Making Queso Oaxaca (Mexican String Cheese) at Home

we'll get a Kurd nerds on Gavin Weber from little green workshops combo you and today we're gonna make wha Hakka now well hacker is a string cheese pasta falada cheese that is traditionally made in Mexico was brought over by Dominican month monks so the process of the pasta falada stretching and I've made one two three four five six six balls of Oaxaca cheese very similar in texture to mozzarella although I did use a different recipe in fact i cobbled this recipe together myself and changed everything that I thought I needed to make it acidic enough to be able to stretch the cheese and thank goodness I did because the stretch on this curds was really really good anyway let's see how we make queso Oaxaca so for a pasta falada cheese like this you need unhomogenized milk now I'm using an homogenized milk from inglenook Terry and thanks for the guys there for supplying it to me the ingredients you'll need is ten liters or ten quarts of whole cow's milk 1/4 TSP of thermophilic starter culture 1/8 of a teaspoon of mesophilic starter culture 1/16 of a teaspoon of lipase which has been diluted in quarter cup of non-chlorinated water 1/4 of a teaspoon of calcium chloride which has been diluted in quart of a cup of non-chlorinated water 1/2 a teaspoon of liquid rennet and I'm using single strength I'm see you 200 and that's also diluted in a quarter cup of cool non-chlorinated water you'll also need a saturated brine solution which is about 18% and you'll need a bowl of cool aughter so clip your thermometer on to the side of your pot once the milk is put in there and we're gonna heat the milk up to 35 degrees Celsius or naught 95 Fahrenheit and doesn't look like that there but it will heat up as it goes along and we're gonna add in the mesophilic starter culture I'm using her mad Mille sachet there you can use a single-use sachet or just add in that the right amount and there's the thermophilic starter culture just sprinkle that over the top of the milk as well it may seem like a lot of starter culture but what we're trying to do is acidify this milk really quickly so we can make a pasta falada cheese [Music] right so cover that and allow the starter culture to rehydrate for five minutes so five minutes later we're gonna stir that into the milk so I'm using a top to bottom stirring there trying to get the cream mixed back into the milk again and all the starter culture mix thoroughly throughout so just another check of the temperature of the milk and use my trusty thermapen and as predicted he has creaked up and it's nearly at the target temperature so 35 which is perfect for the ripening of the mesophilic starter culture to start with so that's going to ripen for 60 minutes the thermophilic won't really act in my kick in too much during this period so the thermophilic culture will happen later on anyway so after its ripened for the 60 Minutes stir the cream back in again and you see a fair bit of it has floated to the top tilda stir that back in using a top to bottom motion okay now I'm I was taking pH measurements but first of all we'll just check the temperature and it's close enough to 35 Celsius for me that'll do that's good so we're gonna add in the lipase now and the lipase needs to be added 15 minutes before the calcium chloride and the rennet or econo inhibits the rennet action so I'm just stirring that all the way through and now we're gonna allow cover that and we're gonna allow it to rest for 15 minutes there we go so 15 minutes later give the milk a stir again [Music] and this is where I'm gonna take a sample to check the pH of the milk just make sure that's thoroughly stir through so I get an accurate sort of check on what the pH for the milk is so I'm just taking a little scoop out of my stainless steel cup there so it should be approximately 6.5 of this stage if it's a little bit lower which means it's a little bit more acidic than that's okay so now we're going to move on and we're gonna add in the calcium chloride solution by adding this this helps the adds will pack a little bit of calcium to the milk to help it set a better and firm occurred so we stir that for about a minute and then we go and find our rennet so we're gonna add our rennet solution to the milk now stir that in and stir for no more than one minute is there any longer there's a chance that you may start to fracture the curds as they start to set so now I steal the milk there you saw me steal it so it's not moving at all now we're gonna cover that and allow the milk to set for 45 minutes at 35 Celsius or 95 Fahrenheit [Music] okay now we're gonna check for a clean break now if you don't get a clean break like this one that's a beautiful clean blade crink clean break there if you don't get that then wait another 15 minutes and try and test again I'm going to cut the Kurds into two centimeter or three quarter inch cubes you'll see I'm not using my trusty Curt heart because that is calibrated for one centimeter cubes which is about half an inch a little bit less than that anyway so I'm doing the the to the vertical cuts there and then to do the horizontal cuts I'll do it at a 45-degree angle on all four sides now this works mostly but you will find that you probably will get some rather large chunks of curds that you'll need to cut as you start stirring so you just pop the lid on and we're going to let the curds heal for five minutes that stops them fracturing when you start stirring them okay a little bit away on top it's a good sign that everything's doing what it should be so I'm just putting the thermometer back on because we're gonna start stirring the milk and just wanna check what the temperature is it has it dropped down let's drop down by about half a degree Celsius that's fine so gonna gently stir the curds now for 30 minutes and I just turn the heat on there and we're gonna slowly heat that up to 42 degrees Celsius or 108 Fahrenheit so you can see I'm cutting the large cubes of curd that I didn't manage to cut during the the cutting process so just cutting and stirring just so they're all fairly evenly cut there are some rather large chunks there so as I'm stirring there I cut them as are going along okay say 30 minutes later and we're very close to the target temperature so that's what 41 points 5.6 they don't do so close enough to 42 Celsius for me so the temperature is Fillie even that's pretty close to a 42 or 100 like Fahrenheit and it's gonna grab my trusty iPhone there so we're gonna stir for another 30 minutes whilst holding the temperature at 42 Celsius 108 Fahrenheit now what this does for us is it allows the thermophilic starter culture to start acidifying the curds because they're premium temperature range is between 40 and about 45 Celsius so that's spot-on for the thermophilic culture to start