Cheese calculator
Winemaking
Today we’d like to recommend a great cheese recipe—quite an unusual one, because it uses netting intended for maturing cold cuts. Such netting has many advantages and can, in practice, serve various culinary purposes. This time, we’ll use it to smoke a homemade cheese. So—how do you make smoked rennet cheese in netting? It’s quite simple, and the result is really worth the bit of work that home cheesemaking enthusiasts call a very pleasant way to spend free time. So—let’s get to it! Or rather—to the cheese!
Preparation:
Pour the milk into a pot*, heat to 38°C, turn off the heat, add salt; if you are using low-heat pasteurized milk, also add calcium chloride. Mix everything thoroughly and add the rennet dissolved in a small amount of water.
Stir and leave until a firm curd forms (about 40 minutes).
Cut the curd into small cubes, stir, and wait about 10 minutes. Then turn the heat back on and slowly heat the curd to 45°C, while pressing it with a sieve and drawing off the whey.
Stir from time to time to loosen the curd and remove as much whey as possible. You should get a thick mass that holds together slightly.
Next, cut the netting to the appropriate lengths (if you are making two cheeses, about 20–25 cm each). Tie one end with string, stretch the open end of the netting over a funnel, and insert the thick cheese pulp into the netting. At the same time, you can press the cheese mass from above (e.g., with a pusher from a meat grinder). Filling the netting is easiest with two people :)
When the mass is packed fairly tightly in the netting, tie the other end with string. Hang the cheese prepared this way for about 4 hours to drain the whey, then place it in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours for further drying.
The next step is smoking. Hot-smoke the dried cheese (or cheeses) taken out of the refrigerator at about 50°C until it turns golden. After removing it from the smoker, leave the cheese in the netting to cool. Once it has cooled completely, you can remove the netting and taste the delicious product you made yourself.
* We recommend pasteurizing fresh milk—ideally at 65°C for 20–30 minutes—and then quickly cooling it to the temperature suitable for adding rennet.
