Big cheese
With my recipe perfected at last,
it started making sense to freeze our excess milk in preparation for a
big batch of chevre. Two weeks and twenty-three cups later, I thawed the
milk out in the fridge (and on the counter for the last couple of
hours) and then whipped up the big cheese.
It
looks like each quart of milk gives me about a cup of goat cheese...and
a big batch is just as delicious as a small one! Five of those cups of
chevre will go back in the freezer for the winter and the sixth cup will
go into our bellies ASAP. (No, really --- I barely managed to put the
lid on the container long enough to write this post.)
What's up next? Dr. Fankhauser's cheese tutorial
suggests a basic pressed cheese or American mozarella, while my milking
trainer instead recommends trying feta with the lipase she's giving
when we pick up our annual lambs.
Since we haven't yet rigged a cheese press, we'll probably try the feta
or mozarella next, but I'm open to suggestions. What do you recommend
as an easy beginner cheese?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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To quote Homer Simpson: "Cheese... MMMmmmmmmm."
I vote for mozarella, but then I'm a mozarella fanatic.
Fias Co farm's Queso Fresco - pressed for a day, aged for a week. Melty. Good pizza mozz sub and much less finicky. I use two pizza pans and a couple free weights for a press. Http://fiascofarm.com/dairy/quesofresco.htm