HOMEMADE SQUEAKY CHEESE CURDS - Perfect for Canadian Poutine

You're in Steve's kitchen, today it's all about

curds

and I mean those

squeaky

curds

that squeak like a mouse in a

cheese

shop, they're

perfect

for Canadian style

poutine

and I'm going to make

poutine

, that's why I need curds. You really want some delicious

squeaky

curds when you make poutine at home and it's not that hard to make so now I'm going to show you how we can have a really good quality milk and this is a whole milk. There is no garbage, something like partially cream or half cream. I don't even know what they call it, we use it very rarely.

One whole milk and we are going to turn it into squeaky curd. Now I don't need a lot of

cheese

curds, so I'm drinking two liters of whole milk and that's about a little over four pints. Now, different milk will give you different qualities of curd. If you find that the milk you have is not very good, you may want to add a small amount of calcium chloride to the milk. In fact, I'm going to use sodium chloride, basically simple uniodized salt; the calcium chloride will give you a slightly firmer curd. So if you have poorer quality milk, that's why you use it.

So, for two liters of milk I am using one teaspoon of sodium chloride or common salt. Now, if you are on a low sodium diet, this can be skipped entirely. Now I added a couple of tablespoons of hot water just to dissolve the salt and we can add that with our milk and stir a little bit, but the first thing we need to do is heat this milk and When we talk about heating the milk during cheese making, It's a little tricky because actually getting milk to stay below a certain temperature is a little more difficult than heating it.

We're only talking about temperatures of around 33 degrees Celsius or so 90 Fahrenheit, so a lot of people will use a double boiler and put their pan in hot water to bring it up to temperature. I'm not actually going to do that today, I want to keep this as simple as possible, I find that with a very low heat on the gas, we can get this to 32 degrees 33 degrees Celsius about 90 Fahrenheit and we can keep it warming up pretty easily. Now you can see that just by reaching the temperature, I'm going to turn it off, we're not going to beat ourselves up over a little discrepancy.

Now here's a step you can decide to skip if you want. In fact, I'm going to add a tablespoon of cultured buttermilk which is kind of a mesophilic starter, well it's a mesophilic starter and it just adds some flavor to the cheese. . Now you will need to leave this there for about 40 minutes to allow those flavors to develop. If you decide not to use buttermilk or a mesophilic starter, you can put in the rennet at this point and omit it completely. We're just going to open the lid and leave it for about 30 to 40 minutes to allow the culture to mature.

The only thing you're really going to need for this recipe is some rennet, I have a vegetable rennet here, you could use an animal rennet, both will work fine. Instructions for how much to use are usually found on the rennet package, whether you are using liquid or powder. Now that the milk has matured, I'm going to put rennet into it, for 4 pints or 2 liters, I'm going to want, for this particular rennet, about a quarter of a teaspoon, so it's a very small amount. Sometimes you need to read, if you are using powders, you will need to dissolve them in a little liquid first.

We're going to put that in with our milk and then I'm going to use a whisk and just mix it gently for about a minute to get a nice even distribution and don't forget at this point our milk still has to be about 33 degrees Celsius, so about 90 Fahrenheit. Only now are we going to cover it and leave it for about 40 minutes for the curd to set. There's an old saying, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating," which has nothing to do with what I'm about to do, but I thought I'd say it anyway. Let's take a look now and see if we can do a cleaning and break up our curd, 40 minutes have passed and hopefully the curd has had time to do its job and when we say a cleaning, what do I mean if you stick your finger in the curd, you can see it's quite firm, we'll just bring it down and see that we've got a nice clean break in the curd.

So now with our curd ready, what I'm going to do is take a knife or a fine palate knife and I'm just going to push it down into the curd and I'm going to cut, I'm going to cut the curd. in sizes of approximately inches. So I'm just going to run the knife across the roof of my mouth and then I'm going to take the knife again and I'm going to cross in the opposite direction. So I'm getting nice cubes of curd, now I want to take the palate knife at an angle and the same thing I'm going to cut, I'm going to cut the curd diagonally.

