Making Provolone at Home

well good day kurd nerds today we're going to be making [Music] provalone well provolone is an Italian cheese it's a stretched curd cheese better known in the class of pasta fada cheeses I've been wanting to make this one for ages been requested about 20 25 times on the channel so I finally got around to making it I'm making it outside today it's a lovely day stretch curd cheese is the way to go very simple but just let me tell you right now it does take a bit of time now if you haven't already seen the taste test I did on Commercial provalone um just check that out uh little info will come up a little info button will just come up now uh just check that out you'll see that it's made in the Lombardi region in the po valley in Italy that's uh traditional it's known as the poor man's parmesan um because it has a peccant flavor it's known to be quite bitey uh it's a bite cheese so anyway let's get on with the cheese the ingredients are 8 L of cow's milk qu of a teaspoon of thermophilic culture an eighth of a teaspoon lipas 16th of a teaspoon of mesophilic culture 1.5 mil of calcium chloride in 1/4 cup of water 1.5 mil of liquid Rena in4 cup of water you'll need a bowl of ice water and 18% saturated brine solution also on the list there you need some olive oil now you need some special equipment you'll need a pH meter or some pH paper heavyduty rubber gloves large plastic tub or stainless steel bowl um ice water again and some patience now heat your milk up to the Target temperature now the target temperature for the start of this cheese is 35° C or 96 [Music] F so we're going to be adding our starter cultures now so firstly the thermos thermophilic and we're going to sprinkle that over the top [Music] and then we're going to add our mesophilic starter culture reason you use two starter cultures is because the mes mesophilic will aify the milk at lower temperatures and then once the milk gets to higher temperatures that'll start to acidify the milk so we're going to allow those to rehydrate for 5 minutes so after 5 minutes we're simply just going to stir the cultures into the milk so stir for about 2 or 3 minutes [Music] now we're just checking to make sure the temperature is still 35° C after all that and we're going to allow it to ripen for 45 minutes put the lid back on so no dust or insects get in there seeing I'm making this out side okay now that it's ripened just give it a quick stir get the cream back in there check the target temperature and then we're going to add in the liay lias gives the cheese the peccant flavor as it ages over a long period of time so give that a good stir through and now we're going to add the calcium chloride now the calcium chloride simply is a mineral salt and it's going to add back in some soluble calcium into the milk when it's been pasteurized um and that will help set the uh curd better so once that's stirred through we're just going to add in the final ingredient which is renit and ren renit will coagulate our milk and set it into curds and we now we only stir this for no more than 1 minute and then we Ste the milk stop it from moving around and pop the lid back on again and we're going to allow the curse to set for 1 hour so 1 hour later we're going to check for a clean breake see if it splits cleanly which it seems to there with my little [Music] Pinky Okay and then we're going to use the curd cutter to cut the horizontal so 1.25 CM or half inch cubes and then use the knife to do the rest if you haven't got a curd knife then cut it at a 45° angle uh on two sides and you should get the same [Music] effect so try to cut the curd cubes evenly makes it a bit simpler later on so we're just going to let that rest or heal for 10 minutes so that just helps the surfaces of the curds to to be a little bit stronger before you start stirring so when you first start stirring You're simply lifting the curd not actually stirring we're going to raise the temperature to 46° or 115 fit over the next 30 minutes so start off gently stirring or lifting the curds and gently heating the curds Now by The Magic of video yes I'm at 45° C there and you can see that the curd side has curd size sorry has shrunk quite dramatically now once you've reach reached the target temperature then we're going to keep stirring for another 15 minutes and this expels a bit more way out of the curds so just checking the temperature that's after the 15 minutes and now we're going to allow the curds to settle down to the bottom for 10 minutes right all that steering's over now all we have to do is pour this into a colander got a bucket underneath hope I'm not going to make too much mess okay here come the [Music] Cs there we go I'll just make sure the curve mass is fairly even and just give that a firm press cuz you want it to form a single curv slab this is important for the next [Applause] stage or so it says righto that's good so we look that rest now for 15 to 20 minutes until that goes into that solid thing all right so let's set the timer set timer for 20 minutes okay 20 minutes and Counting thank you Siri she's a wonderful assistant you know let's see how much got full bucket of away there that's not sitting in the way that's good actually just just to make sure this isn't sitting in the way I'll just put it over the pot instead there we go cuz that bucket bucket is a full as a goog as