Who Cut the Cheese?!

We did! Well actually we made it, THEN we cut it!

I've been wanting to make cheese for the last couple months actually. I found a cool website www.cheesemaking.com that has just about everything you need for cheese making, but better yet they make it look easy! Note: I did have a HUGE problem with what they charge for shipping and ended up contacting them about it - at which point they lied and whatever, but they did give me back some of the money I deserved.

Unfortunately, cheese making is an all-day-freaking-process, so we had to postpone making it for quite sometime, but then the long Memorial Day weekend came along and Chad and I both had an entire day off together with nothing planned - the perfect cheese day!

Our first batch: Cows Milk Feta! We have an amazing very lightly pasteurized, non-homogenized, somewhat local, milk company Twin Brook Creamery, that even comes in glass bottles!! It is perfect for cheese making and cheaper than the local goat milk from Hansville Creamery, which I figured was safest for our first batch :)

Anyways, the method is a little... involved... here is a taste for you: bring the milk to 86 degrees over an hour. Stir gently and hold at 86 degrees for two hours. Raise temperature, two degrees per five minutes, to 94 degrees. etc... etc... etc.... So here it is simply:

 You heat the milk and add cultures and rennet.

 You cut the curd and warm it to draw out even more moisture.

Then you drain the curds and later brine the compacted curd pieces!

 

And then you end up with something that looks and tastes remarkably like cheese!! It ended up being smoother in texture and more mild in flavor than goat milk feta - no joke when I can honestly say I liked it better than the store bought stuff!

The first way we ate it was crumbled in a salad. Then melted in a pasta dish. It's amazing stuff. Next we're gonna make chevre goat cheese - I have the gallon of goat milk in my fridge just waiting!!