Make Blue Cheese at Home!

[Music] hello everyone welcome to cheeseology with Adam I'm Adam the cheesiest Channel on YouTube today we're going to be making a rur style blue cheese I've made this several times it's a fabulous cheese always turns out great the reason I say Rog for Style is because traditional rord blue cheese comes from Southern France and it's made out of raw sheep's milk so today we're going to be using four gallons of just regular vitamin D milk um couple packets of c21 Buttermilk culture and you can get all these in the other ingredients I'm about to show you you can get on the link within the description and we have to introduce the Blue Mold to the cheese and for that we'll be using penicilium ru40 uh the PV style Blue Mold powder couple of pieces of equipment we're going to need naturally we're going to need the stock pot we're going to need a heat Source again if you seen my other videos I do this in my garage because I'm set up to do some other things so I have a hot plate in my garage you can do everything I'm doing here in your kitchen um very easily so I have a hot plate a stock pot that'll easily hold 4 gallons naturally I have my 4 gallons milk right here I have a cur knife I have a good thermometer absolutely essential and a stir also has some cheesecloth in here and then also my colander for straining the way from the curb also need a set of measuring spoons if you watch my video on basic cheese making equipment I go over this this is a very small set it goes all the way down to 164 of a teaspoon sometimes you need that small but amount when we introduce the Blue Mold powder we'll be using a measurement near there you only need a very very little bit so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to get our Blue Mold powder rehydrated with some water it should sit for about an hour or two by the time we about about an hour and a half or so so it should be fine um definitely want to rehydrate that so when we pour that into the milk it mixes in real well and then the Blue Mold powder doesn't Clump I'm going to mix 2 oz of non-chlorinated water with 1/8 teaspoon of the Blue Mold powder to start getting that rehydrated so I have my 2 oz of water now I'm going to add the 1/8 teaspoon of the blue mole powder you want to store Blue mole powder and also any other bacteria cultures that you use for cheese making in your freezer keeps it fresh longer and prolongs the life so I've added the Blue Mold powder going to mix it around as you can see that's become a green color it's exactly how it should look we're going to let that rehydrate while we start processing the milk when we're making cheese we want to make sure everything is sanitized I use a sprayer with some with some food grade sanitizer spray just give it a give my equipment a little bit of spray just to make sure it's all sanitized so what we're going to do now is we're going to add our milk and then we're going to add a teaspoon of calcium chloride what that does it helps with curd formation if you're using pasteurized milk like I am here the curd formation isn't as good as it would be with raw milk so calcium chloride helps with that again you never want to use ultra pasturize or the curd won't form at all or very very little and it will not turn out and you won't be able to process it now that the milk's in we're going to add a teaspoon of calcium chloride this and the other ingredients I went over can be purchased at the link I provided in the description of this video put that in now that the calcium chloride is added we want to make sure it's thoroughly stirred in the milk so I'm going to sanitize my [Music] stir I'm just going to slowly up and down movements stir this so it gets into the milk all the way down to the bottom of the pot so slow up and down movements you don't want to be splashing it around it's very gentle stir you want to stir this for about a minute now we will heat this milk up to 88° and then remove it from the Heat and then put in our c21 buttermilk culture into the pot now that we've stirred the calcium chloride into the 4 gallons of milk we're going to turn our heat on and we're going to heat this to 88° we want to put our thermometer in the pot so we can consistently monitor this it's very important that you keep track of the temperature you do not want to go over uh the recommended temperature when processing couple different reasons for that I found out the hard way in my early days of cheese making 5° makes a difference um so this particular cheese will go up to 88 we'll remove it from the heat source so it doesn't keep heating put in the buttermilk culture c21 then we'll put the pot the the lid on and we'll let that sit for 90 minutes every so often I like to give the milk an up and down stir just to make sure the milk is heating evenly throughout why is Christmas the cheesiest holiday because of cheesus my milk is now at 88° what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn off the heat source and I'm going to remove it so it doesn't keep heating up we want to keep it at 88 now what I'm going to do is I'm going to put in my c21 buttermilk culture