acidifying so i have finished stirring there that's 30 minutes later well or I'll I'm still staring but not for very much longer so just take all utensils out of the pot and we're going to allow the curds to settle for 1 hour and 30 minutes this is to help acidify the curds even further okay so we're gonna drain through a cheesecloth flying colander they can keep the way if you want to it's up to you I chose not to this time around here we go so I just pop the curd mass into the Condor give it a bit of a pat-down allow them to drain for 30 minutes now this stage you can test them test the pH and the pH of my curds at this stage was 5.2 so it was okay to move on to the next stage that 30 minutes will probably allow to drop down by one decimal point meanwhile a heat up 8 liters or 8 quarts of water to 85 Celsius 185 Fahrenheit and now we're going to move the curd mass to the chopping board and then we're going to cut the curds into 5 centimeter or 2 inch cubes I'm using my trusty Kurd cutting knife there it's nice and long and you don't have to muck around too much you just press down I cuts the Kurds now we're gonna move the cubes of curd into a large wider bowl and this helps us a little bit later on when we add the hot water to start stretching [Music] so we've got all their cubes in a big bowl so I'm gonna get me steaming hot water here here we are and I'm gonna light all that over the Kurds until they're just submerged [Music] and wearing heat-resistant gloves we're going to need the Kurds until they're consolidated into one big mass and it becomes a little bit shiny now I have seen on other videos and TV shows season cheese makers not wear gloves I don't know how they do it because that water is so hot so I'm just tempering the curds so drain it off and then what we're going to do is we're going to add more hot water and we're gonna cover the curds again until they're just submerged so I'll go get my pot of water again so I'm going to ladle over some more hot water at 85 Celsius 185 Fahrenheit over the top of my curds which have been warmed up and this way by doing this the water temperature stays higher for longer and helps you stretch the curds into the shapes that you're after so what i'm doing here is pinch off the curds into six even sized balls i didn't really know how much to to pinch them into but i thought six sounded like a pretty good number so that's what i'm doing here [Music] so take one ball and stretch it out into one big long thread and you can see there the curds are just perfectly at the right acidity that you can stretch them now i didn't have a long angle camera so but anyway i'm winding it up wanting the straight up as you would a ball of yarn so it looks pretty cool and then just tuck the end in under the last bit pop that into a bowl of cool tap water and then keep stretching and rolling up the remaining balls of of curd [Music] looks look lovely now if you find a bit doesn't stretch then just put that back into the hot water and that'll help you stretch again now if you also find that the curds start to fracture then you need to either change the water out make it a bit hotter see there you go so I just dipped it back into the water again so I could just stretch it even further you know beautiful big long strings or threads of curd there [Music] this was actually so much fun I really did enjoy making these little balls I was actually chuffed to bits that it will actually worked in the first place but to get this much stringiness and stretch it was just absolutely fantastic okay it's a nicely shaped ball that one [Music] now I felt that the water temperature had dropped down a little bit that one was starting to split so what I did was drained off the water again and pour some more hot water back in over that curd ball okay which was much better just make sure you get these really heavy rubber gloves that does work wonders I couldn't feel the temperature of the water very much through the gloves at all so anyway I chose that that that bit was a bit too big so I made a smaller ball on them I'm gonna make a normal sized ball he [Music] now by dunking the end back in the water and you saw there that I could stretch it a little bit more lovely there's my six balls so they're just in cool water they're not in iced water or anything like that was just to bring the temperature down a little bit so that when we brine it yeah they don't heat the brine up so just gonna leave those in the cool water for five minutes to cool down okay so once that five minutes is finished we're just going to tip that water off you can see all those lovely Oaxaca balls they're lovely cheese's yeah lovely very proud of his work that man isn't he okay we're gonna brine the cheese now here's a brine I prepared earlier for those who want to see my brine video you can check it out a little info bar comes up now I'm gonna place the balls in a cool brine 18 percent saturation for 60 minutes that's one hour now I was thinking about putting them back into the brine and I thought now just leave like that much easier [Music] so at about the 30 minute mark I just turned the balls over that's all I had to do there to make sure that they were evenly brined very cool and then they I've trained them I'm gonna air dry them for about an hour they gets any moisture off them and I've actually stored them then in a ripening box just for one day to let the lipase kick in and provide a big boost of flavor so as you saw a very simple process you know what we had to do was wait the certain amount of time and the good thing about this cheese is all you have to do really is wait and a little bit of stirring it turned out very good now I haven't tasted it yet because I'm going to wait until it's brined for an hour I've only just finished putting it into the balls so I'll do a separate taste test video than this one but anyway they do look absolutely fantastic and I must attest to the recipe that I cobbled together to being good enough to be able to stretch this into the nice big long threads so I could wrap it up into these ball shapes so fantastic absolutely lovely well thanks for watching the video don't forget that you can subscribe and hit that little notification bell to be informed of any other cheesy videos that I produce you can also become a patron of the show either via the YouTube memberships or by patreon the links are below well thanks for watching Kurd nerds and I'll see you next time

Channel: Gavin Webber

Views: 103,168

Keywords: oaxaca, queso oaxaca, mexican string cheese, Queso Oaxaca taste test, cheese, cheese making at home, how to make cheese, cheese making, cheesemaking, food (tv genre), food, cheese (food), mexican food, gavin webber, making cheese

Id: rTQsOefQyuE

Length: 20min 15sec (1215 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 09 2018