Antique Cheese Press: FAIL!

Today's post is brought to you by the book A Guide to Preserving Food for a 12 Months Harvest: Canning, Freezing, Smoking, and Drying; Making Cheese, Cider, Soap and Grinding Grain; Getting the Most from Your Garden by Mariel Dewey -- a great book (despite the fact that this book brought to my attention that the press we had bought as a fruit press was, in fact, a cheese press, leading me to use it for said purpose with poor and frustrating results).

In my last post I said that I would explain how things went with the antique cheese press. Well, here it is: it sucked. I have put it into the category of, "this neat old farm tool is awfully neat looking but should probably just be for decoration." As such, it will probably be someone else's decoration since it is too bulky to keep around if it simply cannot be functional, too.

It all started out with the dilemma of how to sanitize it all. The moment I started wiping it down ("pre-cleaning" if you will), an orange color (read "rust") came off on the cloth. The main section of the press and the follower are cast iron. The internal hoop seemed to be aluminum and the external one cast iron, too. This should have been my first warning; all of the cheese making books clearly say stainless steel or plastic implements only. My response to that had been, "then why did someone make this wonderful old cheese press out of cast iron?" Well, from what I can figure, it must have been all they had available. The press is sturdy and nice looking and would be functional if it were made out of nice stainless steel or wood.

To be honest, the cheese was not THAT bad. I constantly struggle to know whether my cheese is doing what it is supposed to since I am paranoid and (relatively) inexperienced. However, even after washing and sanitizing in Star-San, the press turned my cheese and the butter muslin spotty-orange. Mind you, this is not a colored cheese--I do not add coloring. So this just did not seem right, you know?

After looking online, I found one or two other people who have used old presses and they seemed to be content with the orange RUSTY cheese. They said things like, "just cut off the orange rind and it's just great" and "despite the metallic taste..."

Um, no.

My goal after spending hours in the kitchen tinkering with curds and whey is not to have rusty, metallic-tasting cheese. However, endeavoring to make the best of it, I tried to salvage the cheese. I cut off the orange sections (basically all of the outside, top and bottom) and then cut off a piece of the white section inside. This usually tastes like a bland mozzarella. Before spending any more time on it, I figured I should check to see if it would even turn out edible. The white section tasted a bit metallic, too. So I cut off MORE. Suddenly, I had two hunks of cheese that had been pressed but were now all fresh-surfaced and, though they did not taste metallic, were obviously not going to dry as normal.

I coated them with salt on all sides and turned them. Applying more salt, turning, wiping off wet salt, turning, applying salt. For weeks. Finally, today, they seem to have enough of a rind that I can store them in some way. They also seem harder than a rock. Perhaps they are nice and perfect inside. I am an optimist.

Since they are already super screwed up and experimental, I decided to bandage them instead of waxing. This way, if they are bad, I will have no idea what part of this whole process is bad. And if they are good, the same. It is a wonderful process, messing yourself up ahead of time through completely non-scientific trial and error.

So, the two chunks of cheese are now double-bandaged in butter muslin and crisco, drying in the cool back storage area. I imagine that, if they actually manage to be edible cheese in the end, they will not taste like Farmhouse Cheddar. Mystery cheese--my favorite.