I have two packs of this I'm putting in and what we want to do is sprinkle this on top it's a powder we want to sprinkle this on top all over the top and then wait about a minute or two let it rehydrate and then we'll mix it in it's important to let it to rehydrate or it'll Clump up on you within the milk once I stir the buttermilk culture into the milk we're going to add our blue cheese powder that we rehydrated just give that a brief stir and then we're going to let it sit at 88° for 90 minutes now that we have that mixed in just give our blue cheese powder let's rehydrated a little swirl then we're going to dump that in now we want to mix that up a little bit slow up and down movements now in a moment when I'm done stirring this we want to put the lid on take the thermometer out put the lid on so the heat can be trapped in there because we want to keep it as close to 88° as possible for 90 minutes so I'm going to remove the thermometer going to put my lid on and you can just put a towel over this as long as you have it off your burner put drape a towel over to wrap it in a towel I happen to have something else um that I use just a just neoprene jacket that I just wrap around the pot just to help um retain the heat within the pot you want the you want to let this sit undisturbed for 90 minutes now all right now that we have let the bacteria culture sit for 90 minutes I'm going to add renins what we want to do for this 4 gallon batch take a half a cup of chlorinated water non-chlorinated water and add animal renit again you can buy this from the link you can access in the description of the video we're want to take a half teaspoon of animal renant put it in the nonchlorinated water and we just want to mix it up a little bit this just dilutes it you want to dilute it before putting it in what animal renit is what Ren it is it's an enzyme naturally found in calf stomachs to co what it does is coagulates milk when they drink it from their mother the reason that happens is so the milk just doesn't pass through very fast it coagulates stays in the calf longer and they get more the nutrients what we're using it for is to coagulate the milk to separate the Wy from the curd the kurd is going to be our cheese I'm going to remove this neopreme sleeve I'm going be putting that back on in a minute we want to add the renant we want to mix it from top to bottom with our stir so it gets so the rent it mixes in with all of the milk I just do it very nice and slow just to get it in there now that the renit is mixed in we want to put the lid back on you're going to put your towel back over or your pot or whatever you're using just to kind of try to insulate it a little bit so it retains the Heat and we're going to let that set for 75 minutes okay now it's been 75 minutes we have let the renant set for that 75 minutes to firm up the curd going to REM remove this neopreme jacket again I'm just using this because it's easy at home you can just throw a towel over the pot or wrap the wrap the pot so we've gone 75 minutes plus 90 minutes with the pot off of the heat source and I can feel it it still feels pretty warm so it's probably dropped a couple degrees that's okay we're going to bring it back up to 88 but um but yeah should be perfectly fine the way it is the next thing we're going to do is we're going to cut and dry the curds what I mean by that is we're going to first see if we have a good a good formation of curd and then if we do we're going to cut vertical vertical and horizontal um lines through the curd kind of like a checkerboard about 3/4 of an inch um wide um as uniform as possible and then from there we'll let the curd rest a little bit so those cuts seal or heal rather and then from there we'll we'll start doing some uh stirring of the curds to dry them out but I'll go through that step by step first I'm going to move the camera and show you how I'm going to check to make sure the curd has formed correctly and how we cut the curd I'm going to take my curd knife and I'm going to make a small slit right in the middle then I'm going to make a sideways slit on top of that slit I'm just going to twist the Cur knife a little bit you see how there's separation there let me do it this way so you can see see how this separation it's exactly what we want so now what I'm going to do we drop the curtain knife in all the way just go back front the back I can feel with the resistance that there's good curd formed in in this pot so that's wonderful exactly what we want trying to make these as uniform as possible so they're the same size now I've gone vertical I'm going to go horizontal now across this and make like a checker board I can tell just by the way the curvs are separating from each other you can see that little piece right there that means it's definitely formed properly and we're going to get a good curred Mass out of this now we've cut vertically and horizontally the what we're going to end up with now is long pieces from the top of the pot down it's kind of tricky to cut those I just kind of go on an angle as much as possible possible because you want to you don't want to just cut