How to make cheese at home
themanual.com
themanual.com
Gotta push back against that.
If you're a budding cheesemaker and you don't know what you're doing, don't start with unpasteurised (raw) milk. The professional cheesemakers who make cheese with raw milk know the microorganisms in their milk down to the species and they know it's safe to make cheese with that milk. Unless you have a biology lab next to your house who are willing to look at milk samples, then you simply don't have the same information and everytime you use raw milk you're playing the lottery, and a lottery that you win by losing. Heuristics like "but the animals look healthy" are meaningless, there are bacterial diseases that have very different effects on humans and animals, for example brucellosis (caused by the Brucella bacteria) causes recurring fevers to people but only causes miscarriage in animals. And how would you know that an animal is having a fever, or is not healthy, if you're not, yourself, a farmer?
Even if you don't get sick, raw milk cheese can go bad easily and I mean it can blow up and turn into a sponge-like structure in what is called "early blowing" caused by the gases released by bacteria and yeasts infecting unpasteurised milk. If you don't mind your cheddar turning into a cheesy rugby ball with the consistency of carrot cake, go right for it, but don't say nobody warned you.
However "raw milk can go bad easily and I mean it can blow up ... etc" is not helpful. Millions of people did and do drink raw milk. Cheese was invented by people because raw milk was so valuable as food that it was stored for long periods of time.
In the present day we are informed of risks in a sometimes random way. Automobiles are perhaps the most dangerous things in our lives. And they certainly do go bad and explode. Or crash into people. Yet we still drive and cross the street. We manage our risks.
Our food supply is now managed for us by giant corporations. They try very hard to make as much profit as possible - often by using materials and processes that are untested and may cause unexpected problems. BPA? Forever chemicals anyone? Thalidomide? Have you looked at what they have done to chicken? And perhaps most important is obesity. Sugar anyone? How many aisles in your grocery store are completely devoted to sugar? How many to salt? Did you know that purchasing these supposedly safe products may cause you to explode? :-)
So in your risk assessment you might consider your health risks from all sources. I am not arguing against being careful, just to intelligently whey your choices.
Why the scare quotes? Pasteurization is one of the most important contributions to public health in the last 500 years.
Right. And it was invented / discovered by Louis Pasteur, who also made some other important discoveries related to health and disease.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur
We learned about him in high school.
We manage that risk through rules and safety regulations, like ABS and airbags.
> Our food supply is now managed for us by giant corporations. They try very hard to make as much profit as possible - often by using materials and processes that are untested and may cause unexpected problems.
Pasteurization is just heating milk. It's one of the best tested processes in existence.
Rejecting safety measures is just rolling back centuries of progress. Those giant corporations would love it if they didn't have to take elaborate precautions to make food and cars safe, because those take effort and cost a lot of money to provide.
Of course we have to sometimes roll back safety measures as the world changes.
* Many places that used to chlorinate water no longer do, because the water has gotten cleaner. * The US chlorinate's chicken, and hopefully they'll stop at some point. * Many places no longer require you to heat eggs, because salmonella had been eradicated. * Nobody wears covid masks anymore because the risk of covid is so low.
Here's to hoping we'll be able to roll back many more safety regulations in the future.
Milk proteins change with the pasteurization process. Pasteurization heats milks to between 149 - 161 (my best understanding). Using raw milk, the milk (usually) gets up to 100 F at most in the cheese making process. I believe that the effect of the heat accounts for the change in the flavor, but what do I know? In addition using pasteurized milk requires more rennet, more culture and the addition of calcium chloride. I'm not sure if this is a factor or not.
Interestingly (to me, anyway) raw milk can be clabbered. This is the simplest way to get a sense of the complexity raw milk cheese has, by comparing clabbered milk with commercial sour cream or buttermilk (but don't try to clabber pasteurised milk, it's dangerous).
I personally find the easy and soft cheeses - like mozarella - to be much less rewarding than a Gouda or Cheddar. Feta is the one exception to this, but this is only my opinion. One reason for this preference is that the amount of work-time required to make any type of cheese is pretty much a constant (not how long you age it). The same is true for the amount of cheese you make. It takes basically the same amount of time to convert one gallon of milk into one pound of cheese and six gallons.
If you want to make cheese you will need to consider where and how to age your cheese (aka a cheese cave), how to press your cheese (aka a cheese press) and a source of good quality milk.
I started by making some easy cheese's (Guido's Italian-like) and liking the result enough to get an apartment fridge with an adapter/thermostat as a cheese cave. I got a cheese press from cheesemaking.com and I found a source of raw milk.
