Cheddar!

The moment I've been waiting for!!!  With the spring calves arriving, suddenly a good supply of raw milk (sold as Pet Milk) is freely available!  I've been wanting to make a truly big cheese now that I have so much cheesemaking equipment, and this weekend was my first opportunity to do so.

I got four gallons of milk from the local farm store, and washed my gigantic 5 gallon stock pot...

All cheese goes through pretty much the same few steps:  culturing the milk, adding rennet, processing the curds, pressing, and aging.  The many different types and flavors of cheese results from subtle or dramatic variations to these basic steps.

Even the size of the cut curd cubes varies depending on the type of cheese.

  

"Cheddaring" is the process of keeping the curds warm and pressed and stacking the curd slabs for a while.  I used this recipe: https://cheesemaking.com/products/cheddar-cheese-making-recipe

 

This is my cool cheese press!  

The cheddar presses for about 30 hours with increasing pressure to make a solid cylinder of cheese.  

Teaspoon for scale

The next steps are drying, waxing, and aging the cheese.  This 4 pound chunk of cheddar will be ready to eat between August and December!

One drawback to using four gallons of milk to make cheese is that you end up with 3 gallons of whey--and that's a LOT of whey!  Luckily, this whey made an excellent batch of ricotta cheese (but that's another story!)