Adventures in Skyr, part 2

Carrying on with the skyr saga…

Two of the recipes I had on hand were pretty much word for word the same:
Take 4 quarts of milk. Bring to the boiling point. Cool until lukewarm.
Stir 2 tbsp. Skyr into ½ cup milk. (or use recipe for starter) Stir into lukewarm milk.
Add 12 drops of liquid rennet, stir well. Set aside in warm place for about 24 hours.
Drain off liquid through cheesecloth. Remove cloth, put in bowl, beat well. Chill. Serve with cream and sugar if desired.

So, definitely I was going to try this recipe, since it had cropped up twice. But…. 4 quarts of milk? That’s a lot of milk for a highly speculative venture. (Note my lack of confidence in the whole procedure! Perhaps it harks back to my adventures in brewing. You never know till it’s done if it will be what you want, so you never want to make five gallons. Of course, then it turns out perfectly, and you only made a small bottle!)

I decided I was up for playing with one litre of milk. (And of course, now we not only get to have fun with scaling recipes, I run into that wonderful dark zone of differing rules of measurement. Sigh.) And these two recipes did not make any comment about ‘type’ of milk. No mention of milk fat at all. It had only been from poking around on the web that I’d found mention of low fat at all. Hmmm…. Since both my husband and I have a strong aversion to skim milk, even on principle… (Maybe if it actually cost significantly less than 2% or whole milk?) I opted for 1%. (There’s something about the ‘blue’ quality of skim milk that just gives me shudders.)
And I had no rennet. (This was a sudden experimentation, brought about when Neil had sent me home after a visit, with a small container of leftover skyr from Manitoba.)

Now, you’re supposed to be able to make rennetless cheese by using an acid to curdle the milk. And this is a soft and creamy final product, not a firm cheese. So, would it be possible?

I divided my one litre of milk into two portions, one to try with vinegar, and one to try with lemon juice. I followed the instructions, and waited. And waited. Neither batch was giving me any sort of coagulation at all. I waited. Maybe the kitchen was too cold? Or the entire house? (This was winter in Ontario, in the Snow Belt, with wretched electric baseboard heaters and a programmable thermostat and a thrifty husband, after all!)

The recipe had said to leave it sit for 24 hours. I left it for 36. And a bit longer. Never the slightest hint that my milk had ever heard of the concept of curds. And then it started to smell a bit squiffy, so I cried ‘uncle’. (And when all four of the cats said ‘thanks, but no’, cats who will normally knock you down in a rush to get at anything that even looks like it might be a milk carton, I knew I did NOT have a winner!
Not only were there no curds, in either batch, there wasn’t even the suggestion of thickening. Instead I just had to lots of thin smelly milk to offer up to the septic system gods.

Disappointed, but not vanquished, I turned again to the collected recipes. The Culinary Saga of New Iceland had three different recipes. The second one didn’t even require rennet. So I thought I’d give it a try.
This one, Lyla Thorarinson’s Skyr (An Alternative Method) only wanted 1 quart of buttermilk. It didn’t even ask for a dollop of skyr.

Pour buttermilk into baking dish. Cover and place in a preheated 325-degree oven. Bake for 30 minutes. Shut oven off.
Leave dish in oven overnight, for at least 12 hours, after which the whey should be visibly separated from the curd. Separate the curd from the whey as much as possible and drain curd for about 4 hours or until fairly firm. Put curd into bowl and beat until smooth. Add sugar to taste and serve with cream and/or fruit.

I DID add a bit of the skyr to this, since I wanted to encourage the correct flavour development.

Now this experiment did actually go somewhere. I don’t think it was towards skyr, though. I did develop curds. I was able to separate the whey and the surds and put the curds to drain. However, my suspicion is that I was too successful. My cheesemaking book includes a recipe for buttermilk cheese. For a dry buttermilk cheese, you go through exactly the motions I’d gone through, heating the buttermilk and then draining the curds. And what I’d ended up with was a fairly dry curd. No way did it resemble skyr. And it wasn’t just a case of whisking it up to creamy…
(Mind you, as a dry crumbly cheese product, it wasn’t totally awful. I added some herbs, and used it on some foccaccia, and with some pasta, and eventually my husband blended it with some sour cream and finished it off in a sandwich. But it wasn’t skyr.)

The cheese book suggests that you can achieve a wet curd buttermilk cheese without heat, and I may look into that.

I did eventually have some rennet, thanks to another friend, though it’s a vegetarian version, and I’m not sure how that changes the process. And there was another, even weirder recipe to try from the New Icelandic cookbook.
So stay tuned.

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