To make this cheese you only need a gallon of milk and half a cup of vinegar. Start by heating the milk to 110-120 degrees. Once the milk is warm slowly add the vinegar, the best way to do this is to sprinkle the vinegar evenly over the surface of the milk and gently stir for a few seconds. Let the milk sit for 10-20 minutes or until the milk has formed a good curd. Once the curd has formed line a colander with cheesecloth or muslin (a pillowcase will work in a pinch) and pour the curd into the cloth to drain out the whey. Once the whey has drained out you will have your cheese! It will be a soft cheese that spreads easily and has a very mild flavor.

Now that the queso fresco is finished you can do almost anything you like with it! You could mild the cheese into bricks, you could mix in fresh or dried herbs to add flavor, and you can mix a little wine into the cheese to add flavor and color! For a quick and impressive dip you can slice an avocado and mix some of the slices into a batch of queso fresco with a bit of sea salt and lime. Whisk the mixture together until it is creamy and you get an avocado dip that is delicious and ready in minutes!

As with most things in the cheese world the options really depend on you. If you have never made cheese before queso fresco is a great start. And if you have made cheese but not this type, try it out sometime, it is simple and versatile!

Flocculation is where any solid material that is suspended in a liquid precipitates out of that liquid. In the case of making cheese this means that the milk solids (fat, proteins, calcium) form a curd and leaves the whey.

The Flocculation starts when you first start to see coagulation in milk, when small curds first form. To use this concept in cheese making is not terribly difficult, add the rennet to your milk and float a toothpick or light bowl on the milk’s surface. Every minute or two gently tap the toothpick, at first it will move across the milk easily. Once flocculation has started the toothpick will stay in place when tapped, that is the flocculation point. Be sure to time how long it takes for flocculation to start after you add the rennet.

Take the amount of time it took to flocculation to start and multiply by a factor (based on what cheese you are making) to get the total coagulation time for your cheese. What should you multiply the flocculation time by? As a general rule the longer the flocculation time the more moisture will be trapped in the curd as it forms, for harder cheese such as swiss or cheddar the factor is between 2 and 3. So if the time till flocculation starts is 10 minutes the total flocculation time will be 20-30 minutes. For a soft cheese such as brie the factor is around 6, and a semi-soft cheese like gouda would use a factor of 3 or 4. As with all things cheese it will become a matter of personal preference, as you experiment you will find the ideal factor for you and your milk’s properties. Now the question becomes “why does flocculation matter?” Why not just use the clean break method to determine when your curd has set? Some prefer to use a clean break to determine when your curd is fully set, it is simple and it works. The advantage of using flocculation to determine curd setting time is that is gives you more precision and flexibility. You can precisely modify your cheese to achieve different moisture contents and different textures all by experimenting with different flocculation factors. Another advantage of looking at the flocculation time is that it lets you adjust your recipe for different strengths of rennet and when your rennet loses potency you can still use the concept of flocculation to find the best curdling time.

I hope that this helps demystify flocculation for you and helps you attain cheese supremacy!

When waxing your cheese there are a few things to think about. For one thing you will need to melt the wax, I recommend using a small pot dedicated to melting wax. Just grab a cheap pot from a thrift store and you are all set. You also should keep the heat low when melting your wax, once the wax melts it will give off highly flammable vapors and high heat could cause the wax to burst into flame. Most wax melts at about 100-130 degrees, so you can use a double boiler to control the heat and minimize the chance to making a wax brulee.

Once the wax is melted you have several ways to put in on the cheese, you could simply dip the cheese into the wax, or you could brush the wax onto the cheese. Brushing the wax onto the cheese works a lot like painting, just brush on several thin coats of wax and make sure you cover the whole cheese thoroughly. A basting or painting brush works well, simply dip the brush into the wax and paint in onto the cheese.

You can get wax at most cheese making supply shops, but I like to use old crayons. Crayons can be found easily and really cheaply, the wax is basically the same composition, and it is fully food safe (kids eat crayons all the time). You can also reuse cheese wax. After you remove wax from a cheese just melt the used wax and pour in through a piece of cheese cloth of muslin to strain and extra bits out, and now you have more wax to use in the future!

