how to make cheese

cottage cheese and ricotta cheese

Kimmo, of "at wits end homestead" in Victor, Montana, shows us his technique for making cottage cheese.  And then he uses the whey from the cottage cheese to make ricotta cheese.

He uses milk straight from the cow, adds some rennet and lets it sit for five hours.  This makes for a really sweet cheese.

After the cheese chunks are sorta diced, he puts it all in a bigger pot to warm it a bit.  About 90 minutes later he strains it so he has cottage cheese and whey.    He boils the whey, adds apple cider vinegar and PRESTO! he has ricotta cheese.



The rest of the whey will be for feeding the pigs.

Nice video Paul, love to see cheese making in action.

agreed nice video, i make some simple mozzarella and then use the left over whey to make ricotta.

the only thing i don't like is its very hard to find rennet locally, my searches have come up useless other than online.

great for lasagna ( or even nettle lasagna )

Great stuff! How much milk did he start with & how much rennet did he add? I got the 1/4 cup cider vinegar portion...
@ Soil- if you already have nettles to make Lazagna then you are all set for rennet- Nettles boil down to make a very nice vegetable rennet! I read it on line just a few days ago. Im still a techno dork or I would post the link, sorry. Are you able to list ingredients & measurements for you Mozzerella cheese? Please & Thank you.

yes i am aware of the nettle rennet, it does work. its just way too cold here for nettles right now.

MsMinuette this is basically how i made the mozzarella. not this exact recipe but it looks basically the same.

http://sugarmountainhome.com/milkncheese/mozzarella.html

Thank You! Do you make your Mozz with cow or goat milk?

i use what i can get. cow or goat. both work good enough for me.

Has anyone experimented with dairy free cheese? For example, I put kefir grains in coconut milk and got it fairly thick. It was a little punchy from the kefir, but was the consistency of a yogurt. I tried putting in a salt brine and then drying it, but eventually it molded on top.

I'm looking for an approximate quantity of the liquid rennet one should use.

I found a Malaka brand rennet at a food co-op and my wife found a coupon for a free gallon of "organic" milk.

Last night I added ten drops of rennet to the gallon of milk and this morning it appears the milk has not thickened noticeably.

The temp of your milk is a factor.  Try warming the milk slightly, add the drops following the directs on the bottle of rennet, and then place your milk in a warm location - like the oven with the oven light left on.  I turn my oven on for a few seconds just to take the edge of the cold metal in the winter time.

The amount of rennet depends on the type of cheese your making and your milk.  Google your desired cheese and the type of rennet you are using for the recipes.

Thanks for the tip.

Room temp was mid sixty last night.  Got it in the oven with the light on now.  I should've thought of that because that's how I raise dough in the winter.

I didn't know if I could trust the recipe that came with the rennet entirely because it included using three different milks.  I like how it was kept simple on the video.

The making a cheese press thread is getting questions on making cheese so I thought I would bring this thread to the surface. This was my suggestion saving everything but the water.I don't have much to suggest. Though I really like the the bucket idea. But I do have some cautionary tales to tell based on our experience in the 1950's when we were milking 20 does. There was 2 days each week when we would get ahead of the sales. We would warm up the evening milk and add the fresh morning milking directly to the separator. We would then make ice cream or butter from the cream and freeze it. We decided to make cheese with the warm skim milk. My carpenter father built a nice cheese closet in the milk house that was separate from the barn and milking parlor. [We were completely set up as the Washington state law now regulates raw milk but that was before the current regulations]
We did not want to use paraffin to seal the cheese so we used some of the butter. That was nice short term but long term the cheese continued to dry It got so hard we could not even grate it for parmizon. What we wound up doing was clean the band saw and cut it in thin slices. Then the crumbled thin slices along with the sawdust made good parmizon.
Later we visited with an elderly european goat dairy in the cascades And I learned to make a cheese that includes everything but the water. It is not sold because as I heard in one podcast the demand would be so great that the one making it would not be able to keep any for themselves. Here is the method if you want to try it. Do not use a cultured curd because ant acid in the whey will get too concentrated.

Make your curd as for cottage cheese. We used glass gallon jars to set the curd in and we had stainless fry pan the would hold a gallon of liquid. We put the whey in the pan on the stove to simmer to evaporate the water. the ball of cheese would hang over the pan to continue to drain. as we would come and go we would remove any cured that reformed in the heated whey. When the level got low in the pan then it required constant attention. Turn the heat as low as possible to prevent scorching and stir constantly with a spatula. At this point it is mostly clarified butter and the remaining salts, sugars and protein. If it is too hot steam bubbles will make it splatter. Now comes the secret; mix the concentrate back into the curd. The sugar will have caramelized slightly so it will make it mottled like colby jack. Because you have preserved the salts it usually dose not need any additional salt.
I found molding it in a cake pan worked best. If you can resist eating it all it is even better when coated with brie rind. I did that by inoculating the top in the cake pan then when the surface was covered I turned it out onto a woven cedar mat made by splitting the kindling at each ring Then I kept it in the refrigerator in a cake cover until it was cured..

This could be a rabbit hole, but are there any homey methods of producing/obtaining microbial rennet? I... disagree with animal rennet, but would luuuuv to make some goat cheese or something, as milk is.... not my favorite.

Goat cheese using nightshade berries


This is a traditional technique that I've been interested in trying.

Ian Rule wrote:This could be a rabbit hole, but are there any homey methods of producing/obtaining microbial rennet? I... disagree with animal rennet, but would luuuuv to make some goat cheese or something, as milk is.... not my favorite.

The cost of vegetable rennet I so low that I would probably not try to make my own without any experience. Here is a good sourceand it includes a free ebook on how to use it. Only the tablet form was available when I was growing up they also have that available but not in the nice wooden tube that I used to make toys out of.

I merged your stuff with the following thread. I hope that is okay by you.

I watched the youtube video on making cottage cheese and ricotta. Can you tell me how much rennet to use? Is there an actual recipe I can print>

Marie Lewis wrote:I watched the youtube video on making cottage cheese and ricotta. Can you tell me how much rennet to use? Is there an actual recipe I can print>

How much rennet depends on the kind of rennet you use.  The rennet usually comes with a recommended amount, like 1/2 tablet or so many ml per gallon of milk.  

When I first started making cheese, I was very fussy to get the right amount, but with experience, I found it wasn't crucial.  My favourite recipes come from The art of natural cheese making which your local library should have (if they don't have it, they should and you can tell them I said so).  But if you like cheese, and if you like making things the easy way, then you'll probably want to buy your own copy of this book.  

I have been struggling to find milk locally that I can use to make cheese - most of the brands I can get locall y are either UHT or so close to it as to make it unusable for cheesemaking:

Creamland Dairies/ Dean Foods:
Our QA Manager tells me that the required temperature is 161F, but our's is a bit higher. We do not have anything processed lower than 178F.


Kroger/ Simple Truth Organic:
I was able to research this and the milk is actually Ultra Pasteurized(UP), or Ultra High Temperature (UHT) pasteurization which means that it is heated to 280 F for 2 seconds and then rapidly cooled.  

Horizon Organic:
-UP/ESL - Ultra-Pasteurization = ~280° for 2.0 seconds.  NOTE that this is both the chilled cartons and the aseptic shelf stable cartons!

The only one I could find is Shamrock  - an AZ dairy that we can get in NM:
Thank you for reaching out to Shamrock Farms, regarding pasteurization. Our organic milk is standard pasteurized milk at temperatures right around 165 degrees.

Sandy