i made cheese!

[Mama_Meme]

yup! i sure did!

my first attempt at making cheese was a soft chevre. it was beautiful and I made it into a cheesecake, with honey and home canned peaches. mmmmmm.
anyone else make cheese? have any favourites? I was thinking of trying some harder cheeses but am a little intimidated.
It makes me yearn for a cow, so that the cheese could be raw (raw milk is illegal everywhere in Canada and they are pretty strict about it. good dairy lobbyists...)

[Mama~Love]

That's awesome! I usually just make a basic mozzarella. Turns out really good though! We do have our own cow, she's a sweetheart .

[Proudmom2Teeg]

YUMMY! I want to come to your house! I am addicted to cheese. I would love to have some raw milk cheese as well. I think I might try and make cheese when I have some time... Was it hard?

[ursusarctos]

Congratulations! I'm jealous!
I sometimes make paneer (soft fresh cheese) from pasteurized milk because it requires a lot of milk and raw is so expensive. But never tried anything else.

[dogmom327]

Formage Blanc is a lot like Chevre in the method used to make it (so it's super easy) and I was just having some with basil and hazelnuts. This particular batch was made by someone else so I need to figure out the proportions since the flavor was excellent.

I made some Chevre over the holiday. I just flavored it with lemon zest, black pepper and Celtic sea salt. It was simple and delicious. Perfect spread on raw crackers or inside rolled smoked wild salmon.

[AJP]

Cheese is magic. My husband is the cheese maker here, mostly. We have a cow, so have had enough milk to experiment some.

He makes cottage cheese a lot with the skimmed milk left over after we take the cream for butter, that's very consistent and very useful. Fromage blanc is really nice and versatile, too. Mozzarella is good, but I like the truly raw cheeses better (mozzarella has to be heated at least during the stretching phase, and I find it doesn't digest as easily for me).

Hard, aged cheeses are more of a challenge because the conditions during aging have such a huge impact on the final product (temp, humidity, organisms present, etc.). He recently made 3 wheels of aged cheese in succession, did exactly the same thing each time, ended up with 3 very different cheeses - the first one was dry, grainy and hard, tasted very similar to parmesean, the second one ended up softer, creamier, tasted very much like monterey jack, the third was in between the two in texture and was very cheddar-like. All 3 were milk from the same cow, inoculated with the same culture, pressed the same, aged in the same spot, during the same season. All were great, just different. We have not yet achieved any consistency with aged cheeses, but the experiments are usually edible (with a few notable exceptions).

[Mama_Meme]

yup, aged cheeses sound a little challenging.

Fresh cheese is definitely easy! The chevre took 2 days (mostly waiting) to make and in all I think I did about 1.5 hrs of work. i got 3 lbs of cheese for that!!

I'm thinking I might make cheese logs, either fromage blanc, or chevre for christmas presents. yummy!

[dogmom327]

Tips for making Chevre, Formage Blanc, etc.

Heat the milk and start the culturing process before you go to bed so it can culture (12 hours) overnight. In the morning, place the cheesecloth in a colander and the colander in a bowl. Spoon the cheese in, tie the cheesecloth in knots and hang it on a kitchen cabinet door with the bowl underneath. Once it's done draining (2-12 hours depending on consistency desired), remove the cheese, flavor it and place it in the fridge. Super easy