I make cheese

OK, I made cheese. Once. And I’m making some right now. If I finish two batches, can I say, “I make cheese”?

Our local rancher, from whom we purchase all of our meat and eggs, also makes raw goat milk. So I drive to Greenville every two weeks to pick it up. (Texas law apparently prohibits them from bringing the raw milk to the farmer’s market, where I could very conveniently acquire it with the rest of my Saturday morning shopping. Grr.)

Ella loves this goat milk. I have to admit, it’s not like any other goat milk I’ve ever come across. It doesn’t have that musky goat-ness. They say they taste the milk every morning, and if it tastes “goat-ish”, they feed it to the pigs.

Ella also loves goat cheese. She has since she was a baby. So Jan ordered me a goat cheese making kit from Nichols Garden Nursery (they have veggie rennet, for the squeamish, like me). So I grabbed a gallon of raw milk, and gave it a go.

It was insanely easy. I just poured a gallon of milk into a pan (I didn’t pasteurize it, per the instructions, as that would defeat the entire purpose of using raw milk), added the chevre culture, and left the curds and whey to separate over ~24 hours. Then I drained the whey, put the curds in a bowl and mixed with salt, poured it into cheesecloth, and hung to drain for ~12 hours.

Voila! Raw, organic cheese. One gallon of milk (grass-fed, free range) made a little over 1.5 lbs of cheese. It’s supposed to last about two weeks in the fridge, and they say you can freeze it.

And it was good! But a little dry. I’m making a half-gallon batch right now, and I plan to drain it for only 6 hours. Ella likes to spread the cheese on toast and sandwiches, so creamy is better. Once I’m happy with the consistency, I’ll start experimenting with additions: herbs, flowers, kosher salt, yum. But of course I’ll have to keep making plain batches, for the kid. She’s not so adventurous with the cheese contaminants.