Cotija (?)

So far cheese making reminds me quite a bit of bread making in that you usually use most of the same ingredients no matter what variety of cheese (or bread) you are making.  The process for making specific varieties change slightly (though usually not drastically) so that you can build skill over time.  Once you get comfortable making sandwich bread you nearly have all the skills to make bagels for example.

Usually with bread making though you at least can recognize what the end result was attempting to be (ciabatta rarely turns out to resemble bialy, even though the dough is almost the same).  I can't say the same thing about my cheese-making so far.  I was attempting to make the crumbly Mexican Cotija but the end result seemed harder and more uniform (closer to a Havarti maybe, though really I'm not enough of a cheese expert to tell you).  The results tasted great though so I'm not complaining.

As I said the processes was similar to the other cheese I've made so far, but this is the first time I've had to press the cheese to remove more whey.  I used an old deli container that I poked holes in the bottom of and placed another deli container on top of the cheese inside to create a cheese mold (I should probably just invest in a small cheese mold which would make pressing a lot easier).

I tried all sorts of things to get enough weight on the cheese to press it (it was pressed overnight).  I eventually put the the set up in the sink so that the walls of the sink would help keep the weight stable and wouldn't tip off and send my pot of water (which was acting as the weight) all over the kitchen floor.

After pressing I let the cheese soak in a brine for another day.  I probably should have just stopped right here and eaten the cheese like this.  It looked crumbly and had the level of moisture I expected (I should mention I've only eaten cotija once before so I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking for in terms of flavor and texture).  My recipe said the cheese should age for 14 days so I placed it in my cheese cave and flipped it every day for the next two weeks.

You can see from the picture of the finished cheese below it seems to have dried out too much.  I'm having trouble keeping the humidity high enough in my cave so I may also have to keep the cheese in a plastic bag or Tupperware container with the lid ajar while in the cave to keep the moisture level high enough.

The final result tasted great but I did have to cut off the rind that had built up on it while it was in the cave.  I'm excited to try another pressed cheese to see if I can get better results in the cave during the aging process.