How to make cheese rennet at home
To cook real cheese, a tasty and satisfying food product, you need a special ferment – rennet. It is made from the stomachs of calves using a certain technology that can be repeated at home.
Abomasum is a special part of the stomach of a newborn ruminant. This fragment is usually not eaten, but it is used in the process of making cheese. To make cheese or cottage cheese from milk, you need to curd it. This means that the milk protein must curdle and separate from the whey. It is for curdling milk that rennet is used.
It is impossible to make real cheese without rennet.
It is an organic substance of a rather complex structure, which accelerates the chemical processes in milk. The enzyme is contained in a special part of the baby’s stomach, where breast milk is broken down into nutritional components. It is due to the enzyme that newborn lambs and calves are able to assimilate food.
It is impossible to artificially obtain rennet for cheese. In industrial cheese making, a ready-made enzyme powder is used – pepsin. Its cost is high, but it is difficult to buy it at a pharmacy. Instead of factory rennet powder, you can use a self-made product.
How to make rennet yourself
To start homemade cheese making, you need to prepare a natural enzyme powder. For this, abomasum is suitable not only for young, but also for adult animals. The last section of the stomach, directly adjacent to the intestines, contains enough enzymatic substances for a strong homemade starter culture.
To prepare rennet at home, you need the rennet of a freshly slaughtered animal. The sequence of actions is as follows:
- wash the stomach thoroughly from the outside and inside;
- pull one hole with a thick thread;
- inflate the abomasum through the remaining hole and tie the resulting ball;
- hang it to dry completely in a dry place.
If the abomasum is properly dried, it will look like parchment paper. It can be cut into strips and folded into a glass jar. By breaking off pieces of rennet, you can prepare a natural cheese starter.
There is another way to dry and store the rennet. It is stretched on two sticks, dried, and then transferred to cans. If you punch three or four holes in containers, you can store the abomasum in a dry room for years.
Rennet is an essential ingredient in cheese making. It is not difficult to prepare the starter powder yourself if you can get the stomachs of dairy ruminants.