First attempt at Cheese making

I have been thinking about it for a while now. I really want to make my own cheese. I like the idea that I can make cheese from the organic cows that live about 10 miles from my house. The gal at The Country Market, sells 1/2 gallons of Raw Milk for $5. They are not certified organic but she follows a strict organic practice. They grow all the grain/feed for there chickens, cattle, cows, and pigs. I digress.

I purchased 2 kits, and an instructional DVD to try my hand at cheese making. One is the mozzarella/ricotta and the other is the hard cheese from CheeseMaking.com. I am following along with Ricki Carroll's book Home Cheese Making, which I've had for a while but not gotten around to purchasing the necessities.

The kits and DVD arrived, I watched and decided to give it a go! We made 2 cheeses, Mozzarella and Whey Ricotta. All from one gallon of milk. I won't go into the how too, because for that you really need the book plus I am still not sure what I am doing.

Anyhow, some videos of 2 of the steps.

Mom is stirring the cut curds while we bring them up to temp. Then we will scoop them out and start the stretching process.



Now in order for the Mozzarella to get that smooth shinny, elastic look it must be stretched. But it has to be at 135 degrees or hotter in order to do that, hence the gloves. We used the "water bath" method to keep the cheese hot, you can also use the microwave. I didn't place the cheese in a bowl and use a spoon to add the salt, I will do that next time because our salt wasn't evenly distributed through out the cheese.





We are in the discussion process of the cheese press. It is quite a bit of money up front in order to have accurate documented results. We would like to make sure we can duplicate our cheese results (for gift giving purposes) and the wood block with several pans stacked on top of the cheese just doesn't seem very accurate. I am thinking we will just spend the money on it, and think of it as an organic cheese investment. Since most of the cheese we currently eat isn't organic. We did a cost evaluation of home cheese making, our home made organic cheese would cost slightly more than a Tillamook baby loaf. But the effort of course would be much more. The cost would be about $13 for a 2 lb. loaf where Tillamook is around $9 for a 2 lb. loaf. To purchase organic cheese is about $21 for a 2 lb. loaf. So we will be saving money in the long run but there will be a bit more cost up front. Of course these are "guestimates," we aren't sure how much of a yield we will get. The directions say 2 gallons = 2 lbs of cheese but that could be more/less.

A work in progress. It was a ton of fun to make the mozzarella and a very cool feeling to make something from a gallon of milk!