Homemade Cheese Curds (for Poutine) – Food Wishes

hello this is chef john from food wishes comm on the web homemade cheese curds that's where i'm making your own cheese curds at home is not fast or easy and one thing that makes it seem even more difficult is knowing that you could just walk down the street a couple blocks and buy an entire package for just a few dollars but I realize for many of you potential poutine makers that is not an option so I thought it would take one for the team and actually show you how to do this yourself and first up we're gonna transfer a gallon a whole milk into a sterilized pot and we'll go over that along with all the other exotic ingredients in the block-post but anyway we're gonna transfer our milk in one pot and then place that over another pot that has a few inches of water in it creating what we call in the business a bain marie also known as a double boiler and what we'll want to do is slowly bring that up to ninety degrees Fahrenheit give it a stir once in a while at which point we're going to add two of our remaining three ingredients the first of which would be some calcium chloride which we have to dissolve in water first so if yours comes in crystals like minded we'll have to crush those against the bottom and keep stirring until it's totally dissolved and what we'll do once that is completely dissolved and we have our milk at exactly 90 degrees as well go ahead and stir that in and stir for about one minute and then once that's been stirred in we'll go ahead and sprinkle over our mesophilic culture which very long story short is the bacteria that turns milk into cheese and what we'll do is sprinkle that over let it sit on the surface for exactly one minute at which point we'll stir it in for exactly one minute and I don't think it really matters but the cheese makers really want you to use sort of an up-and-down stirring motion although I forget why but as long as we stir that gently and thoroughly for exactly one minute we should be good and then what we're gonna do is cover this and let that culture do its thing for thirty five minutes and basically what we're doing here is given those microorganisms enough time to get down and reproduce before we add the last major ingredient the rennet which we're gonna want to dilute in a little bit of water and whilst our culture that turns the milk into cheese it's the rennet that's going to make this mixture coagulate to form the curds so what we'll do once our timer rings is go ahead and stir this in it continues stirring for exactly one minute at which point we're gonna cover that back up and set our timer for 45 minutes or until we achieve what's called a clean break which means if we tear or cut the curd it separates cleanly with the break filling with clearway which is exactly what you can see happened around that thermometer but the official test is done on the knife and if you are at the clean break stage that knifes gonna cut right through very cleanly sort of like you're going through gelatin oh and I should mention after 45 minutes if you're not at the clean break stage just keep it at 90 degrees until you are and if your curd is cutting as nice as mine we'll go ahead and slice this into cubes and I usually shoot for something about three quarters of an inch square but I'd say anywhere between a half inch and an inch is gonna be fine but anyway we'll cut that accused by slicing one way and then turning the knife and cutting across the other and then I actually like to do a third cut where we hold the knife at a 45 degree angle and slice it once more like that which is a little awkward especially when you get to the end but as you'll see when we cook and stir this stuff it's not really gonna matter because we're gonna break up any large curds with a spoon and then once that slice we'll let it sit for exactly five minutes and if you are to the clean break stage you should see a bunch of whey start to come out and those little cubes of curd will start to shrink and separate check it out a few things look as cool as freshly cut curds and then what we're gonna do is raise the temperature of this mixture to 98 degrees and cook it for about 90 minutes or so stirring approximately every 10 minutes so yes don't make any plans for the next hour and a half we're gonna keep it as close to 98 degrees as possible covered when we're not stirring and like I said every 10 minutes or so we'll take off the lid and give it a stir for about a half a minute and during that aforementioned stirring if you see any curves that look a little too big just take the edge of your spoon and break them down to a little smaller size and what you're going to notice as time passes as those curds will release more and more way and get smaller and smaller and the longer you cook them the smaller they'll get and the firmer your finish curds and/or cheese will be so I ended up cooking mine for just over 90 minutes at which point they looked a little something like this and one thing you can look forward to tell you you've gone far enough is if you kind of gently squeeze the curves together they want to stick to each other which is you're just about to seize a very important attribute so what we're gonna do after we think our curves have cooked long enough is transfer those into a cheesecloth line strainer that's set over another pot because what we'll do once all those are transferred in there's pour some of that way through the Kurds into the pot below enough so you have like about three inches but you do not want it touching the Kurds and what we'll do is let that drain for a minute or two and then we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up and cover it and we're gonna adjust our temperature to try to keep those cheese curds about somewhere between 112 and 115 degrees Fahrenheit and we're gonna let those sit and drain just like that for 10 minutes at which point we're gonna go ahead and unwrap it and hopefully if everything's gone according to plan all those little curves have kind of stuck together to form a slab and I'm very happy to report that's exactly what happened in my case and then