Homestead Cheese Making

let's talk about cheese cheese making on the homestead for the average everyday person who is a little bit intimidated by making cheeses that need to age for like six months but first let's use up some dairy in a few other ways it is very early in the morning and I'm going to get breakfast started before the kids wake up this morning I will be making one of their favorites which is one of my favorites too it's oatmeal something very simple that allows me to use up lots of milk that's one reason I really like making oatmeal right now you have a really good view of my open shelving in my kitchen I have lots of it and when we built the house I had every intention of styling these open shelves to be beautiful but it's been several years and I've never done it they're just functional I have our dishes sitting there and I've never put any effort into it however I actually filmed this video uh let's see a little over a week ago so if you go back to last week's video then you will see that I have since styled my open shelves so this video my kitchen is kind of a mess because I was actually in the process of clearing things out because I knew I would be styling my shelves I just have stuff everywhere in this video but that's okay we're gonna go with it I got my oatmeal going back there just milk some oats some brown sugar and I'm going to let that simmer on low I've got some bacon here that I'll pop in the oven baking bacon in the oven is the best way to go in my opinion in a cast iron skillet it is delicious got some fruit ready to go in the oatmeal when that's ready so all this is going to be going so breakfast is ready when the kids wake up I like to have breakfast ready when they wake up if at all possible now I've got my big cheese vat my huge five gallon pot out and ready this is my cheese making pot and I got all of my cheese making supplies out so I'm ready to go cheese making even though I'm going to be making a simpler recipe today it's still a bit of a process so I want to get this going early in the morning so that I'm not like up late at night doing cheese making so this recipe is called Simple Farmhouse cheese I believe it requires two gallons of milk which is easy for me I've got the calf has been weaned so I am milking twice a day I've got lots of milk coming in this is not going to be a step-by-step tutorial because this is like I said in the beginning I'm venturing into something new this is my first time making hard cheese so I'm just going to walk you through and show you what I am learning because I did this a bunch last week what was my first week making it but I made it several times in one week so I'm already learning a lot so I've just cut my milk heating up back there breakfast is ready so I'll get that ready for the kids because as you saw in the background they are starting to trickle out and tell me they might starve to death so you know milk want raw milk when it comes out of the cow it wants to be cheese when it goes when a calf nurses and the milk goes into the calf stomach it curdles and you know that's basically the curd separating from the weight it's kind of like the cheese making process so when milk first comes out of the cow it's warm so back in the background what you see me doing is I'm heating my milk up I'm making it warm again because it was in the fridge um that's the first step in cheese making is you want warm milk now you can make cheese with milk straight out of the cow that's very easy it's at the perfect temperature you don't even have to heat it you just might have to maintain a little bit of heat so it stays warm so I fed the kids breakfast now my milk is warmed up and going to start adding in what I need here I added in a little bit of culture let that ripen I'm adding in calcium chloride here and stirring that so calcium chloride is optional you don't have to use it with raw milk but it's really helpful if your milk isn't fresh and these two gallons that I'm using are a couple days old I wanted them to set in the fridge so that I could separate my cream after I added the calcium chloride I added in rennet animal rennet which causes the curd to separate from the Whey and then let it sit for like 45 minutes that's what this particular recipe called for now I'm doing the most fun part which is cutting the cheese cutting the curd it's very fun my kids have since learned that they really like to do this part too and once I cut the curd then here I'm just stirring to kind of slowly break it up into little pieces I've since learned that I it's better if I use my hand and just reach in there and do that and once the curd is broken up into little pieces then you remove some of the way so that you can start to shape your curd so see those little pieces that I broke the curd up into by stirring yeah that would have been a lot easier if I would have just used my hand to slowly do that but anyway I'm learning so that's why I'm showing you guys so now I shaped my curd into mostly one big piece and I'm going to come over here and start to the process of pressing my cheese in my cheese form so I will link where I get all of my cheese making supplies it's just I believe it's called New England cheese making company um yeah I really like them I've had good luck there so got my cheese mold putting my curd inside of the form here just trying to be gentle and get everything in there and then I'm just going to fold my gets a little more curd in here actually try to get all that out and fold my cheese cloth over the top add in my follower and then my weight to press the cheese down which I'm not using a cheese press I'm just going to use a jar of salsa all right my cheese is now being pressed I have a gallon of whey that well actually it's a bit more than a gallon because I still have way left in my big cheese that over there so maybe a gallon and a half a gallon and a quart at least so lots of way I haven't decided what I'm going to do with it yet usually at this point I would make ricotta by just reheating the Whey and adding vinegar and then straining out the rest of the curd because you don't get all the curd the first time you make cheese but anyway I'm actually out of vinegar which never