we say here in Australia so now we're going to turn the slab out onto the uh mat see if we can do that without making too much mess it's always one bit of chees cloth [Music] cheese everywhere there we go all [Music] good so we got bits Here There and Everywhere but anyway what we're going to do is cut into 1 in cubes I believe this is an inch maybe it's a bit [Music] bigger right there we go so now I actually tested the pH of the uh the curds and they're at about between 5.9 and 5.8 uh which is getting close to the 5.3 to 5.1 that we're after to stretch the curds now this process is a fair bit different than what um I use to make um mozzarella the traditional mozzarella so what we're going to do now is we're going to put the Cur cubes back into the pot and we're going to put 63° C water which is where is it 145 f um over just over the top and we going to let that sit until the temperature comes down to uh 54 C uh which is 130 f that should take between an hour to 2 hours by that time the acidity should lower rapidly down to the desired desired acidity of 5.3 to 5.1 all right so I'll bung the cubes in there now so the extra heat will make the acidity rise in the curds a lot faster let's get all of the Cur in [Music] there waste any of it and everything you can see here that I'm using has been sanitized except me tablecloth it doesn't matter right there we go so I've got my hot water let pour that over just enough to cover there we go so that was about 2 L or 2 quart of water and I'll put the thermometer all the way down the bottom and it just doesn't reach so I'll have to come back and check every so often with the thermy pan okay so I'll put the lid on that and come back and check that in an arrow so we sir going set timer for 1 hour I found found two events in the set timer for 1 hour your timer is set for 1 hour time to get good help um had some trouble during the the uh rais putting the water in now I don't know if the instructions were wrong that I I got the original recipe for that I modified it said put in water to 63° C which was uh um me have a look what's it say 145 F now it didn't specify whether the water going in was 63 or that the temperature it had to be before I left it was 63 so I chose the first one which was the water was 63 and then it said that the temperature would come down to 54 Celsius 130 within an hour now it instantly dropped down to 51° c as soon as I poured the hot water on so I had to do a bit of troubleshooting all my batteries on all my cameras went flat so basically what I did was I heated the water up to 63° while the curd was in it on the stove here and basically then walked away now I'll just check the temperature now and after about an hour and a half the temperature has dropped down to it's about 52 so it's only 2° less than what it initially said so that's not too bad as far as I'm concerned we certainly within the range so it does now the instructions I'm following anyway says that I should now form the curd into a single Mass so let me just take that the stove out the way way now I've got my heavy duty rubber gloves [Applause] on now the curd now the water I know the water is not hot enough to do a proper stretch test but what I'll do before I do this is I'll actually test the pH of the curves there's no use actually doing this if the pH h of the curds isn't down to uh 5 3 to 5.1 so I'll just pinch off a bit put the rest back on the pot your fingers crossed I'll tell you what I'll be making a uh getting a pH meter after this remarkably says that the curd is at 5.3 pH which is good so it is ready to stretch so I'm quite happy with that which is a lot quicker than it took for the the mozzarella than I did the other day so hang on let me just uh put these on again I'm going to try and form it into a single Bowl I may have to add in some more hot water the water's gone down to 50° CS 52 sorry because the water temperature is just [Applause] too yeah it's not forming a bul at all so to truly make this stretch I'm going to have to drain this off and put the right amount of um right so let's do this now I shouldn't lose any of the curd because it's in a fairly cubby sort of state so I'll just drain it off to about there there we go so we still got fairly good Cube sizes [Music] we are and I'll heat up some water now this water preferably to 77 [Music] C and then we'll work the work the curds now here's a tub I prepared earlier and I'll now tiip this in here put this on the stove I'll get there eventually folks but this is what happens during a cheese making session not everything always goes to plan of course there we go I'll also put some of that W that I reserved back in as well just in in case I need some more we go it's good to keep all stuff [Music] [Applause] handy now that will take a while to come up to temperature okay I've heated up my way to 77 between 77 and 80 C which is about 170 F uh so that's all good uh the curds at the right pH That's good I've got some chilled water here so just uh an ordinary tap water and I had some large ice blocks now I'm going to put 2 teaspoons of cheese salt just into the iced water this helps the uh cheese absorb a little bit of salt there uh and not to leech too much give that a bit of a stir it's not going to absorb it very well cuz it's freezing cold in there it's only going to be in the ice water bath for 15 minutes anyway so no