It doesn’t matter if bits of curd break off in stirring; they will be retrieved in the final straining. Keep checking the temperature and as it reaches about 100°F, turn the heat as low as possible. If the curd seems to be warming up too fast, lift the pot from the larger vessel, turn off the heat, and add some cold water or ice cubes to the warm water before cautiously resuming operations. When the temperature of the curd reaches 108°F (or something between 105° and 110°F—on the whole, better a bit too cool than too warm), try to hold it at that level without further warming for about 15 minutes. (If necessary, add ice to the water bath or briefly lift the milk pot out of it.)
Now set up your cloth-lined-colander arrangement. Carefully ladle in the curd and some of the whey; pour in the remaining whey as gently as possible. Tie the cloth into a bag for draining as before. It will drain more promptly and completely than the rennetless version, yielding anything from an ounce to a few ounces less cheese and more whey.
When the whey has stopped dripping, decide whether to take or omit a step that I never bother with myself: Fill the sink with ice water and slosh the bag around while kneading the cheese with your hands to rinse out the last remnants of partly sour whey. Many people regard this as standard practice; I can only suppose that they want something as “sweet” and innocuous as supermarket cottage cheese. Personally, I think the small amount of residual whey gives the cheese character.
If you have rinsed the curd, hang it up to drain again (this time it will go faster) before proceeding to the end stage: Turn out the cheese into a mixing bowl, and work it as smooth as possible with a wooden spoon. Work in salt to taste. Some people like to add a little fresh cream at the same time; I usually prefer the cheese without. Store and use as for the rennetless version.
VARIATIONS: I think there is nothing better than either rennetless or renneted fresh cheese made with skim milk. But excellent ones can also be made with whole milk, either homogenized or (as I prefer) unhomogenized. They are nearly creamy enough to pass for cream cheese. If you use unhomogenized milk you will see some melted butterfat appearing on the surface as you heat it. But most of the butterfat will remain with the curd when you drain it in cheesecloth, and any that goes off in the whey can easily be salvaged by chilling the whey and lifting the fat from the surface, to be worked back into the cheese.
The same technique can be used to make a simple culture-and-rennet fresh goats’-milk cheese. But trial and error are even more the rule here than in most home dairying experiments. The huge variations in the chemical makeup of any species’s milk that have been partly erased from the modern commercial cows’-milk supply remain glaringly obvious in goats’ milk from different herds and dairies. All goats’ milk differs from cows’ milk in casein structure, the factor that most directly affects curdling behavior. But there is also a range of differences in goats’-milk casein not only among particular breeds but—because of the strongly seasonal tendency of goats’ mating patterns—among samples taken at different times of the year. Also, not all processors will label the milk to tell you if it’s been frozen. The practical result for a home cheesemaker is that no recipe can reliably tell you the correct amount of rennet for a gallon of goats’ milk or the time the milk should be left to curdle after renneting and inoculation. With identical amounts and timings I have ended up with a curd that refused to become curd at all (it tasted great, though, and I successfully presented it to friends as “goat buttermilk”), a curd too unpleasantly tough for anything but throwing out, and a nice soft cheese.
A fresh white goats’-milk cheese is good enough to risk a few failures. I suggest starting to check the degree of curdling after eight hours; do not let the curd become as stubbornly firm as a wrong opinion. Omit the steps of cutting and heating the curd. The cheese will be ready to drain once you have a somewhat (not decidedly) firm curd. When finished it will be very mild, with scarcely a hint of goatiness. (That characteristic emerges only after brief aging.) The main clue that it comes from goats’ rather than cows’ milk will be the more smoothly, finely knit texture of the curd.
ABOUT CREAM CHEESE
Cream cheese is a great confidence builder for neophyte cheesemakers. Cream is really far easier to work with than milk. Its comparatively small casein content means that even after renneting it never forms a curd requiring to be cut and laboriously brought to a crucial temperature; there’s scarcely anything you need to do to the cream once it’s set except drain it.
