I am thinking about getting a little farther into cheesemaking, which our LHBS has a lot of product and experience for, beyond paneer and ricotta. They recommend a sous vide to hold temps steady. Seems to me that my Mash & Brew could hold a low temp (ca. 86 -95f) for 8 - 12 hours? Down the line I could buy a sous vide, but for now, any reason this wouldn’t work? I was thinking I could put a gallon or two of water in the M&B, get it up to temp and make sure it was holding steady, and place the cheese mixture’s container on a stainless steel trivet with high legs.
It looks like some versions of the Instant Pot have a sous vide setting - mine doesn’t, and the yogurt setting at 110f seems too high… but that got me to contemplating what else I owned that could maintain a single temp in a controlled environment…
One of the more common ways to hold temperature with home cheesemaking (when needed) is using your sink as a hot water bath. But honestly, a lot of recipes have you rest at room temperature (68-72F).
If you’re looking to get into cheesemaking, I highly recommend spending some time at cheesemaking.com They have great resources and recipes, and they sell any cultures or enzymes that you can’t get from your LHBS.
Thanks! Cheesemaking looks pretty interesting, and it looks like one of those crafts in which if you’re already homebrewing you’re halfway there. I’ll check out cheesemaking.com.
I checked out two library books on cheesemaking that our LHBS recommended, and the temperature ranges for the intermediate recipes I am looking for are anywhere from the low 80s into the 100s–for example, Mary Karlin’s Artisan Cheesemaking at Home has a recipe for Crescenza that has a temp hold at 90 degrees for 30 minutes, chevre at 86 degrees, Halloumi is 90 degrees and then up to 104, etc. The fact that my LHBS contributed some of the cheese recipes in one of these books, and carries the cultures and other ingredients discussed, gives me high confidence in their guidance!
That said, I thought of a setup much more compact and kitchen-friendly than my Mash & Boil that I could MacGyver together using my old-school slow cooker and a Johnson controller formerly used on my fermentation fridge that I replaced with a Thinkbird controller a few years back. I’ll do a test run and see how it goes. The ceramic inner pot of the crockpot would appear to be a perfect fit for the “nonreactive 6 quart stockpot” many of the recipes call for. To be continued…
I think it’s ok as long as you can keep the entire internal vessel submerged in the water it would be fine. I don’t know what the dimensions are like for the mash and boil but it may limit your cheese batch size and what kind of vessel you need to fit in it. If you’ll need to buy a pot (and trivet) to fit inside, you may be pretty close to the cost of a sous vide immersion cooker that you could use in your sink.
The dimensions won’t be an issue - the M&B has a 7.5 gallon capacity, though I never get anywhere near that for my brewing. I agree if I had to buy anything to make this work, I might as well buy a sous vide, but I have all kinds of nonreactive containers that would easily fit in the M&B (or the much smaller crockpot), such as the stainless steel insert for my InstantPot, large canning jars, etc. The basic idea is to play around with cheesemaking using existing equipment at home to see how interested I really am in this hobby, and I seem to have an abundance of devices and equipment to help me do that. Say !
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