Chocolate-Flavored Cheese

Question

Would it be feasible to make a chocolate-flavored cheese? The idea that originally occurred to me was the use of chocolate milk for this purpose, but I'm not sure that's the best solution. Does this food already exist? What kinds of cheese are doable in this situation?

Asked by Adele C

Answer

The other answers refer to products that are cheese-flavored fudges or cream cheeses blending with cocoa.

Your question seems like it is asking about making a cocoa flavored cheese from scratch.

I have not tried chocolate in particular but I have been experimenting with flavoring cheese (and tofu) and have some data points that might be helpful.

I have not had much success with flavoring the milk before it is curdled. The curdling and pressing process is designed to force out water and water soluble compounds. I would expect much of the cocoa dissolved in the milk to be wasted. Additionally, I wouldn't expect store-bought chocolate milk to work very well because of all the additional sweeteners, emulsifiers, and thickeners that are included. I don't know how it would behave when making cheese but I wouldn't be surprised if they got in the way of forming a good curd.

I have had more success with adding dry flavorings to the curd after it is drained and before it is pressed into the final shape. This is the same time that the salt is added. Some water is still pressed out and so some flavor is lost but much less than in earlier stages.

I am still experimenting with how much dry flavoring can be added before the curd doesn't set properly. The cheese becomes more fragile the more ingredients interfere with the milk proteins.

An easy way to start would be with a simple paneer or queso fresco. Simply heat up milk, stir in some acid (lemon juice, vinegar, citric acid, etc), let the milk protein precipitate out, strain it, mix in salt and some cocoa powder, and let the mass drain in a cloth until it is the consistency that you want.

Answered by Sobachatina

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Using whey from yogurt to make ricotta

Question

My girlfriend and I make a large batch of yogurt every week, and have done so for more than a year now - we just eat a ton of the stuff. THis leaves a lot of leftover whey which we used to just throw out. This past week I took my first swing at making mozzarella, and noticed that the recipe suggested not throwing out the whey, but rather using it to make ricotta by boiling it. I ended up throwing out the whey from the mozzarella anyways because it was a tiny batch, and we had to make yogurt anyway.

So, we made the yogurt, and my girlfriend saved they whey for me. I've been simmering it for a few minutes now, and it doesn't appear to be working. Nothing is curdling. I'm wondering if its a function of not having anything acidic in it? I tried adding a quarter teaspoon of citric acid, but still nothing is curdling. At this point I'm curious to play with it, so I may try simmering it all the way down into gjetost.

So really i guess my question is, outside of being less acidic, is whey from making yogurt different from whey from cheese making?

Also as a note, we use 1% milk.

Answer

Yogurt whey cannot be used to make ricotta.

With most cheeses, including mozzarella, the milk isn't boiled. The casein proteins are bound up with some of the lactose and almost all the fat to make the curd. The whey for such cheeses contains the rest of the lactose, tons of vitamin B, and almost all the albumin.

The albumin proteins are water soluble when they haven't been denatured. They also denature at a higher temperature than the casein does. Therefore, they almost all wash out of the curd with the whey. Bringing mozzarella whey to a (almost) boil denatures the albumin which precipitates out and can be strained to make ricotta.

When making yogurt the milk is heated to 190 or higher and then cooled. This is precisely to denature the albumin. The extra protein gives the yogurt a lot more structure.

However it means that there is no protein left in the whey- mostly lactose, lactic acid, and vitamin B.

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What determines how hard or soft a cheese will be?

Question

My knowledge of cheese making is extremely lacking, but what determines how hard or soft the final cheese product is when making your own cheese?

Answer

Harold McGee, in On Food and Cooking, is very detailed in his explanation of how cheese "works". He describes three stages.

In the first stage, lactic acid bacteria convert milk sugar into lactic acid. In the second stage, which overlaps with the first one, rennet (an extract of calf stomach - or, to be more precise, chymosin, a protein found in this extract and now also obtainable from yeasts and the like) curdles the casein proteins and watery whey is drained from the concentrated curds. And finally, in the third stage, the cheese ripens, and a whole host of different enzymes do all sorts of things to flavour and texture.

According to McGee,

Acid and Rennet form very different kinds of curd structures -- acid a fine, fragile gel, rennet a coarse but robust, rubbery one -- so their relative contributions, and how quickly they act, help determine the ultimate texture of the cheese.

He goes on to describe how mostly acid coagulation leads to softer cheeses and mostly rennet-based coagulation leads to firmer curds and harder cheeses.

Draining of the whey also strongly affects the final texture, as Sobachatina points out in her excellent answer. Pressing firmly expels much whey and thus leads to a harder cheese; softer cheeses are just allowed to drain some whey by gravity. But there's another important factor here: heat. Some cheeses are "cooked" in their whey at this stage, to a temperature as high as 55C (130F) for a rock-hard Parmesan or about 38C (100F) for a somewhat softer Tommes, and this expels even more whey from the curd particles (and, of course, also affects flavour).

At this stage, salt is also added. Salt draws some moisture out of the curds as well and is a catalyst for the denaturing of casein, thus reinforcing the protein structure.

McGee also discusses aging of cheese at some length, but he doesn't really touch on the effect of aging on the structure of cheese. That effect is certainly there; a very young Gouda cheese is almost as soft as a Camembert, whereas a very old one gets close to Parmesan hardness (if it doesn't crumble to dust). I imagine that this is due to some moisture escaping the cheese, but also due to the fact that the protein networks keep growing more and more interconnected as the cheese ripens.

