pure acid cheese?

[Ty520]

Hello all,

new to cheese making and had a question about curdling milk for making cheese. I came across some instructions for ricotta using just acid (lemon juice, to be specific) to curdle the milk. Is this a fairly legitimate and straightforward way of making cheeses? I would guess that it would have certain limitations compared to cheeses made with rennet? (assuming best for fresh cheeses, like ricotta?)

 

[bernardsmith]

There are two basic weaknesses involved when using acids to clabber milk. The first is that you want the milk to achieve a specific pH when you are making mozzarella, for example, if you want that cheese to stretch. Being able to hit that pH with lemon juice is a lot like juggling with five machetes ... too little juice and the milk will still form curds but the pH will be too high. too much LJ and the pH may drop so low that the cheese becomes grainy and neither a high pH or a low pH will enable that Mozz to stretch. But for cheeses like cottage or ricotta or the like LJ is fine.

The other weakness is that when you use cheese cultures the cultures grow and multiply in the milk and they acidify the milk over days, weeks, months or even longer. They eat the lactose and over time in fact transform the lactose into acids. Typically, you would use rennet to clabber the milk. The cultures over that long time period then create complex and delightful flavors that adding acid does not. Using cultures results in what cheese makers often call sweet whey while adding acids such as LJ results in what is referred to as acid whey.

 

[Ty520]

There are two basic weaknesses involved when using acids to clabber milk. The first is that you want the milk to achieve a specific pH when you are making mozzarella, for example, if you want that cheese to stretch. Being able to hit that pH with lemon juice is a lot like juggling with five machetes ... too little juice and the milk will still form curds but the pH will be too high. too much LJ and the pH may drop so low that the cheese becomes grainy and neither a high pH or a low pH will enable that Mozz to stretch. But for cheeses like cottage or ricotta or the like LJ is fine.

The other weakness is that when you use cheese cultures the cultures grow and multiply in the milk and they acidify the milk over days, weeks, months or even longer. They eat the lactose and over time in fact transform the lactose into acids. Typically, you would use rennet to clabber the milk. The cultures over that long time period then create complex and delightful flavors that adding acid does not. Using cultures results in what cheese makers often call sweet whey while adding acids such as LJ results in what is referred to as acid whey.

Good info.

Admittedly, I am actually exploring methods for using the whey to make a milk based mead - while i don't want to waste the curds, getting cheese out of it is actually of secondary priority, but knowing it will produce decent fresh cheese is good to know.

Successfully using milk in mead has been a long-running curiosity for me; the vast majority of people who experiment with it find it to be cumbersome and off-putting in flavor ( believed ot be attributed to the funky flavor imparted by rennet), but I believe i've recently discovered a method that could prove both effective and appealing

 

[bernardsmith]

I've made lactomels (using whey) a handful of times and in my opinion, it may not be the rennet that creates the problem (although I use only vegetable or microbial rennet as I am a vegetarian) but it may be the use of cheese cultures which will multiply and grow in the whey as they chew through the lactose converting that sugar into lactic acid (think sour beers) . Using acid whey (where you clabbered the milk with lemon juice or vinegar) leaves all the residual lactose (not in the curds) intact and does not result in you adding lacto-bacilli. Of course, if you clabber the milk with acids then there is really no value in adding rennet (I make a hard cheese using kefir I make from my kefir grains and it is too acidic (I think) for the rennet to serve any purpose. Bottom line, my experience has been that a lactomel is far more pleasurable when it is made with acid whey than with sweet whey...