I cannot recommend cheesemaking.com enough. They have good quality at very fair prices, have a long list of recipes and will answer email questions with kindness and knowledge.
Youtube has some outstanding video's to help you along. Someone mentioned Gavin, but if you search for "cheddar" you can find a large number of people who all use variations for making cheddar.
I can now make cheeses - even from pasteurized milk - that are every bit as good as very expensive gourmet cheeses. My only problem is that I tend to eat them instead of letting them age long enough. I guess that is a stretch goal.
https://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2014/02/how-to-make-rico...
Making ricotta from fresh milk is just not an accurate way to make ricotta. And, if done properly, is probably even more delicious than any cheese you have been making.
I've occasionally seen suggestions to use whey from paneer to make ricotta, which is nonsense - it's already been acid-split to make the paneer, all you're really doing is taking some of your paneer curd and calling it ricotta.
Anyway, it has a really rich taste and texture.
It is an even more concentrated milk product than paneer.
Even making your own yogurt is not cost efficient. It is literally cheaper to buy yogurt than the standard ordinary milk and sour it yourself. Cheese is even worse.
All the weird regulations, price control, quota, duties and import restrictions seem to ultimately benefit mostly the very large industrial transformers, leaving actual farmers with scraps and consumers with ballooning costs.
* don't do the initial step where you almost boil the milk
* dissolve the powdered milk and starter yogurt using one of these [1]
* make the yogurt directly in the boxes ("tupperware") you'll be storing it in
* make large batches
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sch%C3%BCttelbecher...
You can’t buy 1 gallon/4 litres of yogurt for $5 as far as I can tell. Maybe there is an angle I’m not aware of.
Plus you can be free of all the preservatives.
This is the speech of a scaremonger: You might not be trying to scare folks, but you've certainly bought into it. Preservatives cut down on food waste and are an overall good for society. More folks would starve without these and more folks would wind up with foodborne illnesses.
I'll mention that salt and sugar are preservatives, we've just found better methods now. Are all of them good? Nope, but food preservation was never perfect. That doesn't make it worse now.
No fearmongering intended.
There’s lots of natural preservatives. But we know that’s not always the case with most commercial options.
Mozzarella is made with a sort of perpetual stew at the farm or milk factory, instead of adding a bacterial culture directly to milk like most cheeses.
In the Netherlands you can find dairy farms everywhere, and some of those have a shop with some range of milk or milk products, usually what they themselves prefer the most. They know how it works, so they can replicate it and it becomes no problem.
Don't make it sound difficult to bootstrap. You can just use some chickpeas or chilli crowns.
First there is a floor price on milk. Milk cannot legally be sold below that floor price to consumers.
Farmers are prohibited from selling fresh milk direct to consumers. It's illegal. Period. They can't gift it either. It has to go to a transformer to be mixed with, homogenized and pasteurized.
Dairies and cheese makers, with the proper license, buy fresh milk in bulk to be transformed.
Since yogurt, or cheese, is not milk, there is no floor price. Somehow this often cause the transformed product to cost less than the raw ingredients (milk) that goes into it if you were to purchase that milk as a consumer.
And of course, you can only buy pasteurized, homogenized milk, which is an entire other problems.
This is the case in Quebec, Canada. Other provinces have different but similar laws. The dairy industry is the only one that is protected in such a way, hence why OP commented how crazy the industry is here, as nothing else work that way.
Milk is about £0.64/l, so roughly equivalent if you add in the cost of heating it.
However, the price for live yoghurt is a different story - much more expensive, which is why I have recently started making my own.
Tip for UK readers: You can put an unopened 4pt plastic milk bottle in the freezer and it will keep as long as UHT. Defrosts in a few days in a fridge. (Was handy during COVID lockdowns)
UHT is usable, and doesn't need to be boiled, but for that added convenience it costs nearly twice as much.
The cheapest yoghurts have all a very bad taste and consistency in the mouth while those you will do at home taste on par with those you pay a premium for.
Speaking as the son of a small commercial cheesemaker, who started out (~23 years ago) making cheddar that only stayed good for about a week in the fridge. Now we make aged cheddar.
But its a fun hobby - if you can stand the long feedback cycles.
Personally I'm pretty much only making a sort-of curd-cheese now [1] with left over (sour) milk. Its fast to make, only ages for a couple weeks, and then I use it in a quiche. Which works really well and us more of a way to use excess milk than actually "make cheese".
[1] I use citric acid and heat to separate the curd, then put that in moulds to drain for 2 weeks are do - minimal pressing. Forms a firm, crumbly curd with a mild sour flavor.