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What determines how well cheese melts

Question

I have had my fair share of eating cheese and experimenting with them. Sometimes they come out heavenly while other times, it turn out to be a huge flop. Usually when it flops, it's because I am expecting the cheese to melt and it doesn't.

So my question is, what properties of cheese determines how well the cheese melts? This way I can determine in the future whether a cheese I am about to experiment with is meltable. Are there physical indicators that I can see and feel that can help me determine a cheese's meltability?

Is there a special way to increase how well cheese melts? I have noticed that some cheese melt slightly on the outside but the inside turn rubbery and doesn't melt.

Answer

Three factors influence how well cheese melts:

The amount of moisture,
The amount of fat,
How it was set.

The meltiest cheeses have a lot of moisture and fat and were set with rennet and not acid. Both moisture and fat leave space between the casein proteins that allows them to move. Otherwise they are packed together and don't flow as well.

Acid set cheeses don't melt much when heated dry because the acid denatures the casein in such a way as to cause it to bind more tightly.(although they will dissolve into hot liquids sometimes.)

This link is not authoritative but jives with my personal experience:
http://www.yumsugar.com/Burning-Question-Why-Do-Some-Cheeses-Melt-Better-Than-Others-2946119

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Are there aged cheeses I can make which don't require a cheese fridge?

Question

I enjoy home cheesemaking, and often make fresh cheeses at home, including ricotta, paneer, queso fresco, and microwave mozzarella. I've stayed away from hard, aged cheeses to date because they appear to all require aging in a special cheese fridge. That is, every hard cheese recipe I've seen requires at least some aging at 55F / 13C. A regular fridge is too cold, and room temperature in our apartment ( 65F / 17C ) is too warm. But I live in a San Francisco apartment, so building a cheese-aging fridge is out of the question. There's no room.

Does anyone know of cheese types or techniques for making semi-soft or hard cheeses which can be aged either at regular fridge temperature, or at 17C room temperature?

Answer

The cheeses that just plain won't work in the fridge are those that make use of bacteria or mold with "special needs". Swiss, camembert, and any blue cheese come to mind. The bacteria that produce the holes in Swiss need specific, relatively warm, temps for specific times. Likewise the molds on the rinds or through blue cheeses need warmer but still cooler than room temperature.

Most semi-firm to firm cheeses can be aged just fine in a fridge. Many generic cheese recipes such as:
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/fankhauser/Cheese/Cheese98.htm
or
http://www.cheesemakingrecipe.com/Dutch.html
either say to age in the fridge or don't give a temperature at all and just say "age in a cool place".

In particular cheddar or gouda like cheeses age just fine in the fridge. Parmesan should also work but I personally haven't had the patience to wait the year necessary to try it.

Of course if generic-cheddar-like cheese isn't good enough and you want to recreate some particular cheddar that will be harder. Those recipes usually call for something like "Age for 6 months in this particular cave in France".

As for room temperature. I don't know. Room temperature at my house is 80F and no cheese will work with that.

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How to obtain rennet?

Question

I want to make some homemade mozzeralla and I know that I need rennet but I am at a loss at how to obtain it. I also don't know which type I need out of the artifical or natural. Is there a way to make it for myself? My searches are turning up conflicting information and I am a little lost in the woods here.

Answer

The easiest way where I live to get rennet is to buy Junket tablets at the grocery store. If they have it it's near the ice cream toppings. You can buy it online from the company. It's very cheap and although not 100% pure rennet it works just fine for the variety of cheeses I have made. The box of tablets comes with reliable recipes for a variety of cheeses and ice cream.

Online cheese making suppliers can sell you "higher quality" rennet that is much more expensive. This may make sense for you- especially if you are buying from them anyway for specialized bacteria or mold to make a particular cheese like swiss, etc. I can't recommend one in particular but they are easy to find.

You can make your own. I wouldn't recommend it. Rennet is an enzyme used by calves to digest their mother's milk. Historically, when a calf was slaughtered the correct stomach (I believe the first) would be chopped up and soaked for some time in water. The stomach was then removed and the water with dissolved rennet would be used to make cheese.

If you have access to a calf and have a tougher constitution than I you could certainly try this.

Nowadays rennet is mostly recombinantly produced. For those opposed to our genetically-modified-bacteria-friends non-recombinant rennet can be found. Vegetarian rennet derived from vegetables or mold with similar properties is also available. Recombinant is, of course, much less expensive.

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Why is there cow cheese but no pig cheese?

Question

I have always wondered what there is no cheese made by other milks either than cow, goat or sheep. Are they not suitable for humans? Do they taste bad? Is it even possible to make dairy products with them?

Answer

There are several main reasons, historically:

1. Cows, sheep and goats have udders, and can be milked by hand into a bucket. Pigs (or cats, or humans for that matter) have nipples, where you need to suck the milk out. Consider that most of the cheese in the world was invented before machinery was able to create a vacuum, this means that the only option would have been to suck milk from the pig and spit it into the bucket.
2. For making cheese, the fat/protein ratio in the milk is important. It changes, obviously, from species to species, which is why there aren't many hard yellow cheeses made of goat's milk.
3. Remember that it is only people of European descent that really eat dairy as adults. Other people usually can't digest milk after childhood, which is why you don't get Chinese cheese dishes for example. Since cows, sheep and goats are what you find in Europe, that's what cheese is made of. I suspect you could probably get milk from a yak, but no-one makes cheese of it.

Lastly, I have actually had camel's milk ice-cream, which goes to show that it's just a cultural thing mostly.

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