One of my side hobbies is making wine, so I thought  I would share a little about my latest experiment with alcohol. On Leap day I made a tasty treat, orange vanilla mead! Here is the recipe:

1.25 gallons of water

2 oranges, sliced in wedges

1.5 tsp. vanilla extract

4.1 pounds of honey

1 tsp. yeast nutrient mix

Champaign yeast

First I boiled the water and added the honey. When the honey was completely dissolved I added the orange wedges and vanilla extract and allowed the flavors to mingle while the mixture cooled. Once the mixture had cooled to 85 degrees I pitched the yeast in and let the fermentation begin! I am greatly looking forward to enjoying this drink in about 6 months or a year! The sweet citrus flavor with a hint of vanilla will be delicious on a hot summer evening, the perfect way to relax and cool down after a hard day’s work.

Heat the milk to 85-90 degrees and then add the yogurt, be sure to not over heat the milk as this will inhibit or kill your starter culture. Keep the milk warm to allow the cultures in the yogurt to propagate. The cultures will slowly acidify the milk as they metabolize the nutrients in the milk and this acidity will start to coagulate the milk, by slowly I mean that it takes about nine hours to thicken. When the yogurt has thickened to the consistency you like the yogurt is done!

There are a few things to note about home-made yogurt. First: it will not easily attain the firmness of most commercially made yogurt, most manufacturers add pectin to their product and this will increase how firm it is. If you want thicker yogurt just let it sit an hour more and remember that as the yogurt cools in the refrigerator it will stiffen a bit. Or you could experiment and add pectin yourself. It’s your food, make it your way!

Second: make sure that you do not overheat the milk as the yogurt cultures are growing. High heat can kill the bacteria and can also add an odd texture to the yogurt.

Some people are probably wondering about Greek yogurt. Greek yogurt is just regular yogurt that has had some liquid drained away from it. Take a colander and line it with some muslin cloth, into this pour some yogurt and let it stand. At this point it is a matter of taste as to how long to drain the yogurt, but once you drain about 25 percent of the liquid away you have Greek yogurt!

I hope that this posting is helpful, and as always if you have questions please ask! I will answer to the fullest of my abilities.

Have a transcendentally beautiful day!

I just made some feta cheese and it turned out awesome! It was super easy to make and age, and it took almost no time to make something delicious!

I used cow’s milk for this recipe instead of the traditional goat milk because my local grocer did not have cheap goat milk. I started by heating 2 gallons of whole cow’s milk to 85 degrees Fahrenheit, to the milk I added lipase powder to give the milk more tang to the cheese. I then inoculated the milk with ¼ Tsp. mesophilic starter and let it sit for about 40 minutes to breed.

Then I added the rennet and waited till a clean break formed and cut the curd into half inch cubes. After cutting the curd I let it stand still for eight minutes and started to stir the curd, because feta is not super soft (and because most recipes call for it) I stirred the curd for about 15 minutes to expel a fair amount of whey. Once the curd was thoroughly stirred I poured the curds into a piece of muslin and hung it up to drain overnight and went out for a drink with friends. Total time to this point: approximately two hours. Waking up the next morning I took the cheese down and removed the muslin to behold a large mass of well-drained beautiful cheese. I sliced the cheese into wheels one inch think and with a four inch diameter. Because I had a good amount of cheese, about three pounds, I tried two salting methods: dry salting and brining. I did this just to experiment with the different methods and compare the results.

To dry salt the feta I sprinkled on one teaspoon of salt onto each wheel and let the cheese age in the fridge for four days. It was really good! It tasted different from feta but it was defiantly related; tangy, salty, and crumbly. Over all a grand cheese! I still have some of this cheese left and I will enjoy seeing how it continues to change.

For the brine I just made my standard cheese brine: water saturated with non-iodized salt with a bit of calcium chloride thrown in. I placed the feta wheels into the brine and left them to soak for about a week. At that point the cheese was awesome, better than most feta I have bought in stores! I still have some of this cheese brining to see how it changes in the coming weeks.

Overall feta was easy, cheap, quick to make, a great cheese for a beginner to learn and experiment with. And it was delicious!

If you can get the cheese you want really cheap (below the cost of milk) than you may be better off just buying that cheese. Super cheap cheese is rarely awesome, but it can be fine. It is more of a matter of personal taste at that point. But if the cheese you want costs more than three dollars a pound than making it may be economically viable.