big deal right so I'm going to put about 2 L to start with with of the hot wave hang on before we start let's put on my heat resistant gloves these are heavyduty gloves rubber gloves latex and they're cotton lined right so let's let's do this shall we fingers crossed so this is a 1 cup measure so 250 M that's half a liter one ler one a quarter one and A2 1 3/4 and 2 L so having the right temperature this should just all meld together so here we go now these gloves are pretty good because I can can hardly feel the heat oh yeah so it's starting to melt together as one bowl it's good [Applause] sign oh now I can feel the heat through the gloves now at this stage I was starting to get a bit disheartened because even though the pH paper said the it was at the right acidity the curd just wasn't stretching it was breaking it was brittle and uh it was getting late in the night and I was getting fairly tired anyway I'll let uh Gavin tell the rest of the story you know what I don't think this CD is at the right pH it doesn't matter what that pH paper says this is far too brittle even though it's stretching it's not stretching as it should be shiny so what we can do we can leave that in the hot water for about half an hour and then come back to it and that will increase in PH quite dramatically and hopefully I haven't made a mess of it anyway time will tell now just a quick update the I had the curd mass in here it wasn't stretching it's bit of a troubleshooting guide to provolone at the moment isn't it so basically the P oh stop the pH is not right so what I did is I put the curd Mass back into a colander in here and I basically put it over the warm way and I'm letting it drain again and keeping it warm under the lid in the colander and I'll turn it over every 30 minutes or so and I'll check um using the stretch test is probably a better more reliable method uh and the stretch test is simply hold the way in here is still at about 77 CSUS so I'll break off a bit of the curd uh I'll dip it into the whe with a with a slotted spoon and if I can stretch it about a meter about that far then it's ready to stretch and then put it into the mold old shape I want either that one or that one I haven't quite figured that out yet I may stretch stretch in here I might might just stretch it into the pot uh we'll see how it goes anyway we're in for a long night I reckon uh we'll see how it goes anyway let's wait and see what happens right it's been a long day I started this provolone at 11 a.m. it's now midnight and the CD is still still not ready for stretching I'm I'm just about to test one final uh stretch test and uh we'll see if not then I'll simply wrap the um curds up in cing film and put it in the fridge toh slow the acidification process down and then I'll try again tomorrow um and uh we'll see how we go from there anyway we'll do a stretch test in a second I'm getting tired as you can tell now I was starting to give up hope um about this stage but I thought I'll give it one more try um as I said earlier I all I could have done was put it in the fridge um and let it rest overnight it would have come up to um the right acidity anyway so I've heated up the way to 77 and this was the last stretch before bed as it's saying there um what I would have done differently I probably wouldn't have cut it into cubes earlier on I would have let it in one big mass and let that sit and just keep turning it over and draining it probably would have happened a lot earlier now don't forget to use heavy gloves when it's at this temperature you don't want to burn yourself because oh look it's starting to stretch look at that anyway put it back on the way for a little bit more and this surprised me so much i' started to uh get a glimmer of hope look at that and it was starting to stretch and be shiny so I popped it back into the way let's have a look there again and stretch it did so that was fantastic and uh yeah that was perfect so um I continued on stretching the curd so there it is Perfecto so that stretched up to about a meter which is about a yard close enough to it without breaking that stage so it was actually ready to do so that took nearly 9 hours to get to the correct pH which is incredible that's a long long time so if you're going to make provalone set aside a good day or um yeah anyway so I put the uh slab in there and eventually I broke it into three bits just to heat it up it continued to cify uh while it was in there so I just gently stretched it um underneath the way continued to dip it in there until it started to stretch I knew it was getting there when it started to see a shiny surface on the on the cheese and it was stretching well as you can see there which was really good so I could stretch each individual piece it was shiny dun it back in the water it wouldn't snap so I knew I was there I was at the right pH for making the uh the ball of pro alone that I was going to make so squeezing it TI L get any air bubbles [Music] out so I did this to each of the three pieces and then I simply molded them together and uh stretched the surface of of it and then folded it over and then folded it so it was shiny and then made it to a neck over on the other side form it into a pear shape and as you can see there keep dunking in the water to keep it warm and then once you get a neck on it then just uh poke the top of the neck back in with