We have lots of milk from the dairy everyday, and the best way to use it is to make cheese! Maddy and I, as beginning cheesemakers, started with Halloumi, because it is one of the most forgiving cheeses you can make. It will still turn out well even if you make a mistake here or there. We also did some Ricotta because it’s a good way to use up the excess whey from other cheeses.
Maddy and I each did our own batches and they both turned out a little different since our procedures ended up varying a little bit.
The first step for Halloumi is to heat the fresh, raw milk to 32 degrees Celsius. For Halloumi, we used a sheep and goat milk combination. Our batches will also turn out slightly different because my mix happened to contain more goats milk than sheep, and Maddy’s was more sheep’s milk than goat.
Anyways, my batch was already off to a shaky start from the beginning because I accidentally underestimated how fast it would heat and it shot up to 34 in a minute. Cheese-making is a precise art and even one degree can totally change the final outcome, although thankfully since Halloumi is flexible Lyndal assured me I didn’t ruin it. After the milk is heated, we added the calf rennet. Calf rennet is an extracted enzyme from the stomach’s lining of a young cow, and it contains compounds called Chymosin and Rennin which curdles the casein (main protein in milk). Calves, goat kids, and lambs all have these enzymes in their stomachs because it helps them digest their mothers milk. Traditionally, you choose which animal’s rennet to use to match the kind of milk, but goat and sheep rennet is much harder to come by and lots more expensive so Lyndal typically just uses calf rennet. The calf rennet is strong so it was dissolved in water, and we added 4 drops of rennet for every liter (mine was 5.2 liters of milk so I added 21 drops). To incorporate it into the milk properly, we very slowly used an up and down motion with a whisk. When handling milk, it is absolutely key to be incredibly gentle with it. Also, for proper cleanliness it’s critical to give any utensils that touch the milk a cold rinse immediately after contact, so we washed whisks right after they came out of the milk. Once the rennet is mixed in it needs to sit for about an hour to set and coagulate.
While we waited, Lyndal talked a little bit about milk production and composition. We discussed the curve of lactation over a season. When a baby goat or sheep is born, they will require about 1 liter of milk each day. The mother will always produce a little bit more than this a day to ensure the baby always has some in the udder for them. It’s not bad for us to milk the mothers because they usually produce more than their babies want. Sometimes they do have empty udders, but we don’t mind because that just means their children are drinking plenty and growing fast! After the first few days, the milk curve rises. At 21 days old, a baby will require the most milk, so the mother reaches her peak production. The milk is also at its peak nutrition wise, it is very full of proteins which is great because when we use that milk for cheesemaking the curd yield is incredible since there’s plenty of casein to curdle. After the 21 days have passed, the milk production starts to very slowly curve downwards over the course of the next months. If you keep milking the animals regularly everyday, they can produce for a very long time! The lambing/kidding season is around September or October here, and most of the dairy animals keep on milking well into April or May.
In an hours time, the milk was much thicker and we could tell the rennet had worked its wonder. As soon as the half hour was up we cut our curds. The size for Halloumi is 1/2 cm^2 cubes, and we achieved this by taking a knife diagonally each way across the curd mass. The idea is to make sure the knife reaches the bottom of the pan so that there aren’t big chunks at the bottom, and to then holding the knife as horizontally as possible to also slice the curd through that way. The end product wasn’t perfect but we did end up with small, decently consistent size chunks.
We then heated our batches up to between 35 and 38 degrees Celsius. The temperature is usually more precise than that, but like I mentioned, Halloumi is a lot more flexible than most cheeses. It does need to be heated very gradually and steadily, however, because if heated too fast it won’t press properly and you could scorch the milk at the bottom. Heating needs to be done because it expulses the whey from the curds, separating the two and and concentrating the curds. The milk was 30 degrees before heating, and according to the typical rate (one degree every 5 minutes) we set out to bring it up to 36 degrees over the course of a half hour, stirring all the while. While the best case scenario is this controlled, steady rising, the second best possible scenario is that it starts off too slow and then gets faster at the end. The worst possible heating would be temperatures that are fluctuating up and down multiple times, or rising up really quickly and then flattening out.
