A diary of the projects, hurdles, rewards and family life at we recorded at Wise Acres, our former homestead in Horsefly, BC. (Careers and teenagers have forced us back into the city, at least for a little while.)

Monday, July 14, 2008

Making Cheese

After reading about making cheese in Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (which I cannot recommend highly enough...definitely a must read) we decided it was something we wanted to try. So after hunting around a bit in our local natural food stores for cheese making supplies and coming up empty...we decided to mail order a kit from Ricki Carroll a.k.a the Cheese Queen. I ordered the ricotta/mozzarella starter kit as well as the goat cheese starter kit. They arrived last week and I decided to get started today with a simple ricotta. It was so incredibly easy and turned out quite delicious! Basically, you take two litres of milk...we used organic homo milk...add 1/2 tsp of citric acid (food grade) and 1/2 tsp of cheese salt...put it in a pot on the stove...bring the temperature to 195 degrees...ladle the curds into a colander lined with cheese cloth..


then hang it for about 30 minutes in the cheese cloth and voila...fresh ricotta cheese!


I think to make it completely worthwhile, it really makes sense to have our own animals to produce the milk...but maybe someday!

So we mixed our lovely cheese with one of our hen's eggs and this...


and ended up with this delicious dinner...


which was completely inspired by my friend Heather's creation which you can see here. Thanks Heather!

4 comments:

  1. It looks delicious. I still haven't tried making my own cheese but you make it sound so nice and easy. Is cheese salt a special kind of salt?

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  2. The cheese salt came with my kit...but I think you can just use any salt that doesn't have iodine in it, apparently iodine inhibits starter growth and slows the aging process.

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  3. Yum! That looks so good Joanne :-) Can you also make a good slicing cheese? I am seeing cheese making in my future... :-)

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  4. Stay tuned...I am going to attempt goat mozzarella next (I just need two more litres of goat milk on my next trip to town).

    I think a slicing cheese, would be considered a hard cheese and it seems a little more complicated...I think you may need a press of some sort? I did order the hard cheese kit too, so I will let you know when I am brave enough to open it ;)

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