Goat cheese. Chevre. Say those words and mouths start to water.
Visit the grocery store to buy some, though, and feel your wallet slam shut in protest of the price tag.
Fortunately, though, chevre is ridiculously easy to make at home so you can have it whenever you want.
You’ll need a gallon of fresh goat milk in a good-sized stock pot with a lid. Heat the milk to 86°F and add one packet of chevre culture
Once the milk has rested 12 hours, you should be able to see a clear separation of curds and whey. I’ve tipped the pot so you can see the clear whey in the pot and the curd mass in the middle. Since this is a soft cheese, the curd mass will still be relatively soft compared to a hard cheese’s curd, but you should still be able to lift out a piece of the soft curd mass onto the tip of a knife. Place a colander in a large bowl or a second pot, line the colander with cheesecloth, butter muslin, or a cheap thin (new!) men’s handkerchief. Ladle the curds and whey into the lined colander. The bowl will catch the whey so that you can use it for other things. Feed it to your chickens! Use it for baking bread! Or make “wheymonade” by replacing the water in lemonade with the whey.
Now, tie the corners of the cloth and hang the bundle over a pot or bowl to finish draining. My fancy-shmancy draining apparatus is a heavy-duty rubber band and a carabiner hooked through my kitchen cabinets. One more rubber band attaches my bundle to the carabiner and I’m ready to let this drain for 12 hours, give or take (more on that in a minute).
Now is when the fun begins!
Take the firmed-up curd out of the cloth bundle and break it up in a bowl. Add 1 1⁄2 – 2 teaspoons of salt and mix it all up together. You can stop there, open a box of crackers, and go to town on that bowl of deliciousness but why stop there? Add some other spices to the cheese. Anything you like. A pinch of cayenne pepper, maybe. Or paprika. Or you can do as I did here, and shape the cheese into a rough log shape, place it on a piece of parchment paper and use a straightedge to tighten the parchment against the cheese to firm it into a nice smooth cheese log that can be rolled in herbs, spices or even ground nuts or dried fruit. I rolled mine in dill. That’s my favorite.
Once you’ve tried making your own chevre this way, don’t stop there! One brilliant thing about chevre is the versatility of it. You can drain it for a shorter time for a moister, sweeter cheese, or drain it longer for tangier crumbles. It can even be molded, pressed and aged. The important thing is for you to consume your fresh chevre within about a week, but I really don’t think that will be a problem, do you? Now pass me that box of crackers, I’m going to have a little snack!
(This post contains affiliate links from which I may earn a small commission. It does not affect your purchase price in any way but does help me buy goat treats.)