Among those who enjoy dairy, there tend to be two camps when it comes to cheese: those who like it and those who love it.
If you’re a cheese lover like most of us at Country Culture, you may want to consider making your own cheese. It can be a fun way to try new flavors and make some unique holiday gifts too.
In general, cheese falls into two categories – either soft or hard. Soft cheese is generally much easier to make and represents a good starting line for those who have never made their own cheese before. The factor that controls a cheese’s hardness is its moisture content, which depends on the pressure with which it is packed into molds and its aging time.
Examples of soft cheeses include cream cheese, Brie and Neufchâtel. Making soft cheese involves the basic processes of cheesemaking without getting too involved in more complicated steps like pressing and aging.
Culture for Health, a website “founded upon the pursuit of sustainable living and a deeper understanding of traditionally prepared foods that are extremely nourishing,” offers some wonderful step-by-step cheesemaking tips for those just getting into the game.
We recommend their fromage blanc recipe for a simple soft cheese, because it requires only a few pieces of equipment and just two ingredients: Milk (1 gallon of cow milk) and culture/coagulant (1 packet fromage blanc starter culture). Seriously – that’s it.
We’d also be remiss if we didn’t recommend their farmer cheese recipe because, hi, we love farmers! This recipe is a little more involved but still a totally obtainable goal for new cheesemakers.
Cheese Grotto is another site with some helpful tips for more well-known cheeses to make at home – ricotta, mascarpone, burrata and the ever-popular mozzarella. Imagine being one step closer to making your own pizza from scratch by making your own mozz!