I made a large wheel once, and matured it for a year, and it was edible, but nothing special. That's too long for me to get the feedback I need to improve.
Takes about a week, cheap and very easy. A decent kimchi here is £4.50 for a small pot, maybe 250-400g? I can make 2kg+ for less. Kimchi is the only one I've seen sold out of the list too. I highly recommend trying it, if you have a vac sealer it's even easier.
But, yeah, you don't really save money in general and decent commercial products you can easily get many places are as good or better.
There are exceptions. Some bread products (including biscuits etc.) are reasonable to make at home, especially if you don't have convenient access to a good baker. (There are a few in the city but not near me.)
I find cooking in general is rewarding and can save quite a bit of money.
Kombucha is the exception.
I make kombucha at home. The labor is extremely minimal (basically the same effort as making a gallon of sweet iced tea) and the economics absolutely make sense - the cost less than $1 a gallon for me to make it vs $3-5 for 16 oz at the grocery store. Plus I already have pounds of tea at home.
The other reasons I make it are to avoid having to haul heavy bottles into the house and because I prefer unflavored kombucha and only flavored ones are widely available commercially.
Yeah, if you use a lot and are just producing unflavored, kombucha is pretty easy/cheap.
But of course it has no flavor, or more accurately all the flavor comes from the milk, so your milk supply matters a lot.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cheesemaking/search/?q=mozzarella&r...
That must be an underestimate too, because the people most likely to post on reddit to tell everyone about their mozzarella are the ones who had a "success!!!" with it.
How to make cheese: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Cheese
How to make Feta cheese: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Feta-Cheese
How to make goat cheese: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Goat-Cheese
These are the ones with quality/expert badges; there are more where that came from.
At first I thought it's a comedy site as it had all these viral guides like "How To Eat Food" or "How To Accept That Your Computer Is Slow". Then it slowly started to appear more and more in search results with actual useful advice.
It's unusual that they have so much content while the content is also high effort considering the illustrations. And they have stood the test of time, they must be on it for 15+ years.
I wonder if there is a business model or a plan to have one or if they run on donations / VC funding / ???.
Rennet can also be sourced from pigs. This was often the case in Norway at some point. I am not sure when it started. I believe few places use it now, some smaller cheese makers might.
I think you can still consider it kosher regardless, unless you're trying to sell it
"Goat cheese with slice on round wooden cutting board shot on dark bluish tint kitchen table. The composition is at the right of an horizontal frame leaving useful copy space for text and/or logo. Low key DSRL studio photo taken with Canon EOS 5D Mk II and Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM"
I used lemon juice as an acid because I had it on hand rather than vinegar which I think is the preferred acid agent. Anyone done this successfully before?
Cream cheese is more like yogurt actually (I'm sure I've had some brands that where really just yoghurt with very low water percentage). Maybe the culture they use is different, but I've left homemade greek yogurt straining in the fridge and forgot about it for an extra day and it came out exactly like cream cheese.
But cream cheese is more like yogurt. You put the culture in the milk, add some sugar to feed it, heat it until barely warm and store until it thickens and can be separated from the whey by straining. The process is similar for both, just not sure if they use different cultures.
Interesting. That is basically how paneer is made. Then you strain off the whey after the milk "splits", and hang the paneer up to drain, wrapped in a porous cloth, for a few hours.
Then you can eat it straight away, either raw (delicious that way too), or deep-fried alone, or in some recipe for a dish having paneer as an ingredient. The raw paneer lasts for a few days in the fridge.
The whey can be drunk as is, or used instead of or in addition to water for cooking.
That is both for giving it shape and firmness, and removing more of the whey, after which it will fry or cook better without falling apart.
I just meant that up-thread cheese sounds like paneer because it is (on its way to being), ricotta is/should be slightly different.
It's like a comfort food because you feel good after eating it, for some reason, not sure why.
But it is a main dish, not a desert :) It is eaten with either chapatis or rotis or naans or rice, mostly.
Not sure how you thought it was that, since it is not sweet, rather it is savory.
It is a dish from Punjabi or North Indian cuisine, whic is one of my favorite cuisines. I like many other regional Indian cuisines too, as well as some from other countries. Unfortunately in Indian restaurants, you don't get many options of ethnic, regional Indian foods, although that is slowly changing, but then again, some of it is the chi-chi and overpriced kind.
They are all dry, and mostly hot, though some are cold.
Now desserts, on the other hand ...
Your strained Greek yogurt sounds similar to labneh, which is delicious!