How to Make Squeaky Cheese Curds

we'll get a kurd notes I'm Gavin from little green cheese calm and little green workshops calm but I you and today we're making squeaky cheese curd [Music] so as you can see here I've I've really made the cheese curd but and it's all seeing here draining a little bit I've salted it and I have to wait for it to dry but anyway we'll check out the process and you'll see how to make squeaky cheese curd so the ingredients list is four litres of full cream milk or whole milk an eighth of a teaspoon of mesophilic culture 2.5 mill of calcium chloride two point five mil or half a teaspoon of liquid rennet both of those are in 1/4 of a cup of Nakhla a water 1 tablespoon of cheese salt plus half teaspoon for flavoring and we bring the milk up to 31 degrees Celsius or 88 Fahrenheit to start with and we give that a good stir to make sure the cream is not floating on the top now we're going to add the mesophilic culture and just sprinkle that all over the surface of the milk [Music] okay we're going to allow that to rehydrate for five minutes then we're going to stir it into the milk so once it's been given a good stir we're going to allow it to ripen now for 45 minutes so after 45 minutes the cream sorry risen to the top again I'm using unhomogenized meat milk here but it has been pasteurized so give it a stir and then we're going to add the rest of the ingredients and a pour in the calcium chloride solution and that just helps the curd set better with pasteurized milk and then after that's stirred in thoroughly we're going to add the rennet solution I mean a stir for no more than one minute [Music] okay so once that stirred in we're going to cover that so no dust or or anything gets in and we're going to let that set for 40 minutes so check for a clean break after forty minutes uh if you haven't found that you have a clean break this type of time then wait another ten minutes okay a very good break there I'm going to cut the curd into one point two five centimeter or half inch cubes such as did the horizontal cuts and now we'll do the vertical cuts with my curd knife so the curd size or cube size is important because it determines how much moisture is left in the final cheese and the texture of the final cheese so that's why I actually specified the the size of the cut okay so that's all done I'm going to allow the curds to heal now for five minutes pop a lid back on so if I will administer you'll see a bit away there on the top which is a good sign what we're going to do now is stir it for thirty minutes and during that thirty minutes we're going to bring the temperature up to thirty nine degrees Celsius or 102 Fahrenheit so the Q's will start off quite big and they'll get down to the size of a better peanut during this thirty minutes and don't heat it up too quickly because they can add to the bitterness there we are at thirty nine Celsius now you'll see that I'm using a new type of thermometer there it's called a thermal panels giving two given to me by one of my students a man who lives in Washington State over there in Yuet in the United States thanks Anne so we're going to stir this for another 30 minutes now and keeping the temperature at 39 Celsius or 102 Fahrenheit so I'm just trying to make the curds form up therm up a bit and 30 minutes is elapsed er yep it looks really good now there's a bit of a test you can do to make sure that you can proceed to the next step now is pretending to the curds grab a handful give it a squeeze and if they stay in a ball then they're just right which they have there and then if you push it on through and they break up again then that's a good sign that they're all good to go there we go now if they are to that stage then that just stir for about another 10 minutes try again so pop the lid on and we're going to let that rest will the curd sink to the bottom for 15 minutes I'm going to take it over to the draining area now I've got a colander and a pot underneath the colander we need to retain the the way in this instance [Music] so just make sure that we're going to ladle it all in there the Kurds are quite firm they're not that delicate so I could have probably poured it all in now did choose initially um during this cheese-making session to use this really deep colander which was not a wise choice and you'll see halfway through that I've actually changed to a more shallow colander because it was difficult to to do the next step so before we do that before I talk about that let's get onto this bit so this will still drip a bit we don't want the curds swimming in the way so I had to tip a little bit off there so I'll let that drain for ten minutes now to form into a slab now that'll drip so should stop after about ten minutes anyway so we're going to heat the way that we were you reserved to our 45 Celsius there's 115 Fahrenheit there's my slab level of curds there that's not very thick it's about about an inch thick 2.5 centimeters so place your colander on top of the pot and then wait for 15 minutes then you can see I've changed colander Z is when I try to turn it over the first time it broken lots of bits now we can do this for an hour every 15 minutes we just turn the slab over all slab pieces till final works out in the end and you'll see that they will change colour during this process they'll start forming a shiny surface it looks a bit like poached chicken so once that's done over the hour you'll find they're quite springy and they have started to stick together a little bit which is all good [Music] so all firm now it could be one slave it could be pieces like mine it doesn't really matter we're going to transfer those onto a chopping board I'm going to cut them into fingers so the fingers I chose it's about 2 2 centimeters long by about one and a half wide so that sets up to two inches by half an inch so put that into a container and then we add our table spoon of salt sprinkle that all over let me put the lid on give it a good shake so that mixes all the assault through the curds I'm going to pour it back into the colander again as it needs drain now for about 12 hours so this releases some more of the way which is good makes them a lot more squeakier this is how I set it up for the 12 hour draining just on top of a pot colander and just dirt you cheesecloth over the top so no flies or anything like that getting to it and these are close-up of the the curds of the squeaky curds that's the next morning they're very firm I haven't tasted them yet but they look really really good so there's a little bit of way in the bottom so you store in an airtight container for up to two weeks so I'm sure you'll agree that this is a very simple little cheese to make it's quite popular now I think it was through 2016 and a DSi probably will still be through 2017 I've had many requests for squeaky cheese curd because it's a vital ingredient in a dish that I think tonight Canada has invented or Canadians have invented and it's called poutine which is essentially french fries or chips we call them here in Australia and you put on top you put this squeaky cheese curd and then you pour rich brown gravy over the top and that's called poutine so we're actually going to have some of this tomorrow night so if I make it correctly we'll see that dish in action in my mouth I hope don't forget that you can support the channel here click through the patreon and pledge your support this keeps the video is flowing and also there's another cheese that is quite simple to make and that's paneer very similar in the process to making squeaky cheese curds thanks for watching curd nerds and we'll see you next time

Channel: Gavin Webber

Views: 110,597

Keywords: Squeaky Cheese Curd, Making Squeaky Cheese Curd, Poutine, How to make Cheese, How to make Squeaky Cheese Curd, How to make Cheese Curd

Id: lTAnJ4gOWZE

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2017