angharad_gam

I’ve been reading and thinking about cheese making for a little while now, so I was quite pleased when Andy gave me a cheese making kit for my birthday. Since then I haven’t really had a chance to try it out, but since I was doing a heap of cooking in the lead up to Christmas, and while the weather was on the somewhat cooler side, I thought I’d give it a go. Being the kind of person I am, I declined the easier option of making a nice, simple soft cheese, and decided to make some feta.

There are lots of different ways to go about cheese making, and you can find lots of different recipes even for the same type of cheese. This feta recipe was pretty simple. Here are a few pics of the process.

This was after I added the rennet and the curd was beginning to set. Note that it it not actually supposed to look like this – the curd is supposed to set as one smooth mass. After some reading around I think the problem was possibly that the milk was too acidic – which it gets as it ages. That’s what I get for using supermarket milk I guess.

After the curd is set comes the draining (not quite – there are some fiddly things to do first).

Bag o’ curds draining over the sink. Note that there’s not a huge amount here when you bear in mind that I started out with 4l of milk.

Where does the rest of it go? Into whey of course:

It’s a bit alarming looking, but it was actually as much yellow as green. The camera has distorted the colour a bit. Although it looks a bit cloudy here, with bits of curd still floating in it, once it had sat for a while (and cooled down a bit) it became much clearer and more even looking.

After the cheese has drained you need to press it to knit the curds together and squeeze out any remaining whey. This required a 3.5kg weight. I didn’t have anything that heavy to hand, so for a while my cheese was sitting under a precarious stack of a large milo tin and a full 2l bottle of juice. I was a bit worried about this bit, after the oddness of the coagulation, but after pressing for two hours, lo and behold:

At this point I was pretty stoked. I made cheese!

But to make it into feta required one further step – salting or brining. I somewhat reluctantly cut my lovely cheese into lumps and soaked it in brine for 30 mins. Then I put it in a jar with lots of olive oil and herbs and so on to preserve it: