Skip to main content

Cheese-making tips and tricks

We have lots of milk again, since Molly calved, but we never had much time for cheese-making, so here are a few tips that you might find useful when you need to make cheese in a hurry.


Make one big cheese rather than several smaller ones
We realised that most of the time involved in cheese making is all the heating and stirring.  We decided to make the largest possible cheese, using our 10 L and 7 L pots at the same time.  When the curd was ready in both pots, I scooped it into our largest mold to make one giant cheese, then there was only one cheese to look after until it was ready to wax.


Save time fishing the spoon out of the pot by securing it to the handle with a twisty tie
You don't want to know how often this has been a problem!


Sterilise your pot just before you start, so you know its clean and you have a warm pot to heat the milk in
I sterilise the pot by putting a little water in the bottom, sitting it on the largest burner with the lid on, until it boils and the steam can sterilise the entire pot.  Then I can just tip out the water and the pot is ready to use.


Preheat milk from the fridge in a sink of hot water while doing other chores
Its easy to ruin a pot of milk heating over a burner while you are efficiently multi-tasking (ie distracted), a double-boiler is ideal, but I don't have a big enough pot to double-boil the 10 L pot!  The next best thing is to fill the 10 L pot with milk and sit it in the sink, and then fill the sink with hot water.  In about 20 minutes the milk will be close to the cheese-making temperature (you could also use boiling water to get even closer) and the last few degrees can be added using the stove.

Use a digital timer will remind you when its time to do the next step
Cheese making involves so much waiting, I often get distracted on other tasks, but this little timer has saved me many times.  Its great for making hard boiled eggs too! 


Do you have any cheese making tips and tricks to add?

If you want to know more about house cows, my eBook is available for purchase on Scribd.  Its only $4.99, and it includes lots of information about keeping a house cow in Australia.  There's more details about the eBook on my house cow eBook blog.  If you don't want to go through all the Scribd/paypal effort, just send me an email on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com and I can arrange to email it to you instead.

Comments

  1. Oh gosh that cheese looks awesome. I have only made ricotta, but really want to try feta as well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My only tip is, make sure you make more than you can eat so you can give it to all your drooling blog readers ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I haven't dabbled in cheese making yet. Only quark. Now that we are milking goats, we've begun to think about cheese so I read this post with interest. Maybe next year we'll be milking two at the same time and I might have enough milk to spare. As for the spoon, does it need to be in the pot for some reason? We just rest ours across the handle of the pot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. well I am paranoid about putting it on the bench top as its not usually clean, so safest place for it is in the pot! And then it doesn't drip milk anywhere either!

      Delete
  4. Great tips Liz. My only other tip is that I sterilise my spoon and utensils in the pot at the same time. I am looking at making some goats cheese in the near future, it will be a first try so we will see how it goes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. yes good point, I usually have all the utensils in the pot when I heat it.

      Delete
  5. My mouth is watering, there is nothing like making your own cheese, the flavor is amazing. Love your post. Thank you for sharing with the Clever Chicks Blog Hop! I hope you’ll join us again next week!

    Cheers,
    Kathy Shea Mormino
    The Chicken Chick
    http://www.The-Chicken-Chick.com

    ReplyDelete
  6. I'd love to have the resources to make such things. Maybe one day! :) Lovely blog. Kathryn x

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here .  You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!).  I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months.  I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post!  New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog.  I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people.  I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts.  I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo.  Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may  have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive!  Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap.  And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps.  I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation  and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment.  One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap.   As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances).   When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather.  I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap.  It also contributes a tan or brown colour to