Technique: How to make mascarpone cheese

Last week was a fun week filled with lots of experiments in the kitchen. I had the strongest craving to replicate the Tiramisu that I ate on my first evening in Verona. That Tiramisu changed my life (more on that in the Tiramisu post).  Tiramisu is generally about assembling ingredients: readymade mascarpone, and store bought Savoiardi biscuits whipped up together. To set myself a challenge, I decided to make everything from scratch. Starting with the mascarpone cheese.

Making the cheese was an adventure, and a fantastic learning process. I even ended up with Mascarpone di Purple Foodie. No kidding.

I wrote to my friend Benny who runs the La Ferme Cheese Factory in Auroville (they make the most amazing chèvre.) to seek his opinion of what my new cheese discovery might be. That’s when I thought that sharing the details of that email might be helpful for those attempting to make mascarpone at home.

“Hi Benny,

I’m very excited to report to you my latest cheese making episode.

I attempted to make mascarpone, and it was a success. It probably one of the easiest cheeses to make!

The process I followed:

Mascarpone Cheese

Ingredients

1 litre cream
1.5 limes, juice

Method

1. I heated the cream to 190F over a double boiler. Stirring it every little while. It took about 15 minutes to reach this temperature.
2. After this, I squeezed in the lime juice.
3. The cream curdled, but not as frantically as it does for paneer/ricotta.
4. I stirred it, so that the lime juice is mixed evenly.
5. The cream began to thicken and I turned off the heat after the mixture was of consistent texture.
6. I let this sit for about 15-20 minutes to cool.
7. After this, I poured it over a sieve lined with a cloth over a bowl to drain off the whey.
8. I let it sit outside till it was completely cool,
9. After that I tied up the cloth and let it sit in the sieve over the bowl in the refrigerator overnight.

1^st attempt:

I used Parsi dairy cream. It’s richer than Amul cream, and I used this thinking I’d get a very creamy mascarpone cheese. The results of this were pretty disastrous. The cream did not curdle even after adding juice of 2 limes. I heated it directly over the stove thinking it would curdle then. It still didn’t.  Then, I finally poured the mixture over a cheese cloth hoping that maybe I didn’t notice the curdling process, because I read that it isn’t as frantic as paneer/ricotta. What I got was this sour tasting shiny cream/butter.  I think this happened because one of the packs of cream had turned sour. I used it anyway thinking it might aid the cheese making process with its acidity. It does not.

2^nd attempt:

I used Amul cream. Everything was perfect when I untied the cloth the next day. As a taste test, I even bought a tub of Italian made mascarpone cheese. It tasted very, very similar. Except that the Italian one was slightly sweeter and creamier with lesser water content. That’s the following photo. You can see that the water content in my home made version was higher and the cheese wasn’t sitting on the spoon perfectly. I needed to get rid of this excess water content.

Instead of waiting for the whey to drip off for a few hours, I started massaging and squeezing the cheese in the cloth to drain off the whey. I got rid of loads of it. But when I opened it, I noticed that the texture changed. It wasn’t the mascarpone texture anymore. It had turned slightly grainy with fat globules and had a distinct yellow tinge to it. I thought that this was the end of the tiramisu process (for which I was making the mascarpone). But as a last resort to salvage the cheese, I tossed it into the bowl of my KitchenAid to see if it gets back its creamy texture on whipping. What happened was amazing – the cream came together and separated from whey and then what I got was this creamy yellow cheese, blobs of which I squeezed by hands and transferred to another bowl. It was silky smooth, without sticking to the fingers like cream or mascarpone cheese usually does. It was like touching melted mozzarella without the grease. That’s the following photo, where it’s kept in comparison with the Italian mascapone. What I wanted to know from you is what kind of cheese did I really end up with? (Dear reader, now is when you chime in) It’s got higher fat content than mascarpone, and tastes richer. It definitely was an additional step after mascarpone-making that I discovered by accident.

3^rd attempt:

I followed the process described above in the recipe to the T. No poking, prodding, squeezing, massaging. What I got was absolutely clear whey (as compared to the milky whey in the 1^st attempt). That’s the following photo. The cheese sat in the cloth for 1.5 days before I transferred it to a container. Here is the luxuriously thick and creamy homemade mascarpone cheese that I’m quite proud of. 3^rd time lucky!

Please let me know what you think the result of my 2nd attempt really is. I’m quite thrilled with my cheese making attempt and can’t wait to move on to more risky things with rennet.

Be well.

Shaheen”

In his reply, Benny tells me “In the second attempt you changed the structure by kneading and whipping; some change had to happen by doing this and I think you had the good luck of a good result. I really don’t know if your result corresponds to something already done and produced. You may have invented your own quality Mascarpone.”

Additional notes:

• The mascarpone cheese used for comparison is Italian made Zanetti mascarpone.
• I used an Ikea instant read thermometer to measure the temperature of cream. In case you want one, here’s a good option.
• While I used 25% fat cream that locally available, you can (and must!) use richer cream with 36% fat, if it’s available to you.
• You can also use lemon juice instead of the lime juice that I used.

Conclusion:

• Parsi dairy cream, with its 3 day shelf life, is highly unstable for cheese making, however tempting the high fat content might be.
• Draining the mascarpone for 1.5 days results in a cheese that’s even thicker and creamier than Italian mascarpone. A day’s worth of draining is sufficient.
• The homemade mascarpone isn’t as sweet as the Italian version, but it does measure up to the Italian mascarpone and is worth the effort.
• Best of all: It costs 5x less than store bought.

So there it is. My Mascarpone cheese experiment.