Alpine Tomme Cheese | How To Make

hi my name is jennifer and in this video i'm going to show you how to make an alpine tone cheese when i first started cheese making one of the things that kind of paralyzed me or worried me was what would happen in all the different scenarios if things didn't go according to plan things didn't go according to plan in this video and so i'm keeping it in here to show you things to happen and you've got to learn how to deal with it cheese making is an adventure important thing is to stick with it keep working at it figure it out and have fun we have about five gallons of fresh milk in here it's still warm and i had a bucket of milk that was in the fridge from yesterday i think there's a good cream line on it i'm just going to keep it in there and all the cream and there's the milk from this morning that's right around 7 gallons this cheese does not have to be full fat you can do it partial fat you can do skim i'm just doing a full fat cheese because i have a lot of fat this is my 50 white vinegar and water solution that i use to just wipe down a few of my main tools the milk had been warm minus that that bucket of cold stuff so i'm going to check the temp right off the bat to see about how long it's going to go right now it's 86 degrees it's pretty close so we're going to bring it up to 106 that's going to be at least 8 minutes on high heat most cheeses that are thermophilic that heat up to like 100 406 degrees or above require a thermophilic culture yogurt provides that so it's a very easy way to start your cheeses and get them culturing don't need anything fancy for that so this was going to take about three quarter cup of yogurt one more scoop and i'll have enough for my breakfast ladle out a little bit of milk from here to thin this out so it will incorporate better into the whole pot of milk so here's the calcium chloride very easy to make your own solution gonna do a little less than a teaspoon this will just help to add more soluble calcium to the milk so that it will yield more cheese curds and then i'm gonna add a little bit of water to this with an alpine tome everything happens all at the same time there is no period of time for culturing the milk so you add the calcium chloride and stir that in then you add your thermophilic culture or your yogurt and then right away without waiting you add the rennet so all that happens in one go and then you let it rest for 45 minutes it's been 45 minutes so now we're going to check for a clean break actually i can tell it's already ready because look around the edge you can see those bubbles and like it's splitting you can press on it oh there's way that comes right up it is ready gonna split it yep clean break there we're gonna cut it into three fourth inch cubes roughly [Music] i'll let this sit for five minutes to heal or firm up a little bit it's been five minutes and i'm going to stir this for about 20 minutes just gently stirring it breaking up the large curds as i go big slabs you just just pop them apart oops i'm dripping away all over the floor it has been seven minutes the biggest ones are pretty much worked in or broken up i can already feel these bigger lumps are drying out on the outside and on the inside they're really wet so you really want to get these cut up earlier rather than later because otherwise they will lock in the way and you want that them to all be drying and poaching cooking whatever you call this at the same speed that's why i'm trying to get these big ones broken up but overall this is supposed to be a larger cut of curd it is not cut with a whisk like you do for the parmesan and asiago and romano and all those where it's a much smaller smaller dry curd this is a more moist higher liquid cheese which will make it softer now it's been nine minutes so i'm going to switch to spoon and just keep stirring this for another 10 minutes before i check the heat on this i recently heard an interview with a woman who has a sex therapist who makes cheese her work is pretty traumatic and exhausting and making cheese is her therapy stirring the cheese is how she copes with all that she hears and deals with so if you have a stressful life you may want to slow down a little bit for cheese yeah see how it's kind of glumping together a little bit but it's still fine it wasn't cooking let's break them up there's some big ones i'm going to use a knife because my hands are now clean just cut kind of break it up all right so that's been 20 minutes let's drop to 102.4 so i'm going to turn this on low we're gonna heat it up to 106. and i'm just going to be stirring for a while i'm going to go get a book and i'll hang out here currently reading migrations by charlotte mcconaughey not sure how to pronounce that it's up to 106 degrees now so i turned the heat off and now i'm going to just sit here and stir it for about 30 minutes and let these curds firm up i was cutting them a little bit here and there there are still some big ones overall i think they're pretty decent it has been 30 minutes of just stirring this and actually part of that time i would set it to spinning and set the timer for three minutes and go answer an email or clean something they are fairly big they are still a little bit they're springy but they're not they're not dry some of the smaller ones are dry some of these are a little bit wet right now i'm going to let this sit for 10 minutes to settle to the bottom supper for the pigs oh no i'm still not strong enough for that so now we'll do breakfast for the pigs starting to get curds back in there yay i'm impressed with myself let me put these back in i spritz this area down with vinegar first to clean it and i'm going to put something underneath here to lift up the back side so it tilts in this is just a easy way to scoop in and let it just go right down the drain this last little bit of mess maybe i could lift it yeah they got stuck together a little bit notice how these are so much more squidgy than like the asiago or the monterey jack these are very moist curd they're kind of plump and this cheese yields a fair bit i'm straining the rest of these curds out into the over that bucket in that colander you can always taste them to see what you think they're sweet gentle they squeak a little bit not not really they're not like the squeaky curds like the cheddars they're very delicious actually add salt to these mix them with some cream cottage cheese these get pressed at very late pressure for 30 minutes an hour however long i feel like i need it i will keep coming back and checking and making sure it's going down because this will as the curd sink this will not push down as hard so i'll come back and just press on it a little bit but just the light pressure just want some nice clear way to keep running off alrighty it's been about one hour and so i've kind of scooched it down as it was going and now i'm gonna flip it it's all soft and still warm i love how this cheese is so big and soft and it's just kind of voluptuous let it go for another hour right around 30 pounds it's still soft which i'm glad to see that's what it looks like giant cake so pretty right and so yummy at this point i'm going to set it over on the table because it is pretty much done draining i'll just put a little dish under it what's it 30 do it till tomorrow morning