Cheese!

Xelene

Xelene

Xelene

Soldato
Joined
27 Sep 2005
Posts
4,673
Location
London innit
So I've decided to have a go at making this wonderful stuff myself. Going to start simple with some cottage style cheese.

Apparently if you warm up a batch of milk with an acid (vinegar, lemon) you get curds and whey. The curds can be pressed into a simple cheese and the whey is the constituent ingredient of american style pancakes.

Pics tomorrow.
 
What cheese you making?

Looked into it so many times, but really need some kit, like a cheese cave, which you can hack together from an old fridge. But it will have to wait until I have my own house and can spend a bit of money on something a bit more permanent and more importantly space.
 
Great links thanks :) I'm just going to try making "cottage" cheese to start. If I can make a hard cheese, then that's great - this forum has inspired me to try stuff out. I wouldn't have learnt to grow herbs and peppers on my window ledge without you.
 
All of the pictures turned out pretty badly, however the cheese was delicious :)

It was definitely a simple "farmhouse" style cheese, it mostly reminded me of Greek cheeses.

I spent a while hunting down the right milk, you need to pick up a full fat milk that isn't Homogenized. Almsot all milk these days is homogenized and this process of destroying the natural fats by shaking them means it's almost impossible to make a good cheese.

More complex cheeses are aged and split with various enzymes and bacterial cultures. I used the juice of one Lemon. I applied heat to the milk until it was sub boiling and put the acid of one Lemon in it. It started seperating fairly quickly into curds and whey.

Once this split had happened, I filtered it into a jar of liquid and some solids using a cheesecloth.

I then wrapped up the cheesecloth and the contents and placed some heavy books onto it.

It was really really tasty.
 
randomshenans said:
Top job!

I'd love to give this a try. No idea where I'd even begin to find the milk mind. Where did you find it in the end?
Click to expand...

As the_blue said you can use standard whole milk without it being too bad. If you check out my brie guide you can see that I added some calcium something or other to it to help improve the final quality of the cheese. Obviously using really awesome fresh milk is better though :)
 
FrenchTart said:
As the_blue said you can use standard whole milk without it being too bad. If you check out my brie guide you can see that I added some calcium something or other to it to help improve the final quality of the cheese. Obviously using really awesome fresh milk is better though :)
Click to expand...

calcium chloride. Helps it curd better.
 
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