Brined cheese

Today I had a first attempt at brined cheese, in the feta or halloumi sort of style. No photos through laziness, but I now have a jar of cubes of cheese that certainly look like feta sitting in brine in the fridge. I also chopped and dry fried some like halloumi. Although it was very young it seemed to cook in the right way and the taste was in the right area, if a little bland.

But back to the beginning. This was four pints (2.2L) of whole fat organic cows' milk, heated to 86F, renneted and left to sit for an hour at which point it hadn't coagulated. Just as well, as it was around now I remembered to add the yoghurt starter culture (in drops, not stirred, to avoid distutbing the early stages of curd formation). After two hours I had a clean break and cut the curd then raised the temperature to 104F over a period of about 45 minutes. I strained the curd in cheesecloth lining a colander, and pressed it under 4kg for an hour or two, turning a couple of times.

I then cut and cooked the semi-firm curd blocks in the whey at 186F or so for another hour. After this I diced them, salted them and let them rest for another hour before dry-frying a little and putting the rest in brine in the fridge.

As a side show I also heated the whey to just short of boiling and stirred in a teaspoon of vinegar and almost instantly ended up with globules of fine curd which I strained to get something like a ricotta.
I'm seriously thinking of scaling things up a bit though, but first I'd need a much bigger stainless steel pan.