Well, our first cheese is a success. That’s a bit of a turn-up. I was rather dubious as it slowly matured in the out house, but despite the fluctuating temperature, the slightly irregular oiling and the mould we’ve been scraping off, it seems it’s actually rather nice.

Very nice, in fact.

It absolutely reeks. We’ve put it in a plastic box and still had to wrap it in a plastic bag with a clip on the top to keep it from stinking out the fridge, but that’s just the rind. Once you slice it off and get inside it’s mild and very creamy.

And so it should be.

Our round is about 5in in diameter and a couple of inches deep, and it took five litres of milk to make. That means that an eighth, which is a pretty small portion, is 625ml of milk compressed into something about the size of a matchbox.

Cheese is quite shockingly bad for you when you think about it – particularly when you know what goes into it, but it is nice to be eating your own.

We’ll certainly be making some more.

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I‘m starting to understand why you can pay so much for a good cheese if you buy it in the shops. Our first homemade cheese – a variety called House Cheese – has now been maturing in the outhouse for four weeks, so we could technically take it out and cut into it. But we don’t want to. Yet.

It’s starting to smell like cheese now, which is encouraging. It’s a bit like a pair of dodgy feet, and it’s getting a decent skin on it, rather than green mold, which I guess will be a nice orangey rind by the time we come to eat it.

That time will probably be about six weeks from now.

Why? Because if we want a decent mature cheese we’re going to have to age it for a full ten weeks. Two and a half months!

We’re only making a single round in this first instance, but think of commercial cheese makers. They have to find enough room to age a lot of cheese for a long time – often a lot longer than ten weeks. And of course our little round of cheese, which is about five inches across and two inches deep, took five litres of milk to make. Multiply up that quantity to a commercial scale and you’ll need a fair few cows at your service.

This whole process has been an eye-opening experience, and one that has taught me to treat cheese as a luxury that should be enjoyed little and often, rather than en masse from a cheap block.

That’s probably a good thing as it’s not exactly healthy stuff, is it.

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Honestly, if we were making a blue cheese I think we would be quite proud of ourselves about now. The trouble is, we’re not, so all that mould on our cheese is getting a bit concerning.

I wiped off the first batch of mould with a cloth and put the cheese back in the outhouse to continue maturing. I was worried then that it might progress. Taking a look at it yesterday, as it approached the two week point, I was shocked to see how it had grown.

In parts there was a proper crust of brown mould, and in others there was a bluey-green fur. Not nice at all.

So this time I’ve scraped it all off with a knife and basted it with another good coating of olive oil. My cheese making book doesn’t tell you why you should do this, but I suspect that it’s something to do with keeping the air away, and hopefully minimising the mould growth.

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Our cheese has been ageing for a week now, so it has at least three more to go before we can cut into it, and nine if we want a nice mature product.

The trouble is, it’s starting to grow mould around the edge. This is quite normal and my cheese making book says you should just rub it off with kitchen roll, which I’ve done. It was quite easy, perhaps because we’d brushed the surfaces of the cheese with oil before putting it out in the outhouse.

My only worry, really, is how quickly the mould will reappear, and whether it will always be so easy to rub it off. Just a week to the first spots strikes me as rather fast.

Then again, could you let it grow to form a skin? I’m thinking not, but at this stage in my fledgling cheese making career I still have more questions than answers.

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After a week of turning, rewrapping and pressing our cheese every night we’ve finally taken it out of the press. It looks fantastic. A little white, perhaps – a bit like the outside of a brie – but nice and firm. It smells good, too.

I really want to get into it now, but we’re a long way from that yet. Now we have to wait, allowing it to mature for at least four weeks and, if we want a really mature cheese, as much as ten. All through that time we’ll have to keep it somewhere cool and slightly damp. On that score, the outhouse is perfect.

We’ll still have to turn it every day and make sure that the skin is well oiled to keep it good, and to make it easier to remove any mould that forms.

Oiling our cheese

This is perhaps the most exciting thing we’ve made. More exciting even than the yoghurt, which I have to admit got me rather chatty.

The piece above, which is about four inches across and a couple of inches deep, was the product of almost five litres of milk. Hang on, though – weren’t we making cheese with just one litre of milk originally? Well, yes, we were. We made two – that one and this one – which is just as well as that other cheese got somewhat crushed in the press. It was a valuable lesson: less is most certainly more, and you should only ever press it down until the whey just starts to run or else you could end up squeezing it through the sides of the press.

So, when can we eat it? Certainly no earlier than 14th March. That feels like ages.

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Remarkably – because I really wan’t all that sure it would work – the cheese starter has been a success. We now have far, far more than we need. A litre, to be precise, which is 1000ml. And how much did we need? 7.5ml.

