Lately, my thoughts have been all about CHEESE. We have a surplus of milk just begging me to make a pretty pepper jack and there’s nothing more satisfying to me than sitting down to a snack of crackers and cheese I’ve made myself, or setting a nice dinner in front of my family that is made with fresh, healthy homemade cheese.
Throughout this blog, you’ll find recipes for cheese and recipes to make with cheese, and I decided that today I’d sit down and make things easier for you to find, all in one place. Beginner recipes, book recommendations, and even my favorite products to use… I’ll do my best to update this page when I post something that I think would be handy for you to know on your own cheesy journey, so I’d suggest bookmarking this page and checking back often.
Basic supplies for acid cheese:
Several different types of cheese can be made using lemon juice or vinegar instead of cultures. These soft, quick cheeses are beginner-friendly as well as delicious. You’ll need milk, vinegar or lemon juice, a large pot with a lid, colander, cheesecloth or a new clean white handkerchief, a large slotted spoon and a thermometer. Most people already have those things in their kitchens or can easily get them at the grocery store. I’ve posted recipes for a few types already and hope to add more in the future. For now, read up on how to make these:
Basic supplies for cultured cheese:
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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.
If you’re not buying a kit, 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 posted the recipes for chevre and Belper knolle (see the links below). If you use the chevre culture with cow’s milk rather than goat’s milk, you’ll get a cheese that resembles a drier cream cheese without the tanginess you’d expect from goat’s milk.
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 or animal rennet (also available here) 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).
A cheese press is essential for making hard cheese. This is the one I own and I think it’s awesome. It’s easy to see how many pounds of pressure I have on the curds by checking the handy gauge, which takes guesswork out of the equation. This press is my absolute favorite, and my first recommendation, but Amazon sells out of them sometimes, so I’ve included a link directly to the source so you can buy from them. This is another Amazon-sold model I like. Rather than telling the amount of pressure with a gauge, you count the number of twists on the handle to keep track of the pounds of pressure. You could always go with a Dutch press rather than a spring-type press. Dutch presses work by using a counterweight on a long arm. They take up more counter space than a spring press, but are pretty foolproof to use and plans to build your own can be found online. Whichever press you decide on, be sure to choose one with a way for whey to drain out the bottom, rather than one that traps the whey against the cheese while it’s in the form.
[Coming soon – how to improvise a basic cheese press if you don’t have one]
Start with these easy recipes for cheeses made with cultures:
Cheesemaking books for beginners:
My first cheesemaking book was Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses by Ricki Carroll. It’s still the book I open first when I want to look up a tried-and-true recipe. If you’re curious how people made cheese back in the day before the advent of handy packets of powdered cultures, 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 handy before you start his recipes.
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. Now you have absolutely no excuse not to make cheese at home, so what’s keeping you? Let’s make some CHEESE!