If you have never eaten any kind of cream cheese except Kraft’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese and other commercial knockoffs, the homemade version free of gums and stabilizers will require some mental readjustment. Like most other kinds of fresh cheese, cream cheese has meant many things to many people in the last few centuries. We can only guess at what the term referred to before the global triumph of the foil-wrapped product baptized with the name “Philadelphia.”
The only wisp of certainty in a vacuum of information is that cream cheese from perhaps the eighteenth century on usually involved cream curdled and drained to a cheesy consistency. As mentioned earlier, something called “cream cheese” had been considered a Philadelphia delicacy for more than a generation before the Empire Cheese Company began selling “Philadelphia Brand Cream Cheese” from a plant in Otsego County, New York, in the early 1880s. (“Dear Longo,” the New York bon vivant Sam Ward wrote to his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1841, “Just returned from Philadelphia.… What took me there?…Not creamcheese, nor melons, nor Preciosa [the ballerina Fanny Elssler], but the Chinese Museum, which closes tonight.”) One can only guess how much it resembled today’s commercial cream cheese. In 1867 the New York market chronicler Thomas F. De Voe described as a Philadelphia specialty one kind of cream cheese “made from rich sour cream tied up in linen cloth to drain, then laid on a deep dish, still covered around, and turned every day, and sprinkled with salt for ten days or a fortnight, until it is ripe. If wanted to ripen quick, cover it with mint or nettle leaves.”
De Voe’s Philadelphia cream cheese sounds much more interesting (and creamier) than the kind now known from Rome to Rio, which undoubtedly didn’t reach anything like its present form until the late 1920s. That was when a series of technological innovations began paving the way for cream cheese made by liquefying a not particularly creamy curd at a temperature well above the boiling point of water, concentrating it in a mechanical separator, standardizing it to a desired fat percentage, and pumping the hot fluid mixture directly into small rectangular foil packages for retail sale. Because the heat-treated cheese tends to leak water, gums such as guar and locust bean are routinely added at the standardizing stage. The end product, “hot pack cream cheese,” has a distinctly cooked flavor and gummy consistency that cannot have belonged to cream cheese before the hot-pack revolution. Today even gourmet and health-food shops and some cheese stores are unlikely to carry anything but hot-pack cream cheese, under whatever label.
Given the popularity of cream cheese made by this technique, talk of fresher-tasting alternatives may sound like an affectation. But I honestly recommend looking for gum-free brands, if only to be able to make the comparison. Or for an idea of what really fresh cream cheese can be, try one of the following two recipes.
CREAM CHEESE: CREAMY
Creaminess is a relative concept. Make cream cheese with the richest, heaviest cream you can find, and it may prove a disappointment. The curd sets up more satisfactorily and with better flavor if you aim for a higher protein content and lower fat content than that of heavy cream. (It still won’t behave exactly like the curd from cultured and renneted skim milk, but it will make a nice cheese.)
My idea of an agreeably creamy cream cheese starts with a mixture of about two parts whole milk—unhomogenized is best—to one part not-too-rich cream made by combining equal amounts of half-and-half and heavy cream—both also unhomogenized, if possible. Remember that what’s labeled half-and-half in one store might pass muster as light cream in another; there is no u
niformity in these matters from region to region or even processor to processor.
Your advance planning for cream cheese should include both lining up some small weights and clearing the decks in the refrigerator for the last stage of draining.
YIELD: About 2¼ cups of cheese, 6¾ cups of slightly sour whey (but every batch may be different; the richer the cream, the higher the proportion of cheese to whey)
1½ quarts (6 cups) milk, preferably unhomogenized and very fresh
1½ cups nonultrapasteurized rich half-and-half or light cream, preferably unhomogenized
1½ cups nonultrapasteurized heavy cream, preferably unhomogenized
½ cup cultured buttermilk of at least 1.5 percent milkfat content, as fresh as possible and made without salt or stabilizing gums
½ unflavored Junket brand rennet tablet
½ teaspoon salt, or to taste
Pour the milk, half-and-half, cream, and buttermilk into a saucepan. Set the pan on a heat deflector over very low heat and slowly heat the milk to about 98° to 100°F. Put the piece of rennet tablet in a small bowl or cup, crush it to a powder, and add a few tablespoons of water, stirring to dissolve it thoroughly.
