Cheese!

Thanks to the fine folks in Hartshorn-Dale I need to make some cheese for the upcoming competition (please note that I am writing this in 2024; I have no idea how long that link will stay good as the competition is coming up soon) I need to make some warmer garb also but cheese is more important or at least more fun.

Georgian cheese in a shop

 

My persona is Georgian. Georgia is famous for cheese and cheese breads but I don't have a good Georgian cookbook that is close to period. I do have the power of the internet. The first stop is a favorite food blog - Food Perestroika for his Imeretian Cheese recipe. Imeretian cheese (sometimes called Imeruli cheese) is a fresh cow's milk cheese made with rennet. You can use a mesophillic cheese culture, a cultured buttermilk, or no culture at all (the Food Perestroika suggestion and what I did on my first attempt).

An ugly picture of my version after most of it was consumed

I don't know how authentic mine turned out but it is good. I thought it would be like feta but it is firmer and not as salty. It still works well in a salad but you have to cut it into small cubes instead of crumbling it. One gallon of milk made a disk that initially filled the dinner plate shown above. This first batch had no additional flavoring but I can already think of some things that might be good.

Now that I have a fall back idea in place I can move on to different things. My first thought is to pull out al-Warriq and look at cheese from Baghdad during the Abbasid's time. 

Making cheese (jubn):
Take fresh milk that has just been drawn, and while it is still warm, mix with it infaha (rennet). The proper way to use it is to take the rennet as it is with the skin [no need to pound it] and stir it into
the milk while it is still warm. When the milk curdles (jamuda), put it in molds made of willow wood, then press it, sprinkle it with salt, and stow it away. [Annal's of the Caliphs' Kitchens, English translation by Nawal Nasrallah, p199]

Cow's milk comes out at cow body temperature which is 38C or a hair over 100F. The recipe I used for imeretian cheese involved heating the cheese to 86F. Personally I cheated and used an instant pot to hold the milk at between 88-91F. So cooler then fresh from the cow but on the other hand it didn't cool off during the process. Close enough. 

There is no mention of a culture but raw milk has natural cultures and the re-use of a wooden mold would carry over cultures from the last cheese so it would be expected that the Baghdadi cheese would have had some form of lactic acid bacteria culture. As mentioned I didn't add a culture to my first attempt so I ended up with a milder flavor.

The other major difference is that I didn't press the cheese. I put the curds into a cheese cloth placed in a metal colander to let them drain. After more than eight hours of draining their own weight had been enough to form a weak but solid mass. Another day in the refrigerator after having been salted and the mass was a little more firm. It's almost what you expect from a farmer's cheese or twarog although it is still a little too wet. Pressing it would expel more whey making it drier and denser.

I'm not going to make a wooden mold right now but I can see round two approaching with the addition of a culture and perhaps a bit of pressure.