it vertical and horizontal cuz you still have long pieces you want these actually to be individual pieces about 3/4 of an inch so I'm just going to try to cut on an angle a little bit and when we start stirring I'll show you we can we can break up the curd a little bit thing is you don't want to break up the curd too much it's a very gentle stirring technique and I'll show you that here in a moment once we cut the curd we want to let it sit for about 5 minutes minutes the slices that I've made to Route this curd Mass we want those slices to heal a little bit or else we'll Lo or those will break up more than we want once we start stirring while we're in that 5 minute period we want to put the pot back on the heat Source because we're going to need to bring it back up to 88° slowly over about 10 minutes I'm going to set that there not going to turn on the heat yet but I can see see where we are as far as temperature see how much we've dropped okay it looks like mine is dropped to about 83° uh not bad we started out at 88 so only dropped 5° over about 2 and 1/2 hours or so 2 and 3/4 hours so that's good we'll just give it another minute for the curve to heal and then we will turn on the heat get back up to 88° um and start stirring slowly now we want to make sure we stir very slow we don't want to break it up in the little super tiny pieces when it's going to end up breaking up especially if you're using um pasteurized milk from the store it's going to end up breaking up to a degree but we want to try to be as careful as possible we want to make sure that we try not to break it up as we stir it it's been about 5 minutes I'm going to start stirring this I only have to go up a couple degrees so I'm going to put the heat on real low in over about 10 minutes the pot is back on the heat I have it on and I only have to go up a few degrees so this is the initial stir we want this to be about 10 minutes long I'm going to show you how slow we go as you see see all those curds that are breaking AP that's wonderful nice clean cuts from the curd knife we have excellent formed curd we want to stir this very slow and if you see long pieces I just cut those in half so I'm trying to make 3/4 in um squares at first you're going to see the curd mainly floats at the top that's because it still has a lot of moisture in it we we dry the curds to get rid of some of that moisture moisture for this cheese we do want moisture in the curds but we have to take some out by doing what I'm doing here by bringing the temperature up back up to 88° and stirring you're actually drying the curds out and as you see after just a little bit of stirring when I stop they'll start to sink that's because they're losing moisture which is a good thing that's what we want as you can see I'm going very slow I don't want to just pulverize this curd and make bust it in the tiny little pieces you're going to see that will happen to a degree but we don't want to help that process so I'm just continuing to stir the curd very very slow can even take pauses in this when we we'll do a couple we'll do two more cycles of stirring um before we start draining wayon off or before before we put it in the form um and you'll see I take pauses because you don't have to keep stirring continuously if you do it'll dry out too much blue cheese is not a pressed cheese it presses on its own weight so you flip it within a form this is an 8 in diameter form um several times and it compresses more and more each time if we were pressing a cheese like a cheddar or or something else that or another cheese that's pressed and the curds were too dry they actually won't meld together um I've had that happen in the past so understanding the proper curd moisture really takes some getting used to but I can tell you it's the biggest thing is not drying them out too much my Cur has reached uh 8 8° again again it was only a few degrees down from sitting out for about two 2 and 3/4 hours something like that um which is good so I'm back to 88 I'm going to take it off we will not this this cheese will not be any hotter than the 88° actually it won't be back on the heat Source at all so now what we want to do is we want to stir this for about another 10 minutes and just very very slowly and after 10 minutes minutes we're going to remove about a quart of the way you'll see when you stop stirring the curds will actually sink down below the liquid level because of because they're drying out this is exactly what it should look like this is one of my favorite cheese probably my favorite cheese that I make this 4lb wheel of blue cheese ROP for style blue cheese absolutely fabulous ready to eat in about two months um it's just it really comes out well as I'm stirring still seeing a few big pieces so I'm just slicing those with my stir just so the curvs are more uniform you're going to see by this point they're not square flat sided shapes anymore they had they are breaking up which is fine we just don't want it to break up um too much so when you see that you can go a little slower or you can take I'll take a little break for a minute and then start again it doesn't have to