New to this forum...Thinking about some cheese.

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bigken462

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Ok, i will admit not having much - if any previous interest in making cheese, but yesterday, I found out my landlords dad has a small dairy business that he sells fresh, non-pasteurized cows milk on a honor system each day. This person has a self-sustaining farm where he grows and mixes his own feed for his cattle and chickens. If I understood him right, everything he uses, he tries to keep organic as possible.

The guy is super nice and just yesterday gave me seven 5 gallon carboys to help with my brewing needs. I've known him for several years, but never realized he sold dairy.

Having this fresh resource at my fingertips, how hard and most importantly, how expensive would it be for me to dip my feet into cheese making?

I will be upfront, I've never been on the cheese forum at all and have absolutely no idea what it takes to make cheese. But surely having fresh cows milk a quarter mile up the road must be a good thing for making cheese?

Any advice would be appreciative.

Ken
 
Ricotta and Paneer are simple cheeses to make. I just made a batch of ricotta this morning and it took me about 60 -90 minutes from the time I poured the milk into a pot to heat it until the moment I removed the cheese from the cheese cloth and placed it in an airtight container in the fridge. Paneer, I made last week and that took me a few days (not sure why so long ) of drying time... but the amount of time spent directly "working" those cheeses is minutes... An even simpler cheese is made from kefir grains. No heat involved. In 12- 24 hours you have a yogurt like cheese; in 48 the curds and whey separate and you have a farmers cheese when you draw off the whey. In fact you can use kefir to ripen milk and to which you can add rennet and then press (under weights) to make hard cheese.
 
^^, plus feta is pretty easy (easy to make way more feta than you can ever eat :).

Mozz looks easy, but man I've had a lot of failures.

The biggest variable with cheesemaking is the milk. If you have access to raw milk, you're miles ahead of most of us that struggle with curd formation from pastuerized milk.
 
Used a recipe that dated back about 4 generations ago.
 
I churned a lot of butter as a lil pup with my grandmother. I think I might try it just to get the experience of making it as an adult.

I still want to do the cheese though. But with brewing kicking up a notch, now honey bees and the garden starting I just have not had much time for much play.
 
I churned a lot of butter as a lil pup with my grandmother. I think I might try it just to get the experience of making it as an adult.

Easiest way is just put cream in a food processor and let it rip, then squeeze the resulting ball of butter under clean water to remove any remaining whey. It's really easy with power tools :)
 
Cultured butter is a good next step, as a small step towards cheesemaking. Plus you get real buttermilk out of it.

http://www.cheesemaking.com/Butter.html

I accidentally infected a batch of my butter with blue cheese mold (p. Rocqueforti). I was making a lot of blue cheese at the same time, and apparently had some cross-contamination. It was a delicious mistake. Wish I could say it was intentional :) The cheese looked perfection normal (no blue), but had a clear blue cheese flavor. It was delicious on bread if you like that sort of thing. Wife was NOT impressed.
 
Easiest way is just put cream in a food processor and let it rip, then squeeze the resulting ball of butter under clean water to remove any remaining whey. It's really easy with power tools :)

Just make sure the milk is room temp
 
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