The costs of making cheese can be quite low depending on what you make and how you make it. Let’s say you’re making some brie. You buy a gallon of regular milk for three dollars and can make two pounds of cheese; add to that the cultures, rennet, and calcium chloride, and the cost goes up to $2.05 per cheese, at most. Now you need to age the brie. If you age it in your refrigerator with the rest of your food there is no significant added cost (the fridge will have been on anyway). This is about half what a small brie would cost at the grocery store

If you have a separate fridge for ageing cheese the cost will be a bit higher, I have a mini-fridge that costs around $3.00 a month to run. If I age two bries for a month, the end cost will be around 5.00 per cheese. This is less expensive than cheap brie from the store and it tastes better! And the more cheese I age at one time in the mini-fridge the lower cost-per-cheese I have.

If you buy more expensive milk than your costs could be much higher, the cost ultimately will all depend a lot on what you want your cheese to be and how you want to make it. And that is what’s great about making your own cheese, you decide what to make it with, you decide how it will taste!

This funnels well into the personal values variable. If you enjoy making cheese than it is defiantly worth it, but then hobbies do not need to save you money. If you hate making cheese it may not be worthwhile even if you cut your food bill in half, misery is expensive. If you only care about the cost than it is much cheaper to make your own cheese, unless you are buying milk at very high prices and aging them in an unusually expensive way. And cheese making is also about the fun of creating something and crafting with life!

One interesting thing about cheese cultures is that almost every recipe for the home cheese maker uses way more culture than is necessary, this not a bad thing but rather a matter of practicality. For example: if one pack of Penicillium Roqueforti uses one DCU to inoculate 260 gallons of milk and that DCU weighs half a gram. Having weighed out that amount I know that 1/32 teaspoon weighs .05 grams which is good for 26 gallons of milk. If I want to make cheese from two gallons of milk I have a problem, I must either eyeball the amount I need from my 1/32 Tsp. or I can weigh the culture and calculate how much I need by weight. Neither option is great for the beginning home cheese maker, as measuring spoons don’t really come is sizes of hundredths of a teaspoon are not found readily, and not many people own a scale that is accurate for to the thousandth of a gram. So what shall the recipe maker or cheese maker do, make the recipe use a little extra culture. This also helps to keep the recipe easy for people using different brands of culture that might have a different level of bacteria.

I hope that this answers most of your questions about what a DCU is, if you have others please ask!

Rennet works by modifying the protein within milk. Milk protein is largely from the casein group of proteins. There are four types of casein found in milk, alpha-s1, alpha s2, beta-casein, and kappa-casein.  The alpha proteins will naturally precipitate around calcium and form large solid clumps. But milk has calcium, why isn’t it always curdled? The protein kappa-casein interferes with the precipitation of the other proteins as it interacts with them, this keeps the milk flowing.

What the rennet does is basically chop the kappa protein apart, allowing the other proteins to precipitate out of the milk and form a curd.

There are several varieties of rennet available and this can lead to a touch of confusion. Let’s look at the most common types of rennet and how they vary.

Calf rennet: Calf rennet comes from the stomach lining of a calf. When a calf is born it feeds on its mother’s milk. The first stomach of the calf excretes the enzyme chymosin to curdle the milk in order to keep it from flowing to quickly through the digestion track. Calf rennet works well to make any type of cheese, but there are a few downsides. One problem is that calf rennet is more expensive than other types, and second it makes cheese unsuitable for most vegetarians.

Vegetable rennet: One alternative to calf rennet is vegetable rennet. Various plants, such as nettle or fig, contain enzymes to curdle milk. I have not used actual vegetable rennet, most vegetable rennet that you buy are should more properly be called microbial rennet as they are obtained from various fungi. But when I have more data I will talk more about this type of rennet.

Microbial rennet: This rennet is derived from microorganisms such as Mucor Miehei (a fungus). These organisms produce the enzymes to curdle milk and form the cheese. Microbial rennet is widely available, fairly cheap, and vegetarian friendly. I have heard that this type of rennet can add a bitter taste to cheese, especially if it ages a long time, though I personally have not had this problem before.

Bacterially derived rennet, the last category of rennet: From a technological standpoint this rennet is really cool! This rennet is made by adding the chymosin producing gene to bacteria, when these bacteria reproduce the daughters will exude chymosin! This chymosin is identical to what you would get from a newborn calf but involves to animal death! One downside for some people is that it is a GMO food. Interesting side note, most of the commercially made cheese in America uses this type of rennet.

What rennet is best? That is really a personal choice, I hope that the information here can help you decide what will work for your situation and if you have additional questions please ask!

Have a transcendentally beautiful day!