Cheese, Monterey Jack

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

Monterey Jack is the mild, pale, springy Californian washed-curd cheese that melts better than almost anything and is the base for pepper jack and a dozen other flavoured versions.

🔴 And the name is worth pausing on, because the man in it did not invent the cheese.

The cheese descends from the queso del país made in Alta California — by the Franciscan missions, and by Californio households. Doña Juana Cota de Boronda is the name most often attached to making and selling it to support her family. David Jacks, a Scottish-born businessman in Monterey, is the man who commercialised and shipped it, and it went out labelled as Jacks’ cheese — which is where the name comes from.

⚠ Jacks is also remembered locally for something else entirely. In 1859 he acquired the enormous Monterey pueblo lands — on the order of 30,000 acres — at a sheriff’s sale, for a sum in the region of a thousand dollars, in a transaction contested and resented for generations afterwards.

⭐ So one of America’s most popular cheeses is named after the man who marketed it rather than the people who made it, and that man is remembered in Monterey mainly for a land grab. That is not a reason not to make the cheese. It is a reason to know whose it was.

Ingredients

• 2 gallons whole milk (not ultra-pasteurised)
• 1/4 tsp mesophilic culture
• 1/2 tsp calcium chloride solution, if the milk is shop-bought
• 1/2 tsp liquid rennet, single strength, diluted in 1/4 cup cool unchlorinated water
• 2 quarts water at 140 F, for the wash (approximately)
• Saturated brine, calcium-adjusted — see Cheese Brine, Saturated
• Optional: 2-3 Tbsp dried or well-drained pickled chillies, for pepper jack

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. Warm to 88 F / 31 C, mesophilic culture, 45 minutes to ripen.
2. Rennet at a flocculation multiplier of 3, cut to 1/2 inch, rest, then stir 30 minutes.
3. Wash: draw off a third of the whey, replace with water at 140 F to bring the vat to 100 F / 38 C. Stir another 30 minutes.
4. If you are making pepper jack, the peppers go in now — worked through the drained curd before moulding. ⚠ Dried, or pickled and very well drained. Fresh chillies carry water and their own microbes into a cheese that will sit for weeks at cave temperature, and published home guidance on that is thin — which is a reason for caution rather than comfort.

⚠ Drain under the whey

1. Let the curd settle into a mass at the bottom of the pot with the whey still over it, press it down with your hands or a plate, and only then gather it. Working the curd under liquid is how you keep air out of it — and air trapped between curd pieces becomes a mechanical opening, a slit or crack in the finished paste that has nothing to do with gas and everything to do with sloppy draining.
2. Press moderately: ~5 PSI for 30 minutes, flip and redress; ~15 PSI for 6-12 hours.

Brine a few hours per pound, dry, wax or bag.

1. Age at 50-55 F for 1 to 3 months. ⭐ Or don’t stop there — Monterey Jack aged hard and long becomes Dry Jack, which is a different cheese in the grating family and, by most accounts, was discovered by accident when a supply disruption left wheels sitting too long.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t 🔴 UNTESTED. “Monterey Jack” is generic with a US standard of identity.

🔴 What the wash actually does Your starter eats lactose and makes lactic acid. Left alone it keeps eating until it runs out or the acid stops it, and a cheddar ends up around pH 5.0–5.2.

Washing interrupts that. You draw off part of the whey and replace it with water, which dilutes the lactose still dissolved among the curds. Less sugar means less acid, and the cheese finishes higher — around pH 5.2–5.4.

⭐ Two-tenths of a pH point is the entire family. Higher pH leaves more calcium bound into the casein network, and bound calcium is what makes a gouda bend where a cheddar snaps. It is also why these are the best melters in the section.

⭐ And the water goes in HOT, so it raises the vat temperature and cooks the curd in the same operation. One step, two outcomes — which is the neatest piece of design in the whole craft.

⚠ On the name, and how I have written it The mission and Californio origin of queso del país is well attested; Doña Juana Cota de Boronda is the name most consistently attached to it in local accounts. David Jacks marketed and shipped it and the name stuck to him. The 1859 pueblo-lands purchase is documented and was contested for decades.

⚠ I have given approximate figures — around 30,000 acres, around a thousand dollars — deliberately, because the precise numbers vary between accounts and I have not seen the records. The shape of it is not in dispute; the decimal places are the part that gets repeated wrongly.

⭐ Why it belongs on a recipe page at all: this collection’s position is that corrections are the product, and “the cheese is named after the salesman, not the cook” is a correction worth making. It costs nothing and it puts the credit closer to where it belongs.

Variations Pepper jack — chillies in the curd. Colby-Jack — Colby and Jack curds marbled in one mould. Dry Jack — aged hard, rubbed with cocoa, pepper and oil.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/semi-soft-washed-curd/, /cheese/makes/smoked-and-flavored/ and /cheese/world/united-states/ on the site.