This cheese is a special experimental cheese request by my sister the pepper jack addict.  Her thought is that since pepper jack is delicious then making a jack and marinating it in hot sauce would be even better.  I am not sure how well it will work but it is worth a try just to see.  And if it doesn’t meld together in the press then I will just have to eat the curds as is.  So really even if it doesn’t work it is still edible and delicious.  A win-win cheese making experiment. My favorite kind of thing to try.

This will be the standard Monterey jack recipe with a couple slight differences.  Alright more than slight changes.  I expect if it melds together and ages that it will be a lot drier then the normal pepper jack.  After the drain of the whey down to the level of the curds I added a bottle of hots sauce to it and let it sit for the remaining 30 minutes.

With the pressing I had to really bump up the weight.  After the first press and flip I didn’t have any knit at all.  Almost spilled the entire batch on the floor since I wasnt expecting it.  I bumped up the weight to the same as a cheddar to get the curds to knit together.  Only other issue was that the cheese was sticking really bad to the cloth. After taking it out of the press it still peeled a lot of the curds onto the cloth.  This will probably be the only experiment of this kind I do.  It is an ugly-looking cheese (not even going to take a pic of it) But we will see in a month at my wifes baby shower if it develops any good flavor other than spice