Cheese Part 2 - Kimcheese?

For the cheese challenge at this years Harts and Horns I have decided to make what I am calling Kimcheese or Seoul Knolle (unfortunately the second word is not pronounced like gnoll or knoll). Yes I am entering an SCA challenge with a variant on a cheese that was invented in the 1990s. It's a lactic cheese that can be aged for short periods and eaten or aged longer times until it is dry and hard and used as shavings or crumbles. 

Balls of pepper coated cheese aging

I followed the procedure from the New England Cheesemaking website for Belper Knolle. I heated the milk to 90 degrees F and added approximately 50 to 60 ml of a mother culture containing the Kazu farmhouse cheese culture that I had on hand. plus some newly created calcium chloride solution and a few drops of rennet. Then I waited. After 12 hours the milk had coagulated but easily turned into thick yogurt consistency with any attempt to cut it. In the end I fiddled with it some, worried about the consistency, and set it aside overnight.

 

In the morning it was basically unchanged. It smelled good but it looked like thick yogurt. At this point I panicked a little and heated it back up to 88 degrees and then let it sit for another roughly 12 hours in case the culture hadn't had the time to actually produce enough lactic acid. No visible change so I poured the mass into the cheesecloth and let it drain overnight. In the morning, a full 48 hours after I started, it was the consistency of cream cheese but tasted more like sour cream. 

 

The cheese mixed with gochujang, kecap manis, garlic, and salt before rolling into balls

For Belper Knolle you should add a paste of garlic and salt prior to shaping the curds into balls. I went in a different direction and made up a paste of gochujang, kecap manis (a thick, sweet Indonesian soy sauce that I often use in kimchi rather than the normal mix of sugar, and rice flour for thickness), minced garlic, and a little salt (since the gochujang and kecap manis already have salt). Then I rolled the cheese balls in a mix of gochugaru (crushed hot pepper), black pepper, and Szechuan pepper.

Now I'm waiting.  I don't have a good cheese cave so I'm using a mix of a cool room with a ceiling fan to dry them out a little and a slightly cooler room inside a sealed box with an attempt at humidity control using the salt and water method. Everything is in 60s instead of the 50s which, if I'm optimistic, might mean quicker aging. If I'm pessimistic it means spoilage but it smells wonderful and certainly doesn't seem to be growing anything on the surface.

Update after (not quite) two weeks

Delicious. So far I've been eating it with eggs, crumbled over sautéed greens, and thinly sliced in a meat and cheese wrap. The texture is smooth, dense, and creamy. The black pepper is strong but the other flavors are not particularly noticeable. Since the outer layer is 2:1 gochugaru to black pepper I expect much more heat. The garlic, gochujang, kecap manis mix might be adding something but it is not an instantly identifiable taste. For that matter the red color of the gochujang has vanished!