Slipp-Coat Cheese Recipe

How to make it

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• Master Phillips Digby, his Method and proportions in making slipp-coat Cheese, are these.
• Take the stroakings and cream; mingle these well together, and let them stand in a bowl, till they are cold.
• Then power upon them the boiling water, and mingle them well together; then let them stand, till they are almost cold, colder than milk warm.
• Then put to it the Runnet, made with fair water (not whey, or any other thing then water; this is an important point), and let it stand till it come.
• Have a care not to break the Curds, nor ever to touch them with your hands, but only with your skimming dish.
• In due time, lade the Curds with the dish, into a thin fine Napkin, held up by two persons, that the whey may run from them through the bunt of the Napkin, which you rowl gently about, that the Curds may dry without breaking.
• When the whey is well drained out, put the Curds as whole as you can into the Cheese-fat, upon a napkin, in the fat. Change the Napkin, and turn the Cheese every quarter of an hour, and less, for ten, twelve, or fourteen times; that is, still as soon as you perceive the Napkin wet with the whay running from the Curds.
• Then press it with a half pound weight for two or three hours.
• Then add half a pound more for as long time, then another half pound for as long, and lastly another half pound, which is two pounds in all; which weight must never be exceeded.
• The next day, (when about twenty four hours are past in all) salt your Cheese moderately, and then turn it but three or four times a day, and keep it in a cotton cloth, which will make it mellow and sweet,
• not rank, and will preserve the coat smooth.
• It may be ready to eat in about twelve days.
• I did not make this cheese, but Phil Troy did. These are his notes:
• This makes a relatively soft uncooked cheese.
• A dairy farmer informed him that strokings are the final few ounces of milk from each milking; to get them you have to be more gentle when stimulating the cow's udder, hence the name.
• They are lower in butterfat than the morning milk, so a lower proportion of cream is added to the morning milk to approximate stroakings and cream.
• He was finally forced to buy a cheese-making kit at a home brewing supply store, of all places, to get rennet.
• The kit also provided a nifty draining basket and a lot of other stuff he didn't use.
• The milk was pasteurized but not homogenized; it came from the farmer's market, as did the cream.
• His basket was designed to hold the curds from a gallon of milk, so he cut the recipe down a bit: approximately one hundred ounces of milk to twenty of cream, and eight ounces of live-culture sheep's-milk yogurt.
• He heated the pasteurized milk and cream to about 88°F.; almost all the modern cheese recipes call for a temperature range of 75 - 90° F. before adding a bacterial starter culture, which is where the yogurt comes in.
• The process of cooling, heating, and cooling again achieves two ends: not only does this process reach and regulate a specific temperature in an age before thermometers, but it gives the milk just enough time to sour a bit.
• Rennet works much more efficiently in the presence of acid, and he figured that porous wooden bowl the original recipe speaks of had acid-producing lactobacilli lurking in every microscopic nook and cranny.
• Rather than trust in nature and airborne bacteria, he innoculated the milk with a known, non-mutated strain of lactobacillus, one which would not make the milk bitter.
• He chose sheep's milk yogurt on a moment's whim.
• Buttermilk, sour cream, or ordinary yogurt would have done just as well.
• Most of the sourness, by the way, stayed in the whey, which left fairly sweet curds when drained off.
• He used half a rennet tablet dissolved in warm water, in lieu of the soaking liquid from reconstituting a dried cow's rectum, the dried curds from the stomach of an unweaned calf, or a variety of alkaloids from relatively unobtainable herbs, all of which are far more in period.
• Otherwise there were no significant deviations from Digby's recipe, except that he had to refrigerate the cheese for part of the ripening process.
• Excessively warm weather was causing the cheese to sweat butterfat, which goes to show you why the manufacturers of commercial cream cheese generally stabilize their product with gum emulsifiers.