So hopefully what this does, if you don't have a proper tool for cutting curds, is it breaks the curd into little cubes and then I'll turn my pan over and do it from the opposite side. The curd here, if I lift a little bit, is very light and creamy and still packed with a lot of whey, so we want to try to help get this out of the curd. The temperature of our curd and whey has dropped a little, it is about 31 and a half degrees. Now we want to start increasing the temperature, it should be around 37 degrees Celsius, so about a hundred degrees Fahrenheit.

So I'm turning the heat back on, but very low, and if you want you can do it in a double boiler, but what we're going to do is start mixing, these are beautiful thick curds, very dense, very good curd that I got from this milk and while we mix it we will only be checking the temperature. Now I don't want it to go over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit or 37 degrees Celsius because all we're doing here is cooking the curd and I'm using a slotted spoon because I want to move the curd quite carefully. around in the serum.

Now, when the liquid reaches temperature, I will turn off the heat and continue stirring very gently for about 30 minutes. So we continue to keep the temperature around 37 degrees Celsius and now you can see that after thirty minutes of stirring the curd has become much smaller and we have much more whey in the pan. Now that we've cooked the curd and I say cook because as you know the temperatures aren't that high, I can stick my hand in there and it won't burn at all. What we need to do now is separate the curds and whey. I have a colander, it has some cheesecloth in it.

Now, if you're making a larger batch than this, you'll probably want to drain some of the whey first, but I only have a small batch, so I'll pour the whey into the cheesecloth, there you can see. All those beautiful curds there, they look a little like popcorn. I'm going to lift up the corners of my cheesecloth, now the only reason I've done this in a bowl is because I'm going to save the whey for other recipes, so we'll just squeeze some of the whey out of the curd. Now what we're going to do is take that curd, I'm going to put it here on a rack so that the whey drips out.

Now you can see the curd trapped inside the cheesecloth and the whey is starting to drip out, but what we're going to do is take a board, a cutting board that's obviously been cleaned and we're just going to place it on top. and then I'm just going to put a bag in there to give it some extra weight. So that little bit of extra weight on the board will only help squeeze out more whey because even though we've cooked it now and it's denser, we want the curd to be much drier than it is and we don't.

I need to do it for a long time, just about an hour and what I'm going to do in about 15 or 20 minutes is lift it up and just check the curds. I can actually cut them up and stack them, but since it's just a squeaky curd that we use for poutine, we won't age it or do anything unusual. By the way, you can take this curd and make fantastic mozzarella with it; It is the same type of curd that you use, but we are doing this for squeaky curds. Now, the cheese-making process yields a large amount of this beautiful whey, which should not be wasted.

By the way, it's excellent food for pigs, so if not you're going to run out now and get a pig. farm, you can use this in all types of baking, in fact you can also use it to make delicious ricotta cheese, I'm not sure if I can do it or not, but don't throw it away. So what I'm going to do is after about 15 to 20 minutes for about an hour, I'm going to unwrap the cheese, I'm just going to remove the cheesecloth and you can see that the curds are starting to form beautifully. In fact, I'm going to turn this around.

Now sometimes people cut the curd in half and stack it, I think at this thickness I'm not going to worry about that, I'm just going to wrap it one more time and you can see down here how much whey there is. starting to come out at the bottom of the cheese and I'll continue this process for probably about an hour to an hour and a half until I have the cheese as dry as I want. Now, as this is a fairly young curd, we don't need to leave it any longer than that, I think it will probably be ready.

Now I'm just going to remove the cheesecloth that we're going to lift, look at that beautiful curd there, it's absolutely

perfect

. Now we're going to take that beautiful curd, we're going to place it on the board and now what we're going to do is we're just going to cut it into strips. Then I'll just turn the board and cut them into beautiful curd cubes like this. So now we have these beautiful curds, beautiful solid, squeaky curds, the last thing I'm going to do is just put them in a bowl and we're going to take some salt, just sprinkle it over the curd.

I'm going to add salt to them, so we have made our delicious curd, now I can try it. It's going to taste like a very soft cheese and like I say, you could turn it into mozzarella if you wanted, it's got a lovely squeak to it, this is going to be great in poutine. Very very simple to make, join me tomorrow because Canada Day is coming up and I thought I would make poutine in Steve's kitchen, now I have my curds so it will taste delicious. I'll see you then, be good.