Making Farmhouse Chive Cheddar Cheese

An eye-catching, simple and flavorful cheddar. This cheese is a real pleasure to make and the end result is well worth the effort.

This is such a welcoming, tasty looking cheese, that it made the cover of Mary Karlin's book, "Artisan Cheese Making at Home", which is where the recipe I used came from. The photo above is of a cheese made in an 8" Tomme mold, with a two gallon batch of milk. Using the 8" Tomme mold with a four gallon batch of milk creates a thicker round cheese, shown in the photo below. Both work, but I think I like the proportions of the taller cheese made with a four gallon recipe.

I have not listed the complete process of recipe here, but I have included some photo's of the process, including how I press the cheese.

Normally I use a stainless steel pot, but with this 4 gallon batch, I use a large ceramic coated pot. The milk has had annato, calcium chloride, Meso II starter culture, and rennet added at this point.

Here the curds have been cut with a long knife, and the whey can be seen separating from the curds.

These "farmhouse" cheddars are simple, in that they do not go through the "cheddaring" proccess. The cheddaring process including letting the curds drain and rest, then cutting the curd mass into 6" wide "loaves" which are then stacked four high, one on top of the other to press whey out under their weight. They are flipped every ten minutes in that process, and then they are milled into smaller curd pieces again and stirred to prevent them from sticking back together again. Throughout this whole process, whey is removed and the pH is reduced. Anyway....the farmhouse style cheddar skips all that.....the curds cut, stirred, cooked and then pressed.

Fresh chopped chives are stirred into the curds and then the curds are placed into a Tomme mold which has been lined with cheese cloth. Be very careful to use only the exact size cheese cloth needed, and trim is as needed. If you wind up with excess cheesecloth on the top of your cheese, it will create an uneven surface on the cheese as it presses. I would like a nice fancy cheese press, but for now I just use weights. This recipe called for applying 8lbs of pressure on an 8" Tomme mold.

Then the pressure was increased to 10lbs

Pressing complete, the cheese cloth is covering the cheese but it is difficult to see that in the photo. The wheel of cheese is then soaked in a salt brine, then set to dry off before waxing and aging.

Wax the cheese. I recommend the hard wax that needs to be melted and then brushed on. I put on a few coats for a nice thick wax covering. This is the thicker cheese made in an 8" Tomme mold and a 4 gallon recipe.

Farmhouse Chive Cheddar Cheese. After one month of aging. It can be aged at 80 percent humidity and 55degF for one to two months. Enjoy!