Pressing the first hard cheese: ten litres, three weights and a lopsided wheel
Ten litres of whole milk from the supermarket, pasteurised but not homogenised, which is the most I can manage in the stockpot without it slopping over when I stir. I warmed it in a sink of hot water rather than on the hob, because the one time I used the hob directly the bottom scorched and the whole batch tasted of it. It took forty minutes to reach 32 °C.
At 32 °C I stirred in a quarter teaspoon of a mesophilic starter culture and left it for an hour with the lid on and a towel over it. Then half a teaspoon of calcium chloride diluted in a little water, because supermarket milk has been through a lot and the curd sets weakly without it, and then the rennet: 2.5 ml of liquid rennet in 50 ml of cool water, stirred in for one minute with an up-and-down motion and then the pot left absolutely still. Forty-five minutes later the curd gave a clean break when I pushed a finger in at an angle and lifted.
Cutting was slow and I was clumsy. A long knife in a grid both ways, then at an angle, aiming for cubes of about 1 cm and getting something between 0.5 and 2 cm. Then the long part: stirring gently and raising the temperature by about one degree every five minutes, from 32 to 38 °C over half an hour, and holding there for another thirty minutes while the curds shrank and firmed. They went from soft and slippery to something like firm scrambled egg that squeaked slightly between the teeth when I tasted one.
Draining through butter muslin in the colander, then into a mould made from a food-grade plastic tub with holes drilled in the bottom and sides, with a disc of chopping board as a follower. The press is a plank, a bucket and water. Five kilograms for fifteen minutes, flip and re-dress, ten kilograms for thirty minutes, flip, then twenty kilograms for twelve hours overnight. The flipping matters: the first flip revealed a wheel already thicker on one side because the follower had tilted, and I never fully corrected it.
In the morning the wheel weighed 1,520 g, a yield of about 15 per cent. Into a saturated brine for eight hours, out, dried on a bamboo mat for two days with turns, and into the hallway fridge. Fourteen hours of work for a cheese I cannot taste until autumn.