what we're gonna do at this point is take a knife or bench scraper and go ahead and cut this in half right down the middle and we'll flip one side over the other to sort of stack them up at which point we're gonna rewrap it and give it a little press and then we'll recover and let it sit for ten minutes more and again we're maintaining a temperature somewhere between 112 and 115 and I should probably mention if you have a sous-vide setup maintaining these precise temperatures is way way easier but I don't and is still totally worked out but anyway we'll leave our stack slabs sitting for 10 minutes and then what we'll do after 10 minutes is uncover and flip it over and yes let this drain another 10 minutes which is definitely going to be just as exciting as the first 10 minutes but then some good news we actually get to do something a little different we'll go ahead and temporarily remove that from the heat and then somehow someway we'll cut this big slab into smaller slabs which we will then stack and continue to drain over our warm colander and by the way this is way easier for uses square pan since working with Halfmoon shape can be a little bit geometrically challenging so what ended up doing is kind of squaring it off by cutting off both ends and stacking those and then with that sort of squarish piece left over I cut that into four pieces although as you'll see not very evenly okay that was not my most precise work ever but I think as you'll see it really doesn't matter that much as long as we can kind of stack and press that all together and it's probably worth mentioning that the shortcut method here is to not do this at all okay some people just take that slab of curd we started with and just simply press that with something heavy and let it drain like that with the weight sort of pressing out the extra way but anyway I thought I would use a semi proper technique with emphasis on the semi and then what we'll do once that's returned to our 112 to 115 degree environment its cover that and let it sit for 15 minutes before uncovering unwrapping and flipping / rearranging all right theoretically you're just not supposed to flip everything over but you're also supposed to rearrange the positions which apparently has something to do with keeping the heat nice and evenly distributed and basically by letting this stuff drain stack like this we're creating a little extra weight and a little extra pressure and apparently our curds will come out a little better but anyway bottom line we're gonna keep them in this warm colander flipping them over and or rearranging them every 15 minutes and we're gonna want to do that at least three more times although I think I did mine for I kind of lost count but anyway what we'll do once we've completed that operation three or four more times is remove that from the heat and unwrap it and I'd like to transfer those slabs onto a paper towel-lined plate and we'll separate those pieces and let them drain for a few minutes and as you can see those have shrunken up pretty good or is it shrunked up or have shrunk tup I don't know add that to the things in this video I'm not quite sure of and then what we'll do after those sit on the paper towel for a few minutes is go ahead and cut these into cubes and of course you pick any size you want I'm showing you right here how big I like mine but you decide I mean you are after all a little miss muffet of what size to cut it and then what we'll do once those are all cut his transfer them into a plastic bag where they must be salted otherwise you're gonna taste really bad and by bad I mean they'll taste like almost nothing so we'll go ahead and sprinkle our salt in and give it the old shake of shaken and I like to do this in two editions so you just saw the first half and I will open this up and pour the rest in and we'll continue to toss those around until that salt salt sorbed at which point we'll go ahead and transfer those to a plates and yes we'll finally sneak a taste which above and beyond having a beautiful fresh milky flavor featuring a very subtle tankiness these also have that very interesting texture or something that's slightly firm and rubbery the kind of sort of squeaks against your teeth at least when they're really fresh so I really did enjoy that and found it comparable to the ones down the street I could have walked in got in ten minutes and been done and if you want you can enjoy these as soon as that salt gets absorbed in but I much prefer to age mine overnight by covering them in cheesecloth and letting them sit out for about 12 hours and they're very very slight tangy flavor is gonna get concentrated even a little more but anyway the next day mine look like this and the texture was just about the same but like I say I think that taste improves just a little more which by the way reminds me of a very very mild Monterey Jack but anyway that's it homemade cheese curds we'll go ahead and transfer those into some kind of airtight container and those will keep in the fridge for at least a week and then as far as enjoying these besides eating them as is you can also coat them with a little bit of cornstarch and deep-fry them to create fried cheese curds which today I'll be pairing with some Cayenne spiked ketchup and that my friends is one of the great fair foods of all time it's right up there with funnel cakes and if I'm not mistaken the ancestor of the modern day mozzarella stick or at least that's the story I'm going with and of course if you don't want to eat them as is or fried you could always settle for using them in a poutine which you only get to see for a couple seconds because that's coming up soon but anyway I really do hope you give that a try after you give these homemade cheese curds a try very very soon so head over food wishes account for all the ingredient amounts and more info as usual and as always enjoy you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 409,559

Keywords: Cheese, Curds, Homemade, Poutine, chef, john, food, wishes, diy, cooking, recipe, curd, dairy, milk, fresh

Id: 4g0Wudcs1UI

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 21 2018