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Step 5Testing our milk and rennet
First of all, wash your hands perfectly and be sure all the materials you are going to use are clean.
Believe it or not, not all commercial milks are suitable for cheese making. This is due to several factors (acidity of milk, calcium content, antibiotics present in milk, etc), so is important to test it before making our cheese. Since I do not know which kind of rennet you got, follow the directions of the manufacturer to prepare your rennet.
Most of the tablet rennet dosage is one tablet for 100 liter of milk (like mine), and should be dissolved in 200 ml of cold water (In theory, this means I only need 0.2 mL to coagulate 1 liter of milk). So I broke one tablet in four parts and dissolved 1/4 tablet in about 30 mL of cold water.
This is important: it seems Junket Rennet Tablets is the most common commercial rennet in the USA, but also is a kind of "diluted" rennet (because of the ingredients) so after a long searching in the internet I found that 1 Junket Rennet tablet coagulates about 18 liters of milk, so you have at least to quadruple the dosage to obtain good results.
Then, if you are using Junket Rennet Tablets dissolve a whole tablet in about 30 mL of cold water.
To test the milk, take about 30 mL of milk and warm it to 35C (remember, rennin is a enzyme and works at body temperature, if you try it on cold milk nothing is going to happen and if you heat the milk over 38C you will inactivate the rennin and also nothing will happen, so be sure the temperature is between 32 - 38C and keep it at this temperature, you can achieve it by immersing the cup in warm water), then add 3 mL of rennet, stirr and take the time it needs to form the curd.
If everything goes well, it only takes lees than 5 minutes to form the curd (remember, we formed the curd by using an enzyme to modify the casein which is the protein of the milk so it become insoluble and form a curd)
If after 10 minutes nothing happens, and you are sure you kept the milk at 35C and you did everything well, then something went wrong, try other milk, or other rennet, but first try other milk (is not common that rennet doesn't work)
If your test is successful, you can continue to the next step. Look at the photos to see examples of two different milks (one is good for cheese making while the other never reached coagulation)
Believe it or not, not all commercial milks are suitable for cheese making. This is due to several factors (acidity of milk, calcium content, antibiotics present in milk, etc), so is important to test it before making our cheese. Since I do not know which kind of rennet you got, follow the directions of the manufacturer to prepare your rennet.
Most of the tablet rennet dosage is one tablet for 100 liter of milk (like mine), and should be dissolved in 200 ml of cold water (In theory, this means I only need 0.2 mL to coagulate 1 liter of milk). So I broke one tablet in four parts and dissolved 1/4 tablet in about 30 mL of cold water.
This is important: it seems Junket Rennet Tablets is the most common commercial rennet in the USA, but also is a kind of "diluted" rennet (because of the ingredients) so after a long searching in the internet I found that 1 Junket Rennet tablet coagulates about 18 liters of milk, so you have at least to quadruple the dosage to obtain good results.
Then, if you are using Junket Rennet Tablets dissolve a whole tablet in about 30 mL of cold water.
To test the milk, take about 30 mL of milk and warm it to 35C (remember, rennin is a enzyme and works at body temperature, if you try it on cold milk nothing is going to happen and if you heat the milk over 38C you will inactivate the rennin and also nothing will happen, so be sure the temperature is between 32 - 38C and keep it at this temperature, you can achieve it by immersing the cup in warm water), then add 3 mL of rennet, stirr and take the time it needs to form the curd.
If everything goes well, it only takes lees than 5 minutes to form the curd (remember, we formed the curd by using an enzyme to modify the casein which is the protein of the milk so it become insoluble and form a curd)
If after 10 minutes nothing happens, and you are sure you kept the milk at 35C and you did everything well, then something went wrong, try other milk, or other rennet, but first try other milk (is not common that rennet doesn't work)
If your test is successful, you can continue to the next step. Look at the photos to see examples of two different milks (one is good for cheese making while the other never reached coagulation)
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