The Cheese Making Process |
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Bulk Tank:
We begin making cheese by pumping milk from our bulk tank. It can hold up to 9000 pounds of milk!
Milk is kept a chilly thirty-eight degrees.
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Dave pasteurizes milk:
Cheese starts with pasteurized milk. Our milk goes directly into
the High Temperature Short Time pasteurizer.
There the milk is heated to 165 degrees for 15 seconds.
Cold milk coming into the pasteurizer then cools the heated milk
via a heat exchange unit. Cooling the milk down to 90 degrees
is the perfect temperature to prepare it for the cheese-making
vat and adding our cheese culture.
When making Neighborly Farms Raw Milk Cheddar cheese, our milk
goes directly into the cheese vat at 38 degrees. The process of
heating the milk to pasteurize is bypassed and replaced by aging
for 60 days, which naturally pasteurizes the cheese.
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Milk Flows into Vat:
Our milk flows into the cheese vat. The pasteurized milk in this vat has
been cooled to 90 degrees from the incoming colder milk.
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Sprinkling culture:
With the milk in the vat we add our freeze-dried culture.
We then mix well and wait for 90 minutes.
If it's working it will change the pH level of the milk reading it for the next step.
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Melissa adds rennet:
The cheese culture changes the milks pH level, readying it for the liquid
vegetable rennet. This makes the cheese a jelly-like
consistency.
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Dave and Melissa cutting the cheese:
Our curd knife has stainless steel wires spaced ½ inch apart.
We cut the curd horizontally and vertically until we have cubes of curd floating in the whey.
The curd is then slowly heated to 102 degrees within 30 minutes.
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Draining whey:
Here we are getting ready to make Monterey Jack cheese and draining the whey.
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David adding salt:
Cheese needs just the right amount of salt!
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David boxing cheese:
After draining whey and salting the cheese curds go into boxes. The boxes are lined with cheesecloth
and kept overnight at a pressure of 40 pounds per square inch.
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Cheese in cheese press:
Cheese boxes lined up to compress the cheese curds into delicious,
40-pound blocks of Monterey Jack!
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Hope to see you at the farm... soon!
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