be continuous stirring it can be [Music] intermittent I love the smell at this stage you can really smell the Whey and the curd it just smells like cheese even this early it's not going to smell like the final product but you can definitely tell there's something happening um outside of just milk being poured in a pot I was saying earlier that blue cheese is not a pressed cheese the reason for that is the blue cheese mold that we put in in the beginning of the process that that's an aerobic mold meaning we need it needs air to actually grow so what we're doing by not pressing the cheese is we're creating air pockets Within the wheel that you'll see um that is that comes from the form there's actually air pockets in there that allows the mold to grow and then when you cut into it then you see the mold that's why it's there if you pressed it it wouldn't grow and likewise on the outside you're going to see you're not we're not going to have flat surfaces it'll be pretty smooth just from the weight um it will be flipping it several times but it's not completely flat or not completely smooth like you like you'll see in other videos where I press uh the cheese with my Dutch style cheese press and hang weights on it if you do pause during the stirring process you'll notice in just a very short amount of time it's going to start sticking together on the bottom we don't want that we going to make sure that those pieces are kind of separated but we'll have a better chance to do that once we put it um once we start draining it either in our colander or for this cheese I'm actually not going to use my colander I'm going to I have a little tub that I drilled a couple holes in and I have cheesecloth that I lay in there the reason I'm doing that is because we want to spread this curd out so it's not stuck together and it still drains and a CER kind of all sits in a ball um I just like that process better I've done it in a Coler um you just need to break it up with your fingers not a big deal um that's just the way I like to do this cheese again you can do everything I'm doing you can do right in your kitchen that's the way I made cheese for years before I started doing it in my garage so what we're going to do now is remove about a liter of the way from stirring it the curds have dried out some and just for me stopping stirring all I see is basically liquid so that's because the curds are drying out so now they're getting heavier they don't have that buoyancy and they're they're sinking to the bottom so let move some of the waist still see some things floating around there that's fine just a couple pieces take a little bit more okay it's about a liter now we want to stir for another 10 minutes very slowly we're going to do this one more cycle when I'm done this 10 minutes I'm going to remove about another lader of the way and then we're going to stir another 10 minutes and then at that point we will start are draining and separating the curb curd in either your colander or like I said in the in the little plastic tub that I use that's flat that enables me to spread out the curd so they don't stick together when we're ready to drain the curd you should be able to touch one of these curds it should have like a kind of a a thin skin on the outside but when you break it apart it'll still be moist this is still pretty mushy it's not done um we still have about 20 more minutes is stirring um and that's why we're stirring is we want to firm it up a little bit more before we start draining it and then putting it um into the form I'm through the second 10minute interval and now when I feel the curves I can feel they're firming up a little bit still a little too mushy and break apart too much but I can definitely tell they're firming up so we have one more interval of 10 minutes and we should be good what I'll do first is remove let the curd settle for a moment and then I'll remove another lader of whey okay another liter has been removed now we're going to stir for the final 10 minutes as I mentioned a couple times we want to stir this very slowly we don't want to dry out the curds too much this is where we're setting the final moisture of the cheese so when we cut it in 2 months what we're doing right now is going to be reflected in what the cheese looks like and tastes like and the texture of it um when we cut it we're almost there the curd has the thin skin on it but when I when I press it together it breaks easily and it's moist inside um just a couple more minutes and I think we'll be good to go to fully drain the curd separate it in the drain pan and then um salt it and then we'll form it okay now we want to do a last test on to make sure the moisture is where we want it as you can see I can pick that curd up it's not just falling apart has a little bit of a skin I squeeze it it easily comes apart and it's moist inside I'm happy with this moisture even if it's a little uh a little on the moist side it's I like that I like the a moisture blue cheese and the variety of uh penicilium Rock Forte blue cheese mold we're using actually helps produce moist cheese I'll show you how I drain this and how