Today, we made cheese! Taking the idea from a post on Pinterest and a cheese making kit from Amazon, we decided to go ahead and make cheese!
Ingredients:
- one gallon of milk (we used Vitamin D milk from Kroger)
- this cheese making kit from Amazon
- pots and stirring things
- a colander
- water and ice
First, you have to mix up the citric acid and milk in a pot and heat it up:
After it hits the necessary temperature, you need to cover it and let it sit. Of course we only figure out entirely too late that we don’t have a cover for that particular pot. Time to improvise!
Once that’s done, you should have a layer of semi-solid curds floating on the top. Cut them up. The texture was really strange, neither cheeselike nor milklike. Not at all what we were expecting, but apparently it’s what it was supposed to be at this point.
Once they curds have been cut apart, you have to put it back on the heat and stir for a while again. The curds start breaking up and eventually vanish, never to be heard from again! (not really, they just sank)
Next, you have to drain off the whey. Technically, you can make it into ricotta cheese, but we didn’t this time. The kit comes with enough supplies to do this about 30 times though, so I’m sure it’s something we’ll try in the future.
All cheesed up and nowhere to go. It’s kind of amazing how much this already looks like cheese and there are still a fair few steps left to go.
They said to stretch it. I decided to let gravity help!
Plop.
This is the fallout in the pot. At least it doesn’t look too terrible to clean up.
The next step is to shape it. They’re not entirely specific onto what shape to use, so I made a cheese brain! It wasn’t entirely intentional, but when the shape semi-randomly showed up, we were good to go.
The next two steps are to put the cheese in cool water than ice water. For the second time, we found that we were missing something we probably should have had: ice. Luckily the mini-fridge needs to be defrosted anyways, so I broke off a few chunks. Completely sanitary? Maybe not. Did it work? Definitely!
Here we have the final product. The cheese-brain has become something of a cheese-butt, but it looks delicious either way.
The first taste test was on a pepperoni. Delicious.
The second test was to make pocket pizzas on the Foreman Grill, since we already had the pepperonis and sauce for another weekend project.
End result? Delicious. We’re totally going to have to do this again!
I’m not sure what the cost comparison is, but I think that it’s actually pretty close to just buying cheese from the store. And this way you can mix in any number of spices or seasonings to keep things interesting.