Halloumi Cheese

Thanks to Fogo De Chao I recently discovered the great joy which is fried cheese with Honey.  Frying cheese needs to have a high melt point in order to hold together during the cooking stage so you need a special cheese to do this.  Halloumi, which is a Greek cheese, is a variety designed for this use.  It has been a couple years since I attempted a cheese so I've decided to give one another try.  I am using this procedure from cheesemaking.com.

This batch will use 2 gal of supermarket pasteurized cow milk.  The cheese is traditionally made with goat or sheep's milk - maybe I will try to round some of that up if I attempt this again.

Anyhow, it is a fairly simple cheese without any climate controlled ripening required.  The one unusual thing about it is that, post forming curds into small wheels of cheese, they are put into near boiling whey for 30+ min.  This procedure gives the cheese it's high melt point and a "squeaky" texture.

I'm very excited to be make some cheese again and hope to have the time to make more in the somewhat near term.

Recipe details:

• 2 gal pasteurized cows milk
• 1 pack of buttermilk culture
• 1/2 tsp Rennet mixed with 1/2 cup of spring water
• 3/4 tsp CaCl
• 1 tsp of salt in the whey
• 3% salt for the cheese 

Process Notes:

• 10/21/23:
• Heated 2 gal of milk to 86 F in a hot water bath using a Sous Vide circulator

• Added CaCl and the buttermilk culture and stirred well to mix in
• Added the rennet and stirred in well.  Let this sit for 40 min at which point curds had formed and there was a fairly clean break

• Cut the curd into 1 inch grid vertically and then attempted to cut horizontally

• Set the circulator to heat the curds up to 105 F.  Stirred the curd every 5-10 min over the next hour
• Ladled the curds out into three basket forms.  Was careful to scoop them out evenly

• Stacked the forms on top of each other so that the weight would help them drain off the whey
• Once the curds were all scooped out I set the circulator to heat up to 190 F
• Flipped the cheese in the baskets every 10 min or so and changed the order of the stacking so that they would all be about evenly pressed

• Once the whey was up to temperature I added 1 tsp of salt and moved the cheese wheels to it
• Soaked them in the hot whey until they started to float which took about 30 min

• Removed them from the whey to cool and added 3% to each cheese (each weighted between 350 and 360 grams)
• Vacuum sealed 2 of the wheels and put the third in a zip lock back

• Moved the cheese to the fridge to absorb the salt
• 10/27/23:
• The salt seems to have fully absorbed so decided to try the cheese
• Cut a few slices.  Ate one raw and found it was fairly firm and quite salty

• Fried 2 quarter inch slices in a carbon steel pan on medium heat.  It browned nicely while holding it's shape well.  I served this with some home made hot honey

• The cheese tastes great and had the nice squeaky texture.  I think the salt level is pleasing
• 10.29/23 - Moving the two vacuum sealed cheeses to the freezer to be eaten later