Making Cheese

  It is amazingly easy to make cheese. Some cheesemakers use enzymes from the stomachs of murdered baby newborn calves - but it is not at all necessary, and you don't even have to have such enzymes at all.



  You can make cheese with exactly two ingredients :

 • Milk

 • Vinegar

  ...but if you don't want to use vinegar, any medium-strong acid like lemon or lime juice also works. If you want to use vinegar but don't have any, and stopped by our "bread" section, the drops condensed on the lid of your sourdough are white distilled vinegar, just pour them off into a jar or bowl and put the lid back on, or brew vinegar directly from your starter.

  Warm the milk in a pot on low heat. This helps the curds stick together in larger clumps. Stir well and try to avoid scalding the bottom of the pot. When it's starting to steam and simmer, add vinegar until it starts to coagulate. Pour it through cloth and catch the chunks.

  This is cheese. It tastes terrible without a pinch of salt. It can be made into a ball or rounded wheel by twisting the cloth to wring the cheese ball.



Making Different Types of Cheese

 • You can add any mix of herbs and spices you like.

 • If you do not rinse the vinegar out, it is very much like feta. It's not, but one would be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

 • If one does rinse the vinegar out before adding salt, it is called "farmer's cheese."

 • If one curdles the farmer's cheese at slightly lower temperature, it resembles a cream cheese. It's not, but...

 • A "Parmesan" is any cheese whatsoever made in the Parmesan region. The cheese people outside the E.U. call "Parmesan" is made by drying the cheese out, flipping it over so the oil blot soaks back and forth.

 • A "Cheddar" is any cheese made in Cheddar, Scotland. The cheese everyone calls Cheddar is kept at 80-120f (27-50c) until the curds squeak when bitten, salted, and aged six months or more. Essentially, it's a cheese kept in the attic all summer and eaten in winter, in the region it's in.

 • Adding a bit of "bleu cheese" to a wheel of farmer's cheese will make more bleu cheese. Cheesemakers like to poke it with a needle to let the mold (pennicilium roqueforti) deeper into the cheese.

 • Mozarella is made by making noodles with fresh cheese. Boil it in the whey until the cheese melts, then stretch and fold like angel hair pasta.

 • Yogurt is a cheese curdled by the lactobacillus acidophilus bacteria, and adding yogurt with active cultures (most yogurt) to milk will create... more yogurt. You'll want to strain it through cloth to have a thicker yogurt.



...but you can make other cheeses by varying time, temperature, and pH, and may get accidental cheeses. Farmer's cheese is rather awesome anyways, and goes well on fresh-baked bread.

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