Flavour testing - semi-soft cheese - goats, cows and 'sheep' substitute

Tonight I have been testing flavouring cheese for a sheep milk substitute. I used the same semi-soft goats milk recipe as my previous blog but use three different 'milks'.

I used the goats because I know what the taste and texture are supposed to be. The plain cows as a base measure and a cows milk with lamb lipase additive to make it more like a sheeps milk.

I hope that I can get a nice balance of flavours for each of these. They are currently in the wine fridge setting for 12-18 hours.

The labels don't show up too well, but they are, from top to bottom, plain cow's, sheep substitute and goat's.

In the morning I will add them to moulds and drain them for another 12 hours and then the tasting begins!

Update:

In the moulds and draining away. Cow's, Goat's and 'Sheep's'.

Didn't get a pic of straight out of the moulds, but reduced to about 1/3 of the capacity. The goats was good to come out of the moulds at the 12 hour mark, but both the cow's milked based ones needed quite a bit of extra time. Prior to A&S I put them back in for another 3 hours and then when I got home I put them all in for another 12 hours draining. Produced a pretty solid cheese (could just be scooped up with a cracker but tended to stay in 'chunks').

Tasting went well. Most feedback was yes definitely different flavours, goats is very goaty and the 'sheeps' was sweet and strong flavour compared to the plain cow's. So looking good for other experiments! Very happy.

Semi-soft Goats cheese, reprise...

Well that didn't work as well as I'd hoped. I think my rennet was bad so it didn't set as well as I would have liked and the yield was therefore smaller than i wanted. So there wasn't enough to serve to everybody at the event. But I did get a couple of nice rounds for the high table AND put in the rest as part of the A&S comp for the night (theme was Love and Warre, I put the cheese in 'because I love cheese' :) ).

Here's some pics of the cheese in the moulds and how much whey drained out.

You can see how much they shrank.

I moulded the rounds that were just too small or badly shaped into a heart shaped cake tin (lined with cheese cloth) for the A&S entry. Edged it with dill and a half cherry/dill sprig arrow.

This pic is after it had sat out a little while for judging so it is looking a little sad lol

Very annoyed with myself for not getting a photo of the actual dressed cheese for presentation to the high table. But these are the two rounds I used. I basically dressed then up to look like little boobies :D

So whilst a little disappointing that I couldn't get enough to put on all the tables, was fun to do. I made a big batch of chive quark as a substitute (had time for making quark but not more of the goats) which always goes down a treat.