Making cheese

[John Fenna]

I got inspired at the Winter Moot - I need to improve my foraging and scratch made meals!
So - I decided to make a bit of cheese, good old "cottage cheese".
I basically followed a hybrid recipe that combined one from a Romany Recipe book (thanks again Mr Crump!) and one off the interweb - and it worked great
Basically it calls for 1 liter of whole milk (I can milk cows by hand, so that is covered) 30ml of lemon juice or white vinegar (I might have trouble sourcing wild lemons in West Wales) 6 average sized leaves of Wild Garlic (lots coming up at the moment) or other herbs of choice, 1 big pinch of salt (I have built stills to make fresh water out of Sea water before and you get a fair bit of salt produced from those.
This gave me about 200gms of soft dry cheese and about 75cl of whey for bread making.
The method was simple
I heated the milk up to - but not quite reaching - boiling, then let it cool off a tad before stirring in the lemon juice.
This made the curds and whey separate and after they had cooled I strained them through my finest jellybag, letting them drip for a couple of hours, before tipping the cheese into a pot. I then mixed in the chopped Wild Garlic and salt and let it mature for a couple of days before starting it.
Although very bland to start with the maturing let the cheese develop a little flavour and it was great on plain Oatcakes along with a bit of Celery (try Alexanders for the true forage feast). The Romany would bury his cheeses in the ground for a couple of days or smoke them over the fire ...
ingredients

heating the milk

curds and whey

straining

mixing

consuming


All easy to do in the field ... except find the lemon juice... even the salt still...

 

[Toddy]

Nicely done and great post.

You can use nettles to curdle the milk John, though I'm told that hen's stomach's will do it too, so if you're killing a hen, keep the inards.
The traditional colour for cheddar, the red that is, is from lady's bedstraw roots which were also used to curdle the milk.

Trust me, the nettle one's easier
Basically gather what you can of nettles and pound them up a bit, just put enough water in the pot to stop them sticking and poach. Add some salt when they soften a bit, and let it all stew slowly for half an hour or so. Strain, and squish, and use as rennet.
It makes a kind of yellowish cheese, and you've to mind that you've already got salt in the 'rennet' too so watch what you add to the cheese.

Lady's bedstraw is a rambling sort of weedy stuff (it entangles itself around my quince) and digging up the roots is easy if you don't have heavy clay soil
Nice colour though

M

 

[John Fenna]

Good tip on the nettles - loads around here.
Now I am good to go for the truely wild cheeses!

 

[Toddy]

I am down with 'flu.....second virus this year, and am feeling very sorry for myself. I'll bounce back though, and if you want, I have strawberries to send to Spandit too, I could see about digging under the quince and see if I can get some viable roots of the Bedstraw for you.
I'm told that it's one of the plants on the red list and not to be disturbed in the wild. Well, I sowed the seeds and they grew, and the plants moved themselves from where I sowed them to tangle themselves in amongst a spiny mess of a quince It's all very pretty, but it's a nightmare to weed, so only in Spring do I even attempt it.

 

[John Fenna]

We are inundated with wild Strawbs here - they take over everything the Hairy Bittercress does not!
Thanks for the offer though
Get well soon and do not worry about bedstraw - I fancy using up the nettles

 

[santaman2000]

I’m not generally a fan of cottage cheese but I like the simplicity of this. Good job

 

[lou1661]

I have used the same technique to make Paneer cheese, you just need to compress it while in the bag. It cooks really well if a little more fragile than a shop bought version. If i remember correctly, it worked with Nido milk powder as well.

 

[Janne]

Teally bad cold here too.....

John, compared to the commercial versions, how is yours?

If you have youghurt, you can make another type of cheese.
You gently heat the youghurt ( absolutely no boiling! Or it goes very hard) until it curdles, then strain it through a cloth.

Apply pressure overnight, and you can even grate it.
Great soft like Cottage Ch. , grated on top of pasta ( think Feta)

 

[Woody girl]

Long time ago I made cheese like Janne's and it was tasty, especially as I had made the yoghurt too. So I had two products from one batch of milk. Very economical. Havnt made it for years as fussy son and his dad would only touch "proper stuff" Must get into it again soon.

 

[John Fenna]

John, compared to the commercial versions, how is yours?

No idea - I have not eaten commercial Cottage Cheese in years

 

[Robson Valley]

Cheese is the paleo method for storing extra milk protein & fat.
I buy "rennilase" enzyme in the grocery store ( or junket tablets).
Warm the milk to about 37C and away I go.

I just paid $57.90/kg, for a little chip of Emmenthal. (approx 34BPS)

I use more than 500g cottage cheese per week. Very fine dice chives adds a lot.
I wonder how your ramson leaf (very fine dice) in CC would taste.

 

[Woody girl]

Pleasantly garlicky!

 

[John Fenna]

She is right there!
Ramsons or Wild Garlic is milder than normal Garlic - especially the leaves - so is not too overpowering, just pleasant

 

[Robson Valley]

I did a 4-day cheese making class last year. Different every day, even churning butter!
We were hoping for a cheese business to start here but the capital cost of the equipment
to scale up the production put them off. They raise chickens, now.

I made cheese for some 10-15 years, ages ago. Always good.

I'm hoping to obtain some ramson seed that I can pot up like chives. I am in favor of all things onion and garlic.
I need at least twice as much onion/garlic in a recipe as you might imagine using.

If the pots do well, I might plant some out in a deer-proof garden plot and see how they do.

 

[John Fenna]

Well - I tried the nettles...but must have done something wrong...
picked 'em, put them in a bit of water, boiled them with a bit of salt, stewed them, strained them.
I got 0.5L of liquor which I used (all of it eventually) to my milk in place of the Lemon juice - nothing!
Re-heated the milk and used Lemon juice... instant success!
Help!

 

[Toddy]

I have no idea why it didn't work. I've done it half a dozen times and it worked every one of them. A quick squint on google shows I'm not the only one either.

Sorry John, I have absolutely no idea why it didn't work
It makes a yellowish crowdie with no bother for me.

M

 

[John Fenna]

Welsh nettles....
The curds are now draining so nowt is lost

 

[Janne]

I hope you made soup with the nettles?

Better than spinach, imo.

Is it the poison in the stinging part of the stinging nettle that curdles the milk?

When I come home I need to make some fresh cheese, using lime juice.

 

[Toddy]

I don't know. I just boil up the stuff, make sure I add the salt and bash it around a fair bit, strain it, add it to the warm milk and set it aside.
It makes crowd, not white crowdie though, but yellow crowdie. Tastes good

I've not well, and not much up to rooting out nettles just now, but I'll have a play later on when I'm on the mend, and see if we can work out why this didn't work for John. He obviously knows how to make cheese, and has rescued his batch anyway, but still. No idea.

I wouldn't use those nettles for soup Janne, they're exhausted and the flavour's gone into the liquor.

M

 

[John Fenna]

I think that I may not have added enough salt and that the nettles, being very young and tender, may have been weak. The curds I achieved were very fine (making a very creamy cheese rather than very dry and crumbly) that tastes good - the nettle flavour is there for sure
I pretty well cleared the nettles in our garden - leaving the lower plant and roots for a future crop (my wife only leaves me a smal area of "Weeds") - but when I find a convenient patch that I can go at (the one in my woods should be do-able soon) I will have another go