Today we went to a friend's place and made manchego cheese. It was SO much fun! It is a very precise artform, much more than I've experienced with baking. We brought the milk up to 86 degrees and had a thermometer to keep it hovering there while we added the starters, lipase and rennet. Then we had to raise the temperature 2 degrees every five minutes to another measure point. There was a lot of stirring, then we cut the curds, did more stirring, then strained the whey out through cheesecloth (my first actual application of CHEESE CLOTH) and put the curds into a press. After pressing at a certain amount of weight for the prescribed time, we flipped the curds (now in a tubular form) and pressed them again. At the end it gets an oil bath overnight.
The whole process took about 6 hours with us having to do something every 5-30 minutes at first (during the pressing we had time to eat dinner and watch a movie). We didn't get to eat the one we made but instead (food show style) he popped a chunck of homemeade colby out of the fridge and we tasted that. I was in HEAVEN. YUM! We boiled up the leftover whey and made ricotta and then gobbled that right up still warm out of the pan.
This was a truly unique experience and I can't wait to do it again! There is another acquaintance who makes beer and bread. We're having a party very soon :)
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