I spr it out in my draining pan and we'll go from there so as I mentioned I'm not using a cander for this because I want to make sure the curves are spread out I I don't want them to Clump together I want to keep them separate because when we put this in the mold we want those individual curds to have some space in between them and by separating it'll help separating them while it's draining and then salting it'll help that process um all this is is just a plastic probably 6 in TI tub I drilled a couple holes on the out on the Outer Edge so it can drain and it gives me a flat surface to spread out the curd I put in a um a piece of cheesecloth here just so I don't lose too many curds in the in the little holes um just kind of help uh retain as much as possible and we're going to U we're going to drain it right now and spread out the curb okay that's a lot of Curves okay what we want to try to do is separate this way from the curd just want to pull the cheesecloth up a little bit here so I can help consolidate the curd and got to get rid of some of this [Applause] liquid you can see I have got good good bit of curve down here outside of the cheesecloth that's okay you know what I'm going to grab my colander and strain the curd that's outside of the cheesecloth into my CER so I can put it in the cheesecloth so we can keep as much as possible most of that way out we have the curd and the cheesecloth here now what we want to do is make sure it's not lumped together like this we just want to break it up a little bit going to fluff it at this point I'm going to add 3 tpoon of salt this will help separate the the curd or keep the curd separate a little bit now we just want to kind of work that in a little bit now I'm going to remove this cheesecloth hopefully we don't lose too much in the little holes I don't think so but it's just going to make it easier to work with now we are going to transfer this into our form we're going to use an 8 in diameter form you can purchase this uh through the link in the description of this of this video and when we put this in here we want to break this up a little bit [Music] that's about it okay that thing's almost full this is probably 8 in tall too but it it'll reduce um a lot just under its own weight so just want to make sure it's kind of flat on top and now we want to put it on a a draining surface just flip that over and this should be adequate for draining so now going to let that sit for about 15 minutes and then we'll flip it you want to flip this about every every 15 minutes for the first hour and then you want to let it rest at about about 72° to 78° for about 10 hours okay so I changed this up a little bit I got my draining tray from my cheese press put something under it so it drains right into my sink this is the table that's been in front of me I just moved it over to my sink um so I think this will drain better want to make sure it's draining properly on that tub it was kind of holding the we in the pockets and I was afraid it would stop it from draining but um yeah we should be good now this is what I typically do so we'll let that set 15 minutes or so and then we will flip it okay we're going to do our first flip this is always the trickiest because the top is not Consolidated yet so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a cheesecloth on top of it and kind of lay it in there so when it slides down down my hand is has cheesecloth between my there'll be cheesecloth between my hand and the actual cheese let's see how this goes okay all right you can see it's already Consolidated some you want to get it in there before it breaks apart on us okay did my best try to keep it together I left the cheesecloth in there so it's easy to get out when the next time I flip it the next time I flip it the cheesecloth out so it's not making creases in the surface probably is doing that a little bit right now but that's okay it'll it'll work out all right another 15 minutes is going by you can see it's still releasing away that's excellent now we're going to flip this again and this time I'm going to get rid of of the cheesecloth that's in here look at that it's looking great okay we're going to let this drain for about another 15 minutes and then I'm going to flip it again and then we'll let it rest what we're going to do now is flip it one last time and then still let it drain but let it sit for about 8 to 10 hours you can see every time you flip it it consolidates better it's what we're looking for hello everyone it's the next morning I've let the cheese set draining overnight about 8 to 10 hours um what I used I have it off to the side here is have a little draining pan that has an opening and I just have it on the edge of a table draining into a bucket this Pan actually comes with this cheese press don't need the cheese press like I said because we're not pressing this cheese um we want we want air pockets within this cheese so the Blue Mold can grow so now what we want to do I'm just going to flip it one more time it should be pretty easy cuz it's pretty Consolidated oh yeah look at that beautiful flip it one more time so what we're