Find a spot in a warm room where the pan of milk and cream can rest absolutely undisturbed for the better part of a day. Remove it from the heat, stir in the dissolved rennet, and loosely cover the pan with a kitchen towel. Let the inoculated mixture sit without jostling or jiggling for 12 to 16 hours, or until you can see by very gently testing the edge with a spoon that it has become about as thick as sour cream. It should smell slightly sour.
Follow the directions on this page for preparing a cloth-lined colander set over a saucepan or other vessel, tying the cloth into a bag, and hanging it up to drain. After about 5 or 6 hours of draining you will have something approaching cream cheese, but it will still contain some residual whey. (Cream cheese has less of a casein matrix than milk-based cheese to squeeze out moisture from the interior.) Get the cloth-swaddled curd arranged in the colander so that you can place a weight on it. A few beach stones are good, or something like a few heavy cans set on a small plate. For years I used a couple of my husband’s 2-pound lead diving weights (on a plate, natch). Put the whole affair over a bowl in the refrigerator until the curd is about as firm as commercial cream cheese and virtually no whey is coming from it. This may take another 6 to 10 hours—some batches drain more cooperatively than others. Check it at intervals.
Turn out the drained cheese into a mixing bowl and taste it. It should be beautifully creamy but not cloying, with a fresh lactic-acid flavor. Beat it smooth with a wooden spoon and work in a little salt. It will keep in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for about a week.
CREAM CHEESE: LIGHT
Light,” that is, by comparison with the previous example. But please don’t expect anything “lite.” To me this is the ideal cream cheese. I think it strikes just the right balance between creamy and cheesy. It also spreads a little more easily than the preceding version.
The yield is nearly the same as for “creamy” cream cheese (a tiny bit more whey and less cheese). The procedure is identical. The ingredients are 7 cups unhomogenized whole milk, 1 cup rich half-and-half or light cream, ½ cup gumless and saltless cultured buttermilk (at least 1.5 percent milkfat), ½ unflavored Junket brand rennet tablet, and ½ to ¾ teaspoon salt. Follow the directions in the preceding recipe; the cheese will drain a little more quickly and more completely. It will also be slightly more perishable. Allow a day or two less keeping time.
CERVELLE DE CANUT
In the heyday of the Lyon silk industry, canuts was local slang for weavers in the region’s mills. Apparently some wag decided that this strong and highly seasoned cheese spread—clearly a counterpart of Liptauer cheese and Greek tyrokafteri—resembled what silk weavers used for brains.
Any unripened curd cheese will do as the foundation of a pleasant copy, but American-style cottage cheese or ricotta should be well drained of whey and either beaten smooth in a food processor or worked through a fine-mesh strainer. Of course it tastes best when made with a homemade fresh white cheese or good commercial fromage blanc. The seasonings can vary widely as long as shallot and chives predominate. I tend to think that the fewer herbs, the better.
YIELD: About 2 cups
2 cups fresh white cows’-milk cheese, or any preferred mixture of fresh chèvre and cows’-milk cheese
1 to 2 shallots
1 small garlic clove (optional)
A bunch of chives
A small handful of chervil, tarragon, and/or flat-leaf parsley (optional)
1 to 2 teaspoons salt, or to taste
Freshly ground white or black pepper to taste
1 tablespoon dry white wine or white wine vinegar
2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil
2 to 3 tablespoons heavy cream or crème fraîche
Work the cheese smooth with a wooden spoon. Mince the shallots very fine; crush the garlic (if using) to a paste with the flat of a knife blade. Mince or snip the chives very fine, together with the chervil and other optional herbs. Work all these seasonings into the cheese along with salt and pepper. Beat in the wine or vinegar, oil, and cream. Let sit in the refrigerator, well covered, for at least an hour before serving it as a spread for coarse country bread or dip for crudités.
