If you like cheese as much as I do, you will notice how much it influences your grocery bill. If you have access to enough milk to justify making your own cheese, then it becomes easier to have all the cheese you want on that burger or pizza without increasing your grocery bill. The above photo is of 18 1/2 pounds of cheddar and 4 pounds of ricotta that was made in only 6 1/2 hours. If this was bought as organic cheese in the grocery store, it would cost roughly $320.00. Not bad for an afternoon’s work.
Making your own cheese at home isn’t as difficult as it might sound. People have been doing it on a small scale for thousands of years without complicated instruments or equipment. It’s easy enough that kids can do it too. All you need are a few basic things to get you started: milk, culture powder, rennet, a big pot or two, and some cheese cloth. We highly recommend this link for cheese molds and everything else that you will need: cheese supplies (we use the large Tomme molds). If you have your own cow, I highly recommend giving cheese-making a try. It’s a fun process and you’re not stuck paying high prices for a small package of cheese.
What makes one type of cheese different from another? Varieties are created primarily by three main factors: type of culture (bacteria) used, the amount of moisture remaining in the cheese, and its age. For instance, cheddar cheese uses one particular type of bacteria, while mozzarella uses a different one. Cheddar is often aged for a period of time, while mozzarella is mostly sold fresh and younger than a cheddar.
We can walk you through the entire cheese-making process on our YouTube channel cheese tutorial with more detailed instructions.
Our recipe for this article will be based on the 18 gallon batch that was used to produce the cheese in the above photo. This milk was collected over a period of 4 days from our cow “Rain”.
Before beginning, be sure to sanitize your pots and utensils with a food-safe sanitizer. We always rinse after sanitizing to keep residue out of the cheese. Also, have some cheap food handling gloves, so you don’t handle the curds with your bare hands.
Simple Cheese Recipe
1. Place the milk into pots that are a convenient size, but not too heavy to move on and off the stove. We use these 6 gallon pots
2. Gently warm the milk to 90 degrees F. This can be done several different ways. One way is to place the pot of milk into a kitchen sink full of hot water. If you use a gas or electric range, be sure to stir frequently to prevent scalding the milk. I personally put all of my pots on top of my wood cook-stove with a very small fire, that way all the pots are ready at the same time.
3. Once the milk is at 90 degrees, take it off the heat and add the appropriate amount of culture for the batch size. Cover the pots with a towel to keep them warm.
4. Allow the pots to rest for 1 hour.
5. Add the appropriate amount of diluted rennet (an enzyme), and gently stir for 30 seconds.
6. Allow it to rest for 40 minutes, until the milk has coagulated and becomes stiff like thick yogurt.
7. In the pot, use a long knife to cut the curd into 1/2 inch chunks.
8. Return the pots to the heat source and begin slowly warming them to 100 degrees over the course of approximately 30 minutes. Be sure to stir gently every 5 minutes during that time to prevent the curds from clumping together or sticking and burning on the bottom of the pot.
9. Once the milk is at 100 degrees, remove the pots from the heat and continue stirring each pot every 5 minutes for an additional 30 minutes.
10. Drain the whey off of the curds and consolidate all of the curds into one pot.
11. Cover the pot with the curds in it to keep it warm for 1 hour.
(steps 12 and 13 are just for the ricotta)
12. While the curds are resting, consolidate the whey into as few pots as possible. Leave several inches of head space over the whey.
13. Place the pots of whey on the heat source and gradually raise the temperature to approximately 195 degrees F, being very careful not to boil the whey. As the whey approaches 195 degrees, you will notice a white mat of ricotta floating on top of the whey. Using a fine wire strainer, slowly scoop the ricotta off of the whey and place it in a colander lined with 2 layers of cheese cloth. If the ricotta falls straight through the wire strainer, it is not quite ready yet. Allow the ricotta to drain and cool for 1 hour before refrigerating it.
14. Drain off excess whey from curds.
15. Break the cheese curds that have been resting in the pot into chunks.
16. Add a maximum of 3/4 Tablespoon of salt for every gallon of milk that you started with to the cut curds and mix well.
17. Line your cheese molds with cheese cloth and pack the curds into each mold and apply light pressure for 20 minutes.
There are several ways to press the cheese other than the above spring tension press. This bucket of water and a board as a lever also allows you to gradually add weight to the cheese press by just adding water.
18. Remove the cheese from the molds and re-wrap them. Then put them back into the molds and increase the pressure to approximately 40 pounds of pressure. Repeat this step once more after 2 hours.
19. After the last re-wrapping of the cheeses, leave them in the presses under 60 pounds of pressure overnight.
20. The next day take the cheese out of the molds and place the cheese wheels on cheese mats in the fridge for 1 day to let the surface dry.
21. Cut the cheese wheels into 1 pound wedges and vacuum seal them. If everything went well, these could last up to a year in your fridge.
If there is any confusion about the above instructions, our demonstration on our YouTube channel should help a lot.
What will you do with all this cheese? Check out The Ultimate Southern Living Cookbook
Enjoy your cheese!
Stay tuned for next week’s blog about Keeping Chickens.
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