How to Make Castle Blue Cheese

well g'day curd nerds and today we're making castle blue so castle blue looks like it's an original recipe from the 200 easy cheese making recipes by deborah amron's boys and it's actually from their farm they actually invented the recipe and they have a company called the farmhouse natural cheeses so this cheese is described as being a blue cheese that is soft until it's oozy and creamy it has natural rinds that vary intensity from blue to gray and inside the paste is scattered with blue veins we'll see how that goes of course my version is similar i don't think i've changed very much at all from the original recipe so hopefully i've stayed true to type and yeah and hopefully deborah would be pleased with what i've concocted out of her recipe anyway enough waffling let's get on and see how i made the cheese so first of all you will have to sanitize your equipment i've got all of my stainless steel equipment there and that was boiled for about 15 minutes now set up my work area i've got a sous vide there keeping the water temperature in the bath at 32 degrees celsius now the ingredients for this cheese is 6.5 liters or 6.8 quarts of cow's milk whole cow's milk 500 mils or 2 cups of whipping cream eighth of a teaspoon of mesophilic starter culture an eighth of a teaspoon of penicillium rote 40 mold powder a quarter of a teaspoon or 1.25 milliliters of calcium chloride diluted in quarter of a cup of non-chlorinated water a quarter of a teaspoon 1.25 milliliters of single strength remnant diluted in a quarter of a cup of non-chlorinated water you're also going to need some non-iodized cheese salt for salting the cheese later on so pour your milk into the pot and clip your thermometer on and if you're using unhomogenized milk and there's some cream floating on the top give it a little bit of a whisk just to incorporate that back into the milk now the initial temperature there it took me a while to heat this up because this is the first time i ever used the sous vide and you would have seen a previous video on it here now heat your milk up to 32 degrees celsius or 90 degrees fahrenheit and that's fairly close within 0.3 of a degree so that's okay so we're going to add the starter culture now just sprinkle that over the top just a tad more because it wasn't a level teaspoon and we're going to add the penicillium rope 40 powder the blue mold powder just sprinkle that over the top so cover that up and then we're going to allow that to rehydrate for five minutes so five minutes later we're going to stir that into the milk now now you may have trouble incorporating the penicillium rope 40 powder it does tend to float on the top at this early stage of the cheese making process but give it a good stir and that will incorporate all the way through the milk as it rehydrates takes a little bit longer than the normal starter culture it will incorporate now allow the milk to ripen for 90 minutes so 90 minutes later should be at the right acidity level give that a quick stir because the cream would have floated to the top just check the temperature and it's fairly spot spot-on notice i've got the sous-vide set half a degree celsius above the temperature i want but that's okay now we're going to add in the calcium chloride just to add some soluble calcium back to the milk after it's been pasteurized and then we're going to add the rennet and the rennet is the substance of the enzyme that coagulates the milk turns it into curds and whey so stir that for no more than one minute there we go now i'm using the flocculation method so we start a stopwatch after we've added the rennet see how long it takes to flocculate when a yeah we're going to float a small plastic lid just on top just trying to get the there's some fat globules on top and it should freely spin now spin it at about the eight minute mark and then every 30 seconds to test for when it stops spinning now when it stops spinning is called the flocculation point and we'll just check and yes it stops spinning there at about the 13 minute mark for me so i called it at 13 minutes and 19 seconds so that is when we can safely take off the little lid we don't need to spin it anymore so the flocculation multiplier for this one is four so we're going to multiply uh 13.3 by four gives us 53.2 minutes so i'm going to use 53 minutes so what we now do is take away the 13.3 which was the initial time away from the 53 gives us 39.9 so about 40 minutes is how much is left to set the curds there we go and the clock's ticking so now we check for a clean break just to make sure that the curd has set as predicted but it's fairly foolproof when you're using the flocculation method so we're going to cut the cubes the curds into 2.5 centimeter or 1 inch cubes rather large now i wasn't going to use my my normal curd harp because that has really small or 1.25 or half the size of what they should be so i just cut diagonally to get larger cube sizes and then just use my skimmer to just cut horizontally so we're going to allow the curds to heal for five minutes so they don't fracture when you start stirring them and there they are fairly chunky that's kind of what we want i'm going to stir the curds gently now at the target temperature for 30 minutes now i'm only cutting the odd big one i'm not going to cut some of those other ones so start your clock so you know how long to stir for so 30 minutes later that's about the size of the curd it's about the size of a canelli bean which of those who don't know is a rather large bean uh we're going to allow the curds to settle now to the bottom for five minutes so i'm stopping the sous vide i don't need the heat anymore i'm just gonna unplug that get that out of the way drip it dry there a little bit and pull the plug out i don't need the water keeping the milk warm anymore because i'm going to put it into its molds so we're going to dip off the way to the level of the curds now just to make a little bit easier putting the curds in the basket now because i couldn't uh stop any of the curds going down the sink so i decided to start ladling it into the three 10 centimeter or four inch molds they're camembert molds traditionally they're called on most cheese making websites so we fill those up to the tippy top as best we can now this will take a little bit of time it took me about half an hour i think uh waiting for the curse to settle so i could put some more in there so you just keep refilling them until all the curds have been used they will shrink under gravity as they drain under their own weight so just wait about 10 minutes and then as you can see they do shrink down that's very high speed footage like i said it took me about half an hour to fill the baskets using all the curd this will give us a fairly firm little cheese that will be fairly high in the basket it won't shrink down to your normal camembert size of cheese so allow those to drain for two hours now that we've totally filled them and they'll shrink even further as you can see there they've shrink about two centimeters from the top of the basket so just a quick cleanup now we're going to flip the cheeses over and allow them to drain overnight now they were fairly firm at this stage so i decided to make sure there was a nice clean bottom i just took them out of the