Thursday, January 14, 2010

Homemade Cheese, of the Goat Variety

Yup, you guessed it--we made goat cheese! Our dear friends The Beedles gave us a DIY kit for Christmas, straight from the local shops of Portland:


As you can see, our kit was for Chevre, or goat cheese, and as you can't see, it came with cheesecloth, a cheese thermometer, and the citric acid needed to curdle milk. Then we had everything else!

The hardest part was finding the goats milk, because it's not hanging out everywhere. What's more, you're not supposed to use Ultra-Pasteurized milk because that kills all of the good bacteria. And plain old pasteurized goats milk is hard to find. But we finally scored some at Trader Joe's, and brought it home dreaming of creamy goodness.

First, we carefully brought the milk to an almost-boil, then added in the citric acid, which curdled it and turned it a weird yellowish green color. But this was a good thing. We kept it at a good simmer until it really got a-curdling, and separated into curds and whey. At this point, I thought, "Little Miss Muffet must have been crazy to eat this stuff." It looked pretty gross.

Then we poured it all into a little baggie made of the cheesecloth and let all the whey drain out, leaving just the beautiful tasty curds: chevre! We mixed dill into part of it, because I have a love affair with dill. Then we let it cool.

And then we ate it! It was delicious! And we had made it all on our own!
Okay. it doesn't look like much, but it's pretty tasty!

So, just to recap, that's sour cream, butter, buttermilk, and chevre we've made in our very own kitchen. I just need to buy a goat, and we'll have a never-ending supply! I suggested it to Jesse, but he didn't go for that. Bummer. Maybe someday. We can have a family of goats, for Suki to make friends with. Our chevre kit makes 10 batches, so we have a ways to go still!

We're on a roll with the dairy items-next up, yogurt?


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