January 20 is National Cheese Lovers Day! While I’m not much on made-up holidays, hey, if it gives me an excuse to celebrate something I love, why not?
To help you celebrate this cheesy day, I’ve made a short list of cheesemaking books that I know you’ll like. And a few supplies I’d recommend you have on hand for making some of the recipes. Because I’m a good friend like that.
I’d suggest you start out with Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses. This is the book I started out with and it’s still the book I open first when I want to look up a tried-and-true recipe.
If you’re really into making cheese, and you want to learn some heirloom methods for making cheese, David Asher has you covered in The Art of Natural Cheesemaking: Using Traditional, Non-Industrial Methods and Raw Ingredients to Make the World’s Best Cheeses. He uses milk kefir to culture his cheeses in this book, so you’ll want to have some milk kefir grains
While I don’t own this particular book, Jean Mansfield is in a cheesemaking online group I’m also in, and she is very helpful and her book How to Make Cheese: Learn the Secrets to Successful Cheesemaking comes highly recommended, so I feel confident in suggesting it.
When I first started out in cheesemaking, I bought Ricki’s Basic Cheese Making Kit. It contains everything you need to get started except the milk: a basket mold, cheesecloth, thermometer, calcium chloride, rennet, mesophilic culture and thermophilic culture, as well as a small booklet with recipes for eight types of cheese.
You’ll need some live cultures for your cheesemaking adventure, and the one I use most is chevre culture. I use it for making chevre (of course) and Belper knolle. I’ve already posted the recipe for chevre and here’s the recipe for Belper knolle.
Mesophilic Direct Set Cheese Culture is used for a variety of popular cheeses that includes cheddar, Monterrey Jack, and colby, and can also be used to aid lactic fermentation in foods like kimchi.
Higher-temperature cheeses use Thermophilic Direct Set Cheese Culture. You’ll need this for many types of Italian cheeses like mozzarella, parmesan and provolone.
The last must-have item for your cheesemaking kit is rennet. I prefer liquid vegetable rennet over tablets, as it gives me more control. Fresh raw milk takes a bit less rennet than milk that’s been bought from the grocery store, and the liquid helps me get it just right (rather than using a whole tablet or half tablet of powdered rennet).
Most of the other items you’ll need for cheesemaking are probably already in your pantry or available at your local grocery store, such as a thermometer and cheesecloth (if you didn’t buy the kit listed above), a lidded stock pot, and a colander.
A brief word about milk – Of course I use fresh raw goat milk in my cheeses, but you don’t have to. And the milk doesn’t even have to be raw. You can use milk bought from the grocery store as long as it’s not “Ultra High Temperature” pasteurized milk. Regular pasteurized milk is fine.
Need some basic recipes to get you started right away? Check out my list of easy cheeses here.
Now you have absolutely no excuse not to make cheese at home, so what’s keeping you? Let’s make some CHEESE!
(This post contains affiliate links from which I might earn a small commission. It does not affect your purchase price in any way but does help me buy goat treats.)
