Every since reading Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
, last summer, I have been longing to make my own cheese. I finally got around to ordering the cheesemaking kit from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company this spring. The instruction suggest keeping a cheesemaking journal and I thought it might be helpful to do that online so others might benefit from my experiences.
Here’s the report of my first attempt. I am happy to say it worked out great. I had decided the for the first time, I would follow the exact directions provided in the kit. I used whole milk since that’s what Ricki, the Cheese Queen, recommended. You cannot use ultra-pasteurized milk as it doesn’t have the necessary live cultures. I discovered that my usual grocery story did not carry any milk that wasn’t ultra-pasteurized, even its organic brand. I ended up at the specialty store in town where I found lots of milk that was homogenized and pasteurized. I bought a gallon of whole milk in a returnable glass bottle from a local dairy. I also bought distilled water since my public water supply is treated with chlorine. My husband suggested that I could use our tap water if I let it sit overnight. I may try that later, but I have a gallon of distilled water and the recipe only uses a little of it so I’m good to go for awhile.
I won’t go through each step as you can find them online and my experience was very similar. The one major difference I had was that, after waiting the suggested 3 to 5 minutes, my curds did not form a solid mass that could be cut into pieces. I waited for another few minutes but still had curds floating in the whey. According to the website, I may need to heat my milk to 100 degrees rather than the suggested 90 degrees. And, I may just need to be more patient.
I was able to scoop out my curds so I moved ahead with the instructions and was rewarded with a lovely ball of fresh mozarella cheese. It was delicious! The only place I deviated from the recipe was that I used about half of the cheese salt. The salt is actually optional but I wanted to add a bit of that flavor.
I am planning to make more on Sunday morning. This time, in an effort to reduce the fat content, I am going to use half whole milk and half 2 percent milk to see how that works. Ricki suggests that I can use low fat milk but the flavor will be reduced so I am also going to work in some of my fresh rosemary and basil from the garden along with the cheese salt.
I was so happy with my experience that I gave a kit as a birthday gift for a friend. It really did just take 30 minutes and I had a product that costs nearly $9/pound in my store! We ate some of it and used the rest for pizza along with our homemade tomato sauce from the freezer. I’m planning to use tomorrow’ batch for a pasta recipe.
