Making Sense of Things

Posts tagged with cheese

• 17 February 2012 - How to make mozzarella at home

  You might remember this post from the New England Cheese Making Supply Company… they liked our ‘How to make brie cheese at home’ post so much they posted it on their site and sent us a Mozzarella & Ricotta kit.  We were so excited to try another type of cheese at home so this post is how we made it. The great thing about making mozzarella is that it’s quite simple, fairly quick and you can eat it straight away!

  

  The following instructions are essentially from the New England Cheese Making Supply Company, with our own notes and experiences added. They have an excellent website for trouble shooting, www.cheesemaking.com, and even have a cheese tech, who can be contacted through their ‘contact us’ page to answer your questions. Check out this page for extra information though. Their kit definitely makes things easy too as it comes with … Read the rest

• 3 February 2012 - How to make kefir cheese

  Since we’ve been loving our kefir nearly daily at the moment, I thought we should take a small step further to make something other than smoothies from it. When I started looking online I was amazed by the variety of recipes using kefir as an ingredient – cheese, ice-cream, sourdough bread, cookies, pancakes, pizza bases, soups and more. So, one step at a time! I decided to take a very small step indeed to make a very simple type of kefir cheese.

  Now, this cheese isn’t a hard cheese… but its not quite like cottage cheese either. I really like Dom’s description that the flavour and texture is similar to quark, or the condensed yoghurt-type curd, labneh. It’s very smooth and creamy. We ate loads of this delicious cheese when we were in Jordan and Palestine recently so it seemed perfect to make a kefir version.

  How do you make … Read the rest

• 24 January 2011 - How to make cottage cheese at home

  In addition to butter, yoghurt and brie, we’ve loved making cottage cheese at home too. It’s so easy we almost don’t want to tell people.  We normally use 2L of Cleopatra’s raw cow’s milk, removing the cream and putting it aside to make our butter.  To remove the cream simply leave your milk standing upright in the fridge so the cream can naturally separate from the milk – you will see a definite line.  Once separated, just make a small hole at the bottom of the bottle, take the lid off the top of the bottle and let the milk drain from the hole in to a separate jar.  When it has drained to the cream line, pour the cream into another container.

  We simply pour the skimmed milk in to our large glass jar and allow it to curdle at room temperature for a maximum of 5 … Read the rest

• 21 December 2010 - How to make brie cheese at home

  Recently we’ve been making a fair bit of brie cheese.  We’ve been using the Cleopatra’s raw cow’s milk (including the cream on top!).   4L makes 3 good size brie cheese wheels. We simply heat the milk up to 32°C in a big sterilised pot, add in a mesophilic starter (the culture), the penicillum candidum (this is the white mould that grows on the outside) and the rennet, stirring in an 8 shape for around 2 minutes.  Then we leave it, off the heat, for around 45 minutes.

  When we have returned to the pot the milk has set so we cut it with a knife in to cubes which are then ladled in to our cheese moulds (basically food grade plastic tubes with holes in them).  We put the moulds on top of upside down plates, in a tray so that the whey can drip out of the holes and … Read the rest