http://www.care2.com/greenliving/how-to-make-homemade-cheese.html
How to Make Homemade Cheese
By Heather Carr, Green Options
An omelet with homemade cheese and chives for breakfast, spinach salad with tomatoes and homemade cheese for lunch, in a pasta sauce, with fruit — homemade cheese is so versatile. It’s also incredibly easy to make with tools and ingredients you already have around the kitchen.
The process of making homemade cheese is fairly consistent no matter the precise recipe.
- Heat the milk. During this step, the milk just looks like milk in a pot.
- Add the acid. At this point the curds begin to form. They are visible in the pot. Don’t progress to the next step unless you see the curds. If the curds don’t form, reheat the milk and add more acid.
- Drain the whey. Pour the curds and whey through a cheesecloth.
Tools
You’ll need a pot to heat the milk in, a kitchen thermometer, cheesecloth, and a colander and bowl. You’ll need a thermometer that can distinguish between individual degrees in the 155-190 range. Candy or digital thermometers will do this; most meat thermometers will not.
As for cheesecloth, you’ll need a thin, fine-weave cloth. Most of the cloth sold as cheesecloth is a very loosely woven cloth — good for catching butterflies, but not so good for draining whey from the curds. I use men’s handkerchiefs, since they’re thin and have very little lint. Just hand wash them straight out of the package. They don’t need to be dry before draining the whey, but they shouldn’t be dripping.
Ingredients
Fresh cheese uses only two ingredients: milk and an acid. The milk can be pasteurized or raw, and skim, low-fat, or whole. I find whole milk makes a tastier cheese. I’ve never used ultra-pasteurized milk, but I’ve heard it doesn’t form curds very well. You might want to avoid ultra-pasteurized milk until you have made cheese a few times.
The acid can be just about anything food grade. Regular white vinegar works fine for a plain cheese, but red wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar, and any other vinegar you have in your kitchen will work as well in the same quantities and add some flavor. Citrus fruits are well-known for their acidity.
What to do with the whey?
Whey is the liquid portion of the milk and curds are the solids once they been precipitated out. You will have almost as much whey as the amount of milk you started with. In other words, if you use one quart of milk to make your cheese, you will have very nearly one quart of whey at the end.
Whey is very popular these days as a protein supplement, but the liquid whey you’ll have is not the concentrated form sold in stores. You can drink whey, use it to make other cheeses, or bake bread with it. Pets like it, too, and they always appreciate the treat.
Next: Two Recipes for Homemade Cheese
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10 comments
add your comment »First of all, that is not a cottage cheese recipe as Genevieve H and Frank are claiming. It is just a very simple fresh cheese recipe that I have made for years using goatmilk.
Nicki B---you'd better do your homework on PETA. They are wolves in sheepscovering. Check out the mission statement of their organization.They have killed more animals than they have saved and they do not actually operate any shelters, they just get themselves affiliated with other organizations and shelters, collect donations and fund backing for legislation that will ULTIMATELY make it illegal for anyone to own a pet.You really have no idea and obviously no first hand knowledge of farm operations.
Megan, fine article except that for your first listed recipe you did not include amts. or temps. Also,FYI, the whey can be used to make ricotta.
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What Nicki B. suggests is giving up entirely dairy products including home made cheese. Milk, cheese, yogurt, kefir were staples in the diets of various peoples for thousand of years. Why should we say no to that diet now? A agree that milk is for calves rather that for adult humans, but yogurt or kefir that contain healthy probiotics are good for you. Milk giving animals were domesticated thousand of years. I do not see how withdrawing of dairy products would prevent world hunger. Please do not get me wrong, I am not for cruelty of animals. What is wrong in keeping animals if we treat them right and they give us their milk and meat? There is no chance to hunt-gather again for over 6 billions of people. Our planet is too small for this.
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Before making your own cheese, please educate yourself about the health implications of including dairy in your diet. You should also learn about the devastating impact that our taste for dairy has on the environment and in perpetuating world hunger. Last but hopefully not least, please look into the treatment of dairy cows and their male offspring. Check out the new PETA undercover investigation of a PA dairy farm that supplies Land O' Lakes-or watch the HBO documentary about an undercover investigator on a small family farm if you think buying from small, local farms is the answer...
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thx Megan for this recipes. I'll try it this weekend
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Cheese made with buttermilk is called "farmer's cheese" rather than cottage and has far better flavor and taste than cottage/acid version. Homemade cheese is very popular in Middle Europa, where I am from. We call it "white cheese" as opposite from "yellow cheese" (like Cheddar for instance) that needs to be aged and to make curds the animal enzymes (calf rennet extracted from stomach of dead animal) are used instead of acid. Hence, production of aged cheese requires butcher involvement and much longer time than just white/cottage cheese.
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Can someone tell me about the nutritional content of this cheese, please (without the sugar!)
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I may try it this weekend. Making even the simplest cheese is new to me. Meanwhile perhaps some one could write up a next step for the next to beginners.
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Yeah, I was a little disappointed, too, that the only recipes are for two flavors of cottage cheese. . . . got any other recipes?
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All you teach here is how to make cottage cheese, so why do you put a photo of a long matured and cooked paste cheese ? These require the use of rennet, which I was surprised you would suggest on this politically correct site, and their making is quite complicated. Sorry to be a stick in the mud, or rather, a stick in the cottage cheese!
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I make my fresh cheese with buttermilk as acid.
I find that skim milk makes clay, not an edible cheese, while whole milk makes delicious but messy cheese. I'd recommend using 1% or 2% milk for beginners (1% being easier to manage, 2% being tastier).
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