your thumb and that keeps the excess in it kind of seals the neck now what would I do differently next time uh besides not cutting the slab up to a into a cube I would double this recipe so I would use 16 l of milk to make a bigger provolone um that's probably about all I do because of the amount of time it takes I'd want a bigger cheese bigger bang for the buck this is pretty small and you'll see this next um when it's hanging um how small this cheese turned out uh that's about all I do double the recipe and I would not cut it into cubes I'd let it rest as one Big Slab toh get down to the right pH and just be patient I think too so once it was formed into its shape I put it into the iced water the water actually cooled down a little bit and uh which was good it was still uh kept it shape so I kept it in there for 15 minutes and that helped uh keep its pear shape which was what I was after so I could actually hang it in string so there's 15 minutes later I'm putting into the 18% saturated brine we brine that for a total of 8 hours this is a very dense cheese now so need that add 8 hours and it's a it prob is normally a very salty cheese anyway so halfway through the 8 hours about the 4 Hour Mark you just need to roll that so that uh it is uh salted um throughout so after 8 hours you simply put it onto a drying [Music] mat now it will have a tendency to uh change it shape because it is still fairly um pliable at this stage so we're going to air dry that only for a couple of hours so 2 hours and we're going to turn it regularly to prevent it from flattening on the bottom so we're going to cure that at 17 to 18 c or 62 to 65 F at 80% relative humidity we're going to turn that daily or move it around daily now if you get mold on it then wipe that off with a salt vinegar solution so it's a teaspoon of salt to half a cup of vinegar and just wipe that off well here's my tiny provolone after 2 weeks and uh I'm about to oil it so it's been hanging here in the string onion bag uh it's been about 17 18° C here uh which I think is about 63 f um here at home it's uh Autumn here in Australia so technically it's been the right temperature so we'll see how it goes anyway I'm going to coat it in olive oil now for its rest of its curing all righty so we're just going to take it out of its string bag I just tied it on a little knot here so I can reuse it later now the beauty of hanging these is that the the flat bit that you saw earlier is completely rounded now and you can see this nice and smooth this is after 2 weeks you can see that the there's a nice rin's form it's very solid a lot of the moisture's G out very smooth I've got nice Clean Hands by the way anyway so we're just going to oil that now to assist in further rind development so so I've just got my olive oil here the scissors out the [Music] way and need a little bit of oil so then do this once a month now I don't know this is a fairly small cheese so this will probably only last it might dry out too much so um I'm thinking it's only going to be able to mature for a little while so let's put a little bit in there so it doesn't get mold in it so this is going to help protect any mold development stop it from drying out as it's hanging in its bag now I'm going to instead of hanging this in the kitchen where it's tends to get a little bit warmer I'm going to hand it hang it in the laundry it tends to be cooler in the house so I'm going to put it back in a string bag now that it's all oiled one hands get that out the way give it a string [Music] this is um twine that's used for uh making salami I just happen to have some from my salami making so basically just tying a knot in the end there and looping it through the string bag a little bit for some added support um pretty simple just add a a loop there so I can hang it on a hook that I've got in the laundry now that I'm going to cure this for between 2 to 4 months for a doy um because it's pretty small I don't think I'll be able to do the 6 to 12 months for the peany but we'll see there we go nice Loop just cut off the excess and that's perfect so that's going to protect sorry not protect but that's going to stop so well o stop the uh mold from getting to the cheese and uh help with Ry development so that's a nice quick way to to hang your cheese well there you have it kurd nerds there's the provalone uh a dainty little cheese with only 8 L of milk and it did take a long time to make as you could uh see in the video but I think it'll be well worth it now I don't know if we'll get to the pant stage or pean stage uh this may end up being a proone doy uh depends on how long uh the the rine holds out and how long uh how whether it dries out or not so we'll see how that goes anyway I'll pop that down there now if you want to check out some other pasta fada videos you can click through over here and check out my playlist also if you'd like to buy the ingredients and stuff check out littleg greenw workshops.com and uh also if you'd like to support the channel then uh support by patreon over here thanks for watching kurd nerds and we'll see you next time

Channel: Gavin Webber

Views: 295,871

Keywords: Provolone, How to make Provolone, Provolone Dolce, Homemade Provolone, cheese making, cheese, how to make cheese, cheese making at home, cheesemaking

Id: u_XYn4Dgjrs

Length: 39min 40sec (2380 seconds)

Published: Sat May 06 2017