happens I'm out of vinegar today though so no ricotta today I may have a video where I make ricotta though if I do then I'll link it however I just wanted to share the book that this recipe came from so I'm making Farmhouse cheese from this book it's called mastering basic cheese making and it is so good I just got this recently and I wish I would have had this from the very beginning when I first got a dairy cow she's making at least to me seems very intimidating it always has seemed very intimidating but this book really just breaks it down and it's like cheese making for dummies and it goes over a lot more than cheese as well butter cultured butter butter all of the basics that you will want to know if you have a dairy cow or you have a source of a lot of raw dairy and you want to go beyond just drinking milk and cooking with milk now ever so often I just have to pull my cheese out of the form unwrap it and turn it over re-wrap it put it back in the form and add the weight again so this has been pressing about 15 minutes and you can see what this looks like so it's still the round still isn't smooth there are still lots of wrinkles but that's okay this is just the very beginning of the pressing process so it will start to Look a Lot smoother as we go here okay now let me show you something that happened with the very first batch of cheese that I made look at all those tiny little holes that is not supposed to look like that that's called early blowing and it happened because I did my cheese making right by my sourdough starter and you really do not want different cultures next to each other so just fair warning when you're cheese making this is quite a process to do just to find out that it was ruined because of something so silly so lesson learned uh now I know I need to move my starter when I'm cheese making so you can see there my rind is getting smoother every time I flip and press and I'm gonna move on while the cheese is pressing I've got lots of cream and I need to make butter so I'm just going to show you I usually do butter in big batches so I save my cream over several days until I have like a gallon of cream I really love using the food processor for butter it's really is just as simple you pour a quart of cream in turn it on high and within 10 5-10 minutes you've got butter and buttermilk then you just strain out the buttermilk and you're left with the butter I have a whole video on this actually the video I have on butter making it was cultured butter so that's kind of fun I do that sometimes and I'll link that video you can see the process and making cultured butter but this is not culture this is just straight cream and you can see I just keep things going so I pulled one batch of butter out and I'm going to drain and rinse this butter saving the buttermilk of course for baking while I have the next batch of butter going in the food processor processor so since my food processor only holds a quart of liquid I'll have to do four batches which will take about 20 to 30 minutes depending on how fast my butter churns on any particular day but it works out because while one batch is churning I just continue washing and straining out the butter you want to get out as much buttermilk as possible you really want the water to run clear that way your butter does not go rancid so the more buttermilk you can squeeze out like you see me doing here the better and it's easier to work with cold colder butter so it doesn't stick to your hands um so I'm salting this batch I usually do a couple of salted batches of butter sometimes I'll do an unsalted and then I a friend got me this vintage butter mold that is very cute so I'm just I've got my cheesecloth that I soaked just dipped in some buttermilk there and it's going to help the butter not stick to the mold I learned that the hard way now I've got my butter in here I'll just show you guys one of these and then I'll probably press the rest of this butter later because I really do need to get back to cheese making and a few other things you know I have to run into town this evening so it's a busy day so I'm just going to press this butter definitely not necessary but it's just fun and it's cute they make all kinds of really cute butter presses I've seen ones that actually have a little cow on them so I want one of those very cute so see this turned out to be very pretty a little uneven on one side but that's okay we'll just wrap this up and store it in the fridge I'll I'll store one or two of these in the fridge but the others will go in the freezer butter homemade butter freezes very well so I actually ran into town came back home while my cheese was doing the final four hour press and now it's ready to be salted so I'm salting this very generously and like I said the recipe is in that that book I don't want to you know copy and give you guys the recipe out of the book because it's not my recipe I didn't come up with it so you'll have to buy the book if you want the recipe but I am just showing you what the process looks like to show you this really is a good Homestead cheese for just like a mom to make you know if you don't have a ton of time to dedicate to it you can do it in one day so I got my my other Butters out that I made earlier and I'm going to mold those but they've been in the fridge all day and honestly they're a little bit too hard so I had I had to let them sit out for a while and just figured I would do my kitchen shut down routine while those we're warming up just enough to press into the mold and this is the last thing I have to do just wrap these Butters and put them away and now we will Fast Forward three days and I have finished cheese this cheese only has to age for three days in the fridge it is so simple and it is delicious we have really been enjoying it I have made it several times since this first week making it and I'm getting better each time like I said I learned my lesson about the starter and I'm sure I will continue learning as I go all right well thank you guys for tuning in I will see you next week

Channel: Hopewell Heights

Views: 17,019

Keywords: raw cheese, cheesemaking, homesteading

Id: ZzVRNUg6Z0w

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2023