Our first homemade cheese
I made our first trial
cheese! I suspect this is most people's first cheese because it can be
made with normal kitchen supplies --- a quart of goat's milk, 1/4 cup of
lemon juice, a jelly thermometer, a clean cloth, and a collander. Just
slowly heat the milk to 180 degrees, add the vinegar, watch curds form,
then strain through the cloth. Nearly instant cheese!
If you want, you can
finish by adding salt, garlic, herbs, or other seasonings. I kept it
simple with a dash of salt and found the cheese tasty, but nothing like
the goat's cheese I've had from the store. Instead, this simple lemon
cheese tasted more like mozzarella.
The amount of whey to
discard is rather daunting, though. A search of the internet turned up
the fact that there are two types of whey --- acid whey (which this is)
and sweet whey (from cultured cheeses). Sweet whey has scads of uses,
but acid whey is less malleable. So I'll probably end up giving the whey
to our animals (whichever one likes it best).
When I started
researching cheeses, most people reported that they soon moved on from
acid cheeses to cultured cheeses, and I can see why. Our lemon cheese
was tasty, but I prefer the more complicated flavors of cultured
cheeses. I guess it's time to bite the bullet and buy some cultures and
rennet....
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
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.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.
I have perused the web once or twice looking for different uses for the whey we get when we make occasional batches of homemade yogurt. Seems like the primary use is in bread, which i can do just fine (there's a raisin-cinnamon-english-muffin bread loaf that i fall to pieces for, and it has very little sugar). But uses other than in bread/grain products seem harder to find. I did read once that you can cook veggies in the whey, but I can't image that's a flavor profile I'm looking for when I eat my veggies. Otherwise, I don't know what to do with it. I do agree it lasts a long time in the fridge.