going to do now is we want to put this cheese in an area that's 60 to 65° reason we want to do that is we want to slow down the bacteria activity and stop the acid production um it's morning time now I'll put it in an area that's that temperature proba leave it there till later this afternoon or so and then um I'll dry salt but I'll show you that here shortly hey everybody okay our cheese now is sat for several hours in a in a space that's 62 to 65° somewhere around there again we're doing that to slow down the bacteria um activity so the lactic acid production slows down what I'm going to do is test the ph and B lots and lots of cheeses without ever testing ph so don't feel like you have to go out and buy a bunch of equipment I just happen to want to start monitoring this a little bit closer um I believe we should be somewhere in a Range of the low 5.2 somewhere around there uh for final um pH let's see where we're at we're right at about five think that's good okay all right so now what we'll do is we're going to dry salt our cheese so what we want to do is take 2.5% of the weight of of the cheese that amount of salt it will be used over a couple days to dry salt for a 4 lb wheel it's about 4 tablespoons so I'm just going to measure out 4 tablespoons of non-iodized salt or you can just you can go buy cheese salt but I just buy this at the store long as it's plain non-iodized you're fine so I'm going to measure out four tablespoons of salt put I'm going to put it in a little bowl so we don't need it all at once it takes some time for the cheese to absorb all of this salt and it will absorb all of it so I'm going to put a little bit of salt in a line or my tray I just have a small cookie sheet going to dump a little bit in a line maybe a quarter of it I need more I can add more here shortly Dum about a quar of the salt in a line on the tray now I'm going to take the curd one more dump into the bucket still releasing a lot of way going to take the the curd or the the cheese that we formed that looks absolutely fabulous so it should be pretty Consolidated on the on the on the flat sides which it is because of the weight of the cheese itself and we see we still have pockets um along the side it's exactly what we want it's great so I'm going to put the cheese and the salt here on on the flat side and I'm going to rub it around get all on that surface now what I'm going to do is I'm going to roll it on the sides and then I'm going to use my hands and spread it around on that on the sides to make sure we get she the salt all over it what we're going to do now is I have a BL bamboo I have a bamboo dry buying mats you can buy you can actually purchase very cheap from the link in the description of this video so where I get all my supplies um we want to put the flat the salt the side that we salted up until it absorbs and then we'll go back and salt the other side so this is what a bamboo drying mat looks like I'm just going to lay this I'll lay this over my draining tray because it is still releasing some whe then I'm just going to make sure that salt is nicely spread around the sides and the top there and salt the flat side salt it up um until it absorbs and then we'll salt the other flat side and then tomorrow we'll salt again everyone it's been 9 days since we put our rope for blue cheese into our aging space after salting as you can see we have fabulous Blue Mold all all over this been in the Aging space between 52 and 55° at a humidity of about 94% um what we now do now we're ready for internal mold formation and to do this as I mentioned earlier in the video the the Blue Mold that we introduced in the beginning of the process needs air to grow so what we did was we did not we put the curds into the into the form but we did not press that again where we want those air channels to remain with those air pockets what we're going to do now is we're going to take a skewer this is a pretty thick skewer and what I've done is I put a piece of tape around it to show me where how far how deep I can go uh before I go through the other side you only want to go about 3/4 of the way through or so you don't want to break up the cheese at all all you're doing is creating a channels we're going to make a series of these holes all throughout the top surface of this down to this blue tape Mark about half inch apart um from there we're going to put it back in our aging space for about another two to 3 [Music] [Music] weeks after that we're going to take the cheese out of our aging space at the same humidity same temperatures I just mentioned we're going to wrap it in this wax paper line foil with the with the wax paper side touching the cheese we're going to wrap that put a piece of tape on it and then you're going to put it in your just regular refrigerator in a drawer for 30 days at that point the rord style blue cheese is ready to eat hope you like this video please like And subscribe and see you next time

Channel: Cheeseology

Views: 2,661

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Id: v6g8C8B3UbU

Length: 39min 58sec (2398 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2023