good morning good morning this foam has been sitting overnight it's been pressing a total of not quite 24 hours but almost this is a dry salted cheese so it's over a process of two days that we are going to get the salt to work its way into the cheese we are going to do a teaspoon of salt per gallon of milk and you do that twice so i'm going to put salt on the top of this seven teaspoons of salt rub it in let it sit for 24 hours some of the whey will come off the salt will begin working its way in flip the cheese seven more teaspoons on the other side i do this by using a bucket i think this will fit right yes it will sit whatever is big enough to create like a lid you can use a tupperware container whatever you want whey will come out and run onto the table if you want a little something with a little bit of a lip seven teaspoons of salt one two seven and then i just pat it over the the top and you don't worry about the sides i always think oh it needs to be on the sides but it doesn't it works its way down in just fine so there's the salt top and then i take my bucket and just put it down over top so right here is it's a gruyere that one has been brining for 24 hours on both the salt over here i have a sal george this tome will sit here for 24 hours and tomorrow morning i'll flip it and we'll salt the other side look at that it got all slumpy it's slumpy fluffy slumpy and that cute you can see where it met the side of the bucket it that hasn't happened before that's the way it's collected i just take this and slide it down on the sides a little bit you can see how it's turning harder a harder yellow um where the salt was touching it seven teaspoons and then rub it over you know what i'm not gonna do that i'll let this go for another 24 hours when i came home from work today this part was all slimy so i splashed on more salt again and i'm just keeping it salted it kind of has a funky smell i don't know what that's about i'm gonna just put more salt on it you can see all this whey is coming off here is the alpine tome i do not know what is up with it if i was to do this again i would not measure the salt i would just pile it on top and all around the sides see if there's any whey underneath oh look at that whole bunch of whey is still coming out so what does this mean let's think about it let's flip this first and see what it's like on the other side it feels a little firmer oh like there's a squishy spot i'm gonna rub more salt around this my hunch is that the curds were either not cooked long enough i think i pressed it long enough and i think i pressed it well enough so i think it was maybe a problem with the cooking process but i'm not sure about that either because it felt very similar to how i've done it other times maybe this is absolutely fine i don't know for a little bit there it was giving off a funky smell like a slightly off smell that is dissipating i'm going to just make things up here i think that that smell that funky smell was like the icky way whey isn't icky but it was getting icky because it was sitting in the cheese that way was coming out on its own and creating that funkiness when you added the salt that cleaned it up like it freshened it it's getting out the way and it's drying it out and it's just becoming sweeter salt does sweeten cheese cheese would be bitter if it doesn't have enough salt i don't think it fixes the funky problem but maybe it does anyway a rind is developing on this the sides are still soft there is a squishy spot i'm going to show you that spot right there is squishy sits hard here and it's harder around here but you touch right there and it goes in so i'm gonna salt the side again and the top and we're just gonna let it keep sitting here this is like days like a lot longer than it's supposed to be but it's cheese and cheese takes a long time but i'm pushing in on the sides at the top it feels harder in the middle it feels a little bit like it gives a little bit more so i think there's just probably too much moisture caught inside this might be the saltiest cheese in the history of cheeses no it's not going to be feta's way spotty oh you saw fish and it preserved it for forever so this has got to work out eventually right i've never had this trouble with the tone before this is a new thing i guess what i'm saying is the recipe still works i've made it a lot of times and it's worked out i just happen to be filming at a time when it's a little bit wonky it might still work out because this is what cheese making is sometimes it goes a little wonky which doesn't mean it's failed doesn't mean it's bad doesn't mean it's wrong it's just different and you've got to learn to like roll with it and and figure it out and think it through or i should say i've got to do that i'm always doing this and trying to figure it out it's always a bit of a mystery and that's why i feel totally unqualified to share my cheese making experiences because i really don't know what's going on but maybe if you see me messing up or being confused or see the little ebbs and flows in my confidence and in the process it'll help you to like gain your footing and just be a little bit more bold with making mistakes this salt does not seem to be going in any further let's see if there's whey underneath oh it's really quite wet there [Music] oh yeah there's way but it's a lot less than there's been i'm gonna take that as a good sign how's this on the underside oh my god what that is this just does not feel right it's getting a rind it doesn't smell bad that doesn't smell bad and it's not feeling squishy it's feeling much more firm i'm gonna just put a little bit more salt on this there we go it looks to me like the salt is all sitting on the outside it doesn't seem like there's much moisture it feels like that oozy liquidy slimy stuff has stopped let's see if there's a way under here maybe a half teaspoon so i think we are good with salting [Music] it smells fine we're good it looks wet on the bottom but that's there's still a lot of salt on it i don't think it's absorbing it anymore we're going to now air dry this and i'm going to stick it in the cheese fridge and that dumb dog shut up coco stop so here's a fresh matte clean plate gonna scrape off this salt and this is feeling firm it's actually feeling quite hard we might have a nice cheese after all i'm going to flip this upside down from what it was before this is going to go in the cheese fridge and i will let it sit there for the next two days or so and i'll flip it every night every morning night morning every 12 hours to just let it do its thing and then we'll backpack it and here we are with this tome this troublesome tome and i think it is totally air dried it is ready to go it feels firm it actually feels a lot like an um like asiago or a palm it's really hard i'm going to be very curious to see how this cheese ages like it's a rock do you hear that okay like knock knock who's there hard cheese hard cheese who hard cheese i think we can fit it on this bag it's not that huge we can yay this goes down in the cheese cellar the cheese the cheese fridge and i will age it flipping it weekly

Channel: Jennifer Murch

Views: 4,569

Keywords: Jennifer Murch, recipes, DIY, home cheesemaking, cooking, baking

Id: RwEnjjk7GRc

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2022