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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