Cheese Making

We made cheese on Wednesday, thanks to this wonderful kit from http://www.cheesemaking.com/ that we bought in February!

The kit is great and comes with all the ingredients except milk. So, after a trip to Braum's for some delicious, cold, vitamin D milk, I got everything ready.

Milk

Water

Citric Acid (included in kit)

Rennet Tablet (included in kit)

Cheese Salt (included in kit)

Pot

Dairy Thermometer (included in kit)

Colander

Slotted Spoon

Long Knife

Microwaveable bowl

Cameron dissolved the rennet tablet in cool water

Then we mixed citric acid in water and poured that into our pot. The book said a 1 gallon pot, and in this picture, we used our 4 qt pot.

Adding the milk

Heat milk to 90 degrees while stirring. We switched to a much larger pot after adding the milk. It just wasn't working in that one!

Remove from heat and add rennet solution. Cover pot and let sit 5-10 minutes. Once the curd has separated from the whey, we cut the curd. Or as the guys say, time to cut the cheese!

Then heat the curd to 105 degrees while gently stirring it. Ladle the curds into a bowl and microwave for 1 minute. Curds need to be drained and heated to 135 degrees.

Once the cheese is nice and hot, your supposed to add the salt and stretch the cheese. It suggests rubber gloves for this part. Something we will FOR SURE have for next time!

For stretching, it was kinda like a big glob of hot silly putty.

I forgot the salt and added it towards the end of the stretching. Sooo, some bites are salty, others aren't

You're supposed to stretch until its smooth and shiny. The more you stretch it, the firmer the cheese will be.

Here is the final product...

After its stretched, you submerge it in water. This helps it cool down and keep its shape. The cheese pictured above, we ate immediately, warm. It was YUMMY!

Overall, it was pretty easy. It took a bit longer than the 30 minutes it claims to take. Most of that was probably due to our inexperience.

I'm going to try ricotta soon and make some homemade lasagna. This kit makes 30 batches of mozzarella & ricotta. We're also going to add some of our abundant fresh basil to the mozzarella next time!