Ever want to make cheese but never proceeded as it seems too technical? Or maybe it never crossed your mind that you can easily make cheese at home, with or without having your own fresh supply of milk?
Fresh Milk at home or Store-bought?
Of course having fresh and raw milk makes the best cheese. The benefits with raw milk are that it has natural cultures and enzymes that add complexity and character to the cheese. However, if you want to make cheese at home without the investment of farming you can go to your local store and purchase whole milk. Do not use any milk that has been ultra-pasteurized.
Top Three Easy Cheeses:
The best way to delve into the world of cheeses is to start out with a simpler cheese. The top 3 easy cheeses are Chevre, Mozzarella and Feta. These take minimum skill and are fairly quick in time frame, requiring between 1- 8 hours, generally spread out in a day. Especially for your first time set aside a whole day to experiment with recipe.
What you will need:
There are really only a few things you will need and it depends on the cheese. Most cheese but not all use whole milk, a culture, large pot, candy thermometer and a cheese mold. You don’t need to purchase a mold. Save a lidded plastic food container from either sour cream, cool whip or something similar and puncture holes into bottom and lower sides for drainage. Some will go on to needing rennet. Premade kits are the best way to make starting out simpler.
Cheese making can be very fun!
This article is a very basic one and doesn’t go deep into cheese making. It is just my way to convince you that you really need to give it a try. On occasion you come up with some error and it doesn’t work out. Once you figure out how to make this and learn from any failures you will see that it really can be quite a fun little hobby. So I dare you to try. Take on one of the above cheeses. In no time you will feel confident enough to move onto the more complex cheeses.
Have FUN!!!