So, hello everyone. Today I will talk how in a few simple steps you can make your own starter culture for cheesemaking from scratch. You don't have to buy those DVI cultures that are produced in laboratories. They have their pros and cons. The reason why I advocate using your own made starter culture is the very reason I started making cheese. From the very beginning I have wondered how I can go about without buying those freeze dried "powders" and what is actually going on there. Why is it that you add one powder and get one taste, or add another powder to get a different taste. But having practiced sourdough bread baking I started to get a feeling that something similar is happening in cheesemaking. It is due to the bacterial life which occurs in milk that there is a difference between kinds of cheeses out there. Basically variety of cheeses that we know (Swiss, French, and so on) could be grouped by their firmness as hard, semi-hard, soft, moldy, but the main difference between all of them is that they use milk of their particular region and bacterial cultures that are local to those places. But can you make those starter cultures on your own? How to make a starter culture that would be the authentic to your locale? So here we go, and BTW this is what I have been doing for past year and a half. If you do not have fresh raw milk, you can buy a kefir grains on craigslist or facebook marketplace. Just Google it and you will find someone who would love to share it or perhaps just sells it. Use it to add to pasteurized milk to kickstart that bacterial life. I have personally used a kefir grains for some time. But as for me I might have not figured out how to work with it the best way perhaps because I was using it during the summer when bacterial life in milk is quite active on is own. So I switched to using whey from the previous batch of cheese and that was because I was making cheese every day. But even if you do cheese at least twice a week then you can keep your culture in a fridge for two or three days. It is not the best option, but doable nonetheless. So here we have some fresh raw milk. It is at room temperature somewhat cooled after milking. It was milked this morning. I used it to make cheese today and left some to use as a prop. I just pour it into a jar, close the lid and leave at room temperature for two to three days (depending whether it is in winter or summer). Once milk ferments you would end up with very thick clabber. I did not add anything else to it. It has fermented on its own. Now I am going to taste it and try to explain what it tastes like. As you can see, it has turned into very thick clabber. Cream has separated on top and down below just skim milk clabber but also very thick. Sour cream tastes amazing. Again, it had fermented itself. What is important to keep in mind here? I did not cool this milk. Milk was warm from the odder and I immediately put away basically to go sour. But to make this culture even better I recommend that you repeat the process a few more times but use clabber from your first batch to start a new jar of milk ferment. You can see how thick it is but it is going to be even thicker in summer time. Add your clabber to a jar of fresh raw milk according to ratio that I talked about in previous video, and that is 2%. Here we have 250ml of milk so I am going to use 5ml of clabber. This is a teaspoon full. Stir it thoroughly and leave ferment overnight. Most likely next day (might be a bit longer in winter) you would end up with even better started culture And following the same ratio of 2% use it to add to milk when making cheese. You can feed this culture every day or at least every other day to keep it going. But if you make cheese at least once in three days, would be much easier just to use whey for starter culture. So this is how you can start a culture for cheesemaking similarly to starting a sourdough culture for bread baking. And this starter culture will be authentic to your cheese and your locale. And thus your cheeses would be different from any other cheeses around. You can make hard, semi-hard, soft, moldy and so on but the taste will be slightly different in every one of them. So you use the same starter culture for every cheese variety but diversify by implementing various techniques pertaining to cheese grain size, temperature and that is what I am going to talk about in videos to follow That's probably it. If you liked this information and it was of any use to you, please share it with someone who would find it useful as well. See you in the next video.
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