We went to a party last weekend, and got talking with like-minded semi-self-sufficientists about chickens, yoghurt and cheese. What a revelation. It seems we’re only doing half a job with our own home-make yoghurt… we’re just two short steps away from cheese.
Cheese is one of the things I plan on learning how to make in 2010, so it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Plus, we needed some more yoghurt, so now seemed like the ideal time to give it a crack.
Our yoghurt is now onto its third generation. I made some more this morning by boiling up a couple of pints of milk and stirring in the last few spoons of our previous batch, then sitting the whole lot – in a couple of coffee flasks – beside a radiator as I spent the day working. By this evening the flasks were filled with lovely creamy yoghurt.
So I’ve put half of it into the preserving jar that we use to store our yoghurt and the rest into a muslin jam bag (very similar to cheesecloth, after all) and stood it over a bowl in the outhouse, using the jelly-making stand.
We’re lucky to have the outhouse at this time of year. With snow all about in the garden and on the roof of the outhouse, the thermometer is showing about one degree above freezing in there at the moment, which makes it as good as a walk-in fridge.
I’m going to leave it to drip overnight to drain off the whey (liquid) from the curds (solid). We should, in theory, be left with a yoghurt cheese.
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