hoops and put the not so smooth side down on the bottom of the basket and that will give me a nice clean surface all over the cheese so the next day we're going to flip the cheeses again and allow them to drain for two hours as you can see i've got a nice rind developed on all the cheese they're all over there we go lovely just pop a little umbrella over to keep any beasties off so two hours later we're just going to check for firmness just get all those mats out the way get the maturation box out of the way now i could tell they were firm enough so we're just going to salt the top of each cheese with three quarters of a teaspoon of non-iodized salt so this is a quarter of a teaspoon i'm using there so i'm using three for each one give it a little bit of a rub and salt in there and then flip it over so that the salt side is down now the salt sides down we're going to salt the remaining the top with three quarters of a teaspoon of salt on each top and then give that a gentle rub that'll help the salt absorb into the cheese just gentle rub there we go so they go into the dishwasher i'm going to cover those straight away and we're going to ripen those in the cheese fridge at 10 degrees celsius or 50 fahrenheit at 90 humidity for one week and just pop that into the cheese fridge there that's how i mature all my cheese so it's time to pierce the cheese this is the castile blue uh it's been ripening now for a week and a half so a week and a half and i'll just pull it out of the box hopefully don't spill anything and put it down on here oh lovely look at that magnificent we've got some lovely blue coverage there a little bit moist on the bottom so there's no blue on the bottom so i'm going to have to pat those dry use some paper towel to do that so let's do that now sanitize the the it's a thermometer that i'm going to pierce the cheese with and that's what we're going to do now uh sanitize the board here so let's just take let's move that there put that there put that there just rip off a bit of my paper towel my hands are clean uh and make sure always make sure you've got some clean hands so i'm just going to flip that over and just pat that dry because it won't grow mold on it if it's that moist i'm telling you now but i will pierce from this side from the not so moist side so here we go so just i can feel it's really creamy which is great because i didn't put a favorite of cream in this just to pierce it down this will allow oxygen into the cheese and for the blue mould to grow because the penicillium broke 40 needs oxygen for it to develop so i need a few holes not too many uh we should get some more good mold coverage there um and i'll do a couple of sideways ones just a couple maybe one more one more there we go so i haven't gone all the way through that's just enough to allow the uh the blue mold in all right so that's the first one uh i'll go high speed through the rest as a blue cheese that tastes quite nice now even though i don't have a little bit of vinegar on my fingers but yeah anyway i'll put them back into the into the ripening box and it's got a bit of blue down so that's all dry now i've cleaned that all out as you've seen so there's no moisture on the mat or anything like that but they shouldn't be too wet because the blue mold just doesn't like to develop and it needs ample oxygen so you need to make sure that you check at least once a week for the cheese to get enough oxygen um when you take the lid off and let it circulate anyway so that's piercing uh the cam blues and we'll get back to it when it's time for the taste test i'm very excited about that they look lovely so far and taste very nice already a little bit of a blue hint but there's no veining and we won't know that until we cut into the cheese so don't forget to turn your cheese weekly this will give you an even mold development all over here's just an example of one of the turnings that i've done for this cheese you can see that the mold has developed quite well now all over the cheese if i wanted to i could probably pierce it for a second time but i'll see how it goes along see how the mold is developing but yeah nice even mold covering all over the cheese and make sure you do flip it at least weekly because you'll find that the rind will stick to the mat if you don't and you won't get an even blue covering so just pop that back into your maturation box again make sure they've got a bit of space between them so that the oxygen can get to all surfaces and you won't have too many troubles now if the lid's got moisture on it make sure that's dried off because you don't want that building up and dripping on top of the cheeses just with a piece of paper towel just give that a wipe and pop that back on top again so total ripening time from when you first put them in the cheese fridge is six to ten weeks depending on how oozy your you like your blue cheese if you like it quite firm then go for the six weeks anyway back to gav so that was fairly uh easy i said it's more of an intermediate cheese and i found that the blue mold started to grow at about the 10 day mark so that's when i pierced it i didn't pierce it beforehand it did mention in the recipe the original recipe that i used that after one week you should pierce it i waited until i saw a coating of blue on the outside so i knew that the penicillium rogue 40 was actually growing so it's pierced now it's in the cheese cave i've turned it a couple of times uh it's got some blue on the outside it hasn't got um it's not entirely covered in blue but it's gonna age for between six and ten weeks and then once it has a fairly blue mold all over i'm gonna wrap it in some silver uh cheese wrap that is micro perforated so let's breathe uh and then i'll store it in the kitchen fridge uh hopefully it doesn't smell the fridge out a little bit too much there's some smoky spunky some funky smells coming out of the cheese cave already anyway we'll have a taste test on this one in about four to five weeks time uh it should be mature then but i'll kind of gauge it it needs to be runny on the inside or or the blue mold needs to have made it a bit oozy but we'll see how that goes if i'm going to stay true to type if not i'll cut it it should be fairly creamy with the addition of that cream so that should be good and then we'll do the taste test and i'll give my verdict on what this cheese tastes like so don't forget you can pick up the kit i recommend the specialty cheese kit and i'll put the link for that in the description below if you enjoyed this video don't forget to give it a thumbs up if you liked it of course and you can subscribe to the channel to get more cheesy content if you want to become a financial member please do so over a patreon or youtube memberships and the links are in the description below anyway thanks for watching curd nerds and we will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Gavin Webber

Views: 10,882

Rating: 4.9845562 out of 5

Keywords: blue cheese, cheese making, cheese making process, cheese making at home, cheese making for beginners, cheese making recipe, cheese making asmr, Gavin Webber, DIY Blue cheese, debra amrein-boyes, debra amrein-boyes cheese, Cheeseman, Castle Blue cheese, Castle Blue

Id: a_PeXcz4W8A

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021