We managed to stay focused and control the temperature just right so that both Halloumi pots heated up nice and steadily. Lots of taking the pot off the burner and putting it back on was involved but it worked out well. Our curds ended up looking like little lumpy blobs floating around (no longer nice cubes).
Next, the lumpy curd blobs just sit in the whey for 5 minutes in order for them to shrink a little bit and sink into the whey. Once time was up, we drained out the whey in a double-lined sieve.The whey buckets were immediately put back on the stove for Ricotta making, because it can’t dip back down in temperature and needs to rise up to 90 degrees fast. We spread out the curds into the press, still in the cheesecloth. We arranged the curds so that there was no significant air patches, and so that all the curds were evenly distributed and pressed up tight against the edges of the wood frame. We wrapped up our curd sheets in the cheesecloth, ready to be pressed.
A cheese press can be complicated (a designed machine) or very simple. In our case, we don’t have any special “cheese press”, we use a very easy method that anyone can replicate at home. First, we put a sheet of flat wood over the frame. The cheese needed the pressure of 1 kilo applied onto it, and since 1 liter of water weighs 1 kilo we just placed a bucket containing 1 liter of water on top of the press.
It’s worth noting that my yield of curds was a little lower than Maddy’s batch. Mine took up a little less than half of the press. This was likely due to the fact that mine overheated by 2 degrees initially, and we believe there may have been too much rennet in it as well (I may have used a little less than 5.2 liters of milk, our records aren’t perfect). An additional reason is that my goat to sheep milk ratio was a little higher in goats milk than Maddy’s. In terms of milk composition, sheep have the best curd yield, goats have less of a high yield, and cows milk yields only about half the curds that sheep milk can produce. It’s kind of interesting that most cheese in America is made with cows milk when its really not as effective as sheep or goats.
Almost right after we finished getting the press situated, the whey for our Ricotta was heated to 90 degrees. Lyndal then told us that alternatively, my batch of Ricotta would likely be richer and better yielding since I had more whey drain from my curds. The whey from the ricotta had curdled into finely grouped cheese bits. All we did afterwards was add 2 teaspoon of vinegar and 2 teaspoons of salt to each batch, stirring gently after each addition. Then we let it sit for one minute before draining. For the draining process, we practiced a technique called the cheesemakers knot, where we held 3 corners of a sheet of cheesecloth in one hand, the fourth corner in the other, and tied it around a spoon which we let sit across the pot to drain for quite awhile. Voila! We had 2 big cheesecloths full of Ricotta. It’s a super easy cheese to produce, and we just stored it in plastic containers in the fridge after all the whey drained out. The remaining whey got fed to the pigs (who really love it), and a bit was saved for preserving the Halloumi in.
Just after we tied the Ricotta the Halloumi was ready to be dealt with and had finished pressing. When we removed the sheet of wood from the press the curds had solidified together and formed one sheet of smooth, spongy, delicious looking cheese. My batch was just a little bit more condensed than Maddy’s but overall the finished product looked and tasted very similar. The final steps were easy, all we had to do was cut it into squares and use a slotted spatula to drain off any residual whey. Some of them went to be stored in the fridge, sitting in a brine we made that was 500ml of leftover whey mixed with 500ml of 20% salt solution. A few squares went into a pan of sizzling butter, so we could eat fried Halloumi!
The taste was fresh and creamy, a little bit salty but most of the flavor was sweet like the milk it came from. It had a squeak sound when you bit into it, and the texture was similar to chicken. I think I would absolutely love to eat nothing but this cheese for every meal. I think our dairy animals would be proud to know that their milk got turned into something this yummy. We’ll be cooking with it over the next couple days. One of Lyndal’s favorite ways to use Halloumi is to fry it and then put it in curry with vegetables. How exciting!
