INGREDIENTS

INSTRUCTIONS

Notes on the above:
(a) For those of you who'll be adding chiles:  they should be added after
salting the curd.  If using fresh chiles, you should probably parboil them
(5 minutes or so) to make some kind of attempt at sterilizing them. Pickled
ones seem not to produce any problems, and neither do dried or powdered
chiles.  Additionally, the chile flavors seem to intensify the longer the
cheese is kept.  The problem is *keeping* the stuff: the flavor of fresh
homemade Jack cheese is far superior to that of the store-bought kind, and
you'll find it won't last long. NB: cheese which has been aged 8-10 days in
the fridge seems to melt better.
(b)  The trickiest part of all of this is keeping the temperature of the
milk from jumping too quickly, and keeping it steady for prolonged periods.
You may want to experiment a little with your double-boiler apparatus, with
water in the inner pan instead of milk, to see how quickly the temperature
goes up when you change burner settings on your stove.
Some of the trickiness involves the way temperatures will continue to
"float" upward even after you've turned the burner down or off.  It is
important not to let it get out of control:  otherwise the extra heat will
kill the organisms in the starter.  Residual heat "float" can be slowed up
by slipping ice cubes into the milk one at a time until the heat
stabilizes.  Don't overdo this, obviously.
(c) Equally obviously, vegetarians can substitute vegetarian rennet for the
non-vegetarian kind.  I usually make mine with vegetarian rennet, just for
convenience's sake.
(d) Cleanliness in the utensils is very important in this process:
everything should be freshly scalded out with near-boiling water before you
start, to keep alien "bugs" from making lie difficult for the friendly ones
in the starter.
(e) For those of you with livestock:  chickens and pigs like the leftover
whey mixed with meal or feed.
(f) The quantities given in the recipe make a wheel of cheese weighing
between 1 1/2 and 1 3/4 pounds.
Posted to CHILE-HEADS DIGEST V4 #151 by Peter Morwood & Diane Duane
<owlsprng@iol.ie> on Oct 07, 1997

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