CREAM CHEESE–SCALLION DIP
Say what you will of commercial American cream cheese made by the standard hot-pack method with an array of gums (see this page), the fact remains that it is useful. This truth dawned on a large public during Prohibition and Repeal, when booze-absorbing cocktail nibbles for one-handed eating multiplied like rabbits. In contrast to the elaborately decorated canapés of the previous era, they tended to require almost no time or attention on anyone’s part. Cream cheese turned out to be the perfect all-purpose vehicle for many of the new filler-uppers. Having a pleasantly neutral flavor that clashed with nothing, it could be almost instantly mixed to a kind of cement for chopped olives, bacon, sweet pickle relish, raisins, or some stronger cheese like Roquefort.
Ashkenazic Jews viewed cream cheese a little differently, as uniting the handier qualities of Russian-style sour cream and pot cheese. (A few places on New York’s Lower East Side continued to make their own cream cheese—sometimes really creamy cold-pack versions—until the last years of the twentieth century. But by then only a handful of diehards cared about the difference.) People took to putting cream cheese on bread or rolls, either plain or mixed with something else—for instance, some member of the onion fraternity. By the 1950s “scallion cream cheese” or “chive cream cheese” was an indispensable Sunday brunch adjunct to bagels and bialys. By the turn of the twenty-first century it was being presented as a dip for crudités, widely sold in prepackaged versions that don’t hold a candle to anything you can mix yourself—especially if the cream cheese is homemade or gum-free.
Scallion (or chive) cream cheese scarcely needs a recipe. For every cup (8 ounces) of cream cheese, use a few tablespoons of cream or whole milk and two or three large scallions (the white and a few inches of the green part), cleaned, trimmed, and coarsely chopped. Mash everything together with a wooden spoon, adding cream a tablespoon at a time to make a spread (thicker) or dip (thinner) and using as much or as little scallion as you like. It will keep for several days in the refrigerator, tightly covered, but be sure to let it warm to room temperature before using.
VARIATIONS: There are dozens of other possibilities. I like cream-cheese spread or dip made with a few crunchy raw vegetables, for instance, shredded carrots and minced celery. Clam dip with minced clams (usually canned) and a few seasonings like a little garlic, prepared horseradish, and/or Tabasco sauce is a Superbowl party perennial. People also love smoked fish, especially salmon, in cream-cheese dips and spreads. Roasted red peppers (coarsely chopped) are wonderful. There is a big fan club of blue-cheese dips. In fact, nearly any of the suggestions for sour-cream dips on this page can be easily adapted for use with cream
cheese, as long as you thin the cheese slightly with cream. Some people add mayonnaise for easier spreading, but I like the flavor better without it.
ABOUT LIPTAUER CHEESE
Like many American cooks, I first met Liptauer cheese as a spread made from ordinary cottage cheese (generally enriched with butter) or cream cheese, with a little paprika, caraway, onion, and/or anchovy paste. And such versions are perfectly good in their own way. But Liptauer cheese really started as something more characterful.
Its historical and culinary career involves many confusing wrinkles. In the first place, the popular Austrian and German name “Liptauer” refers to a Slovakian district that was once a county named Liptó in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. Long ago it received a large influx of Vlach (Wallachian) sheepherders from parts of present-day Romania and Moldava. Through them, sheep’s milk became dominant in local dairying. The cheese called Liptovsky/Liptoi/Liptauer was a version of sheep’s-milk “bryndza,” or “brinza”—the name for brined cheeses like feta throughout much of Eastern Europe, locally Germanized to “Brimsen”—that came from Romania with the Vlachs. It is still made in the former Liptó county.
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