Archive | Make it yourself Monday RSS feed for this section

Make it yourself Monday: Farmer’s cheese tutorial

By Tricia on May 17, 2011 in Make it yourself Monday, Recipes, Tutorial

If you have been following along you may have read last Monday’s Make it Yourself tutorial about making butter. This follows it since I used the milk that was left over after taking the cream off the top of my gallon of raw milk. We are making Farmers cheese. Farmers cheese is great to slice and put in a sandwich, crumble into a salad, fry it (very good) or just eat it straight up.

Once the cheese is made we will still have one more thing left from that gallon which can be used…whey. I save the whey for pancakes, waffles and baking and I have made some pretty yummy pasta using the whey are water before. Who knew you could get so much from one gallon of raw milk.

What you will need:
1 gallon of milk, you don’t have to use raw, you could use store bought or even powdered will work.
White of apple cider vinegar
Cheesecloth (I use some sheer curtain fabric because I hate to throw away and continue buying cheese cloth plus the weave is much smaller and the cheese looks nicer to me. Shhhhh, thats my little secret that I share with you. Go get one of those old curtains out of your linen closet and give it a new home. The liquid goes right through but the solid stays perfectly, much better than cheese cloth.
A food thermometer or you could just

heat your milk to between 180 to 185 F. If you do not have a thermometer, just watch it to the moment right before the milk boils. Add 1/4 cup of vinegar to your pot

give it a gentle stir

You will start to notice the solids separating from the liquid. This is the curd and they whey (just like in Little Miss Muffet).

Put a strainer inside a bigger bowl to catch the whey and place your cloth in it.

pour everything in your pot into the lined strainer (with the bowl under it)

twist the cloth to squeeze out the liquid. Before all the liquid is out I open the cloth and salt the cheese. If you wait until all the liquid is out it is harder to get the salt in because the cheese becomes somewhat solid. You can tie off the cloth with a string and hang it to drip but with this cloth it will all come out with a few twists of the cloth. Put your drained cheese into whatever mold you like and refrigerate over night. Enjoy.

Comments { 8 }

Make it yourself Monday: Butter tutorial

By Tricia on May 10, 2011 in Do it yourself, Make it yourself Monday, Tutorial

So I am starting a new thing on Mondays. The little things we really can make for ourselves which no one knows how to make anymore…Make it yourself Monday. I decided to start with butter because I happened to be making some.

This is seriously so easy! You need only one thing…raw milk! OK you could go to the store and buy some cream but digress.

For starters, you see the whiter stuff at the top of the milk, that is cream. It is called the cream line. This is what is turned into butter. Sorry if that is a duh. Now to get the cream to rise to the top you just put it in the fridge for 12 hours and viola it floats to the top. Next we have to skim it off. Here is my little trick. I pour the fresh milk into a tea jar with a spigot at the bottom. Then you just pour off the milk until you get to the cream and then stop. Easy, told ya.

Pour your cream (room temp) into the bowl of your mixer.

If you don’t have a splash guard you are going to want to put some plastic wrap around it or you will be bathing in cream. Start your mixer on medium and work it up to fast. Let it mix on high for a few minutes and keep an eye on it. I think this took about 3 minutes and

the fat started separating from the buttermilk.

when you see the cream look grainy, you are almost done.

Now you have to pour the buttermilk off of the butter. I took a spatula and just pressed all the butter to one side and then poured off the liquid into a container (don’t throw it away, I use it to make pasta, and pancakes).

Next we are going to wash the butter. You are supposed to wash the butter to get the buttermilk out so it does not spoil too quickly. I don’t normally do this because the butter does not last long enough in my house to get rancid. Just pour some ice cold water into your butter and press the butter with your spatula to get any buttermilk out. Pour the water off and enjoy your butter.