Taking 7.5ml from our litre of starter

We knew it was ready because of the way it looked. Shaking the jug in which we’d made it set it wobbling like a blancmange, and it had a slightly acrid sharp smell.

So today was day two, when the cheese making proper began.

First ingredient, more milk. We’re using full fat milk because I suspect that the fat content (4%) will give us firmer curds, although at the moment that is pure speculation on my part.

We poured a litre of it into a pan, heated it gently to take off the chill (to 30 degrees Celsius / 86 degrees Fahrenheit) and then stirred in the 7.5ml of starter. It then needs to sit for three quarters of an hour while the cultures grow.

Adding cheese starter to our pan

When the time is up we added 5ml of vegetarian rennet, which is what helps separate the curds (solid parts) and whey (liquid parts) so that the whey can be disposed of and the solids retained to make the cheese. With the rennet added we left it for a further 45 minutes during which it did its magic. Coming back to it at the end of that time we found that our thick milk had turned more or less solid – enough to be sliced with a knife.

We cut it up into small squares then put it back on the hob to heat to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) while we stirred it, then took it off the heat and left it to settle for 10 minutes. It was at this point that the curds and whey properly separated, leaving a yellowy liquid floating on top of the solids.

The whey needs to be drained off, so we lined a sieve with the muslin bag we use to strain jelly and poured the contents of the pan through it. It was very effective, and much quicker than stacking and pressing, which is the accepted routine.

Straining the cheese mixture

With the curds fully drained and quite dry we put them back in the empty pan, mashed them up with a wooden spoon and added a gram of salt to stop the bacteria from multiplying any more. Why one gram? Because we were using a litre of milk.

Now all we need to do is harden it up. We’ve packed it into a cheese mould, wrapped in cheese cloth and set the whole thing in the fruit press with a fair amount of pressure.

Over the next four days we’ll have to remove it every evening and turn it over and reapply the pressure, at the end of which we should have something that looks more or less like a conventional cheese.

That’s when the waiting begins as it slowly matures.

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Time to get serious. After the success of our yoghurt cheese, which turned out to be quite like a low-salt Philadelphia, we’re trying our hand at proper hard cheese – the sort you can grate onto a cottage pie, slice for a sandwich or grill on toast.

Needless to say it’s all a bit more involved and requires some more kit, so we’ve invested in a proper press (£50), which will squeeze the whey from the curds and form the cheese’s shape (and can also be used to press fruit for wine in the summer), some vegetarian rennet so solidify the milk, a cheese cloth to wrap it all in, and some cheese culture.

The whole process takes several days, after which we’ll have to leave the cheese for four to 10 weeks to mature before we eat it.

The first stage is to make up the starter, which is the bacterial liquid that will form the basis of all of our cheeses for the foreseeable future, as by the time this first task is done we’ll have a litre of the stuff, which is far (far far) more than we need. Fortunately what we don’t use can be frozen.

Because we bought our milk from the shops rather than taking it straight from a cow there was no need to boil it to kill off the bugs as it had already been pasteurised. Instead we raised the temperature to 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) and whisked in the cheese culture, bought online from a cheese-making supplies firm.

When we were sure this was properly combined, we poured the culture and milk into a large, sterilised jug, put film over the top to keep out the dust and capped it with a plate to keep in the heat. As we don’t have a warm airing cupboard, we then stood it on a very cool radiator where it will stay until tomorrow evening, by which time the starter should be ready to use and we can start making proper cheese.

I’ll let you know how we get on.

Heating milk to make cheese

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We’ve got a bit of a cheesemaking deadline on our hands. We found some bottles of vegetarian rennet in the supermarket on Friday night with a best before date of the end of February. They were knocked down and going cheap, so we snapped one up.

Rennet is key – essential – to successful cheese making. It curdles the milk and, along with the starter culture, actually makes the cheese. Or, more accurately, makes the cheese hard. The trouble is, regular rennet is an acid taken from a calf’s stomach, so if you’re a vegetarian (like me) most cheeses aren’t actually something you ought to be eating.

Vegetarian rennet does the same thing, but without the dead animal.

So, we have about five weeks to make our first batch of cheese and put the VegeRen to use before it goes off. That means getting online and ordering some starter culture. We had a look in town today at all the most obvious places – Holland and Barrett, Julian Graves, Wilkinsons and so on – but none of them had it, so I’m going to try Ascott Dairy, which for £1.80 will sell you enough starter to cheese up a full litre of milk.

And how much rennet do you need in that? Two drops. We’re going to have a lot left.

My cheese book recommends starting with house cheese which is, it says, ‘a simple, hard cheese ideal for the beginner that lends itself to experimentation. This recipe is so-called because it can easily be adapted to fit in with the maker’s daily routine.’

I’m liking the sound of that.

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