Anyone make their own cheese?

335clone

335clone

Living the dream
Wife bought a basic cheese making kit, and today we tackled step 1; making curd.

Wasn't a complete disaster, but we had issues controlling temps. You have to maintain 86F and then step up to 102F, and that is not really in a controllable range on our electric range. Still, we ended up with a curdish blob.

Tomorrow we will turn that white blob into mozzarella. We need to find my old variac and a hot plate and see if I can get better control in the necessary temp range.
 
I've done farmers cheese, mozzarella, ricotta and cheese curds. I'd like to try some cultures and other varieties. The biggest challenge is reliably buying raw milk. Fortunately, I have two markets w/in a couple miles of my house that sell raw milk from some really great farms. Everything in the grocery store is ultra pasturized/homogenized and that really impacts the quality/flavor and limits what cheese you can make with it.
 
I've just done paneer. I've been interested in cheese making, but I'm not really good at details and that seems lethal.
 
Blessed are the cheese makers.

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We did mozzarella one time, and it turned out really tasty. The second time we tried it, we couldn't get the individual curds to congeal into one glob, so we just kinda had cottage cheese.
 
Well, it came out like a cross between ricotta and cottage cheese. Apparently non-lethal, pretty mild.
We used whole pasteurized milk and added calcium chloride per the directions. I'll have to look, but I suspect we can get raw milk as well as goat milk locally.

Really, I think we screwed it up by letting the milk/culture get way too hot, which affected the consistency of the curd.

Came out in a nice solid wheel after being in the press for a while, and crumbled some up on the pizza we were making. We had hoped to have had homemade mozzarella for the pizzas, but that will come in time.
 
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