This post is about my first try at making a pressed cheese, a farmhouse cheddar.  I learned a lot from the process, and the result was a much more accomplished second effort in this posting:  Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese.  It will probably be a couple of months before I try this second effort, but I opened Read More …

The photo shows Gouda out of the brine and beginning to air dry in the cheese cave. Gouda is an example of a washed-curd cheese, and this is the first time I have made one.  When making a washed-curd cheese, one of the steps is to drain some of the whey from the curds and Read More …

I have now made two batches of Parmesan cheese using the instructions in Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making pages 140-141.  The photo is of one of the cheeses after 6 months of aging in the cheese cave. It looked and tasted like Parmesan – a success. To assist myself in planning the day and keeping Read More …

After two batches of farmhouse cheddar, I was ready for the next step in technical difficulty, stirred-curd cheddar.  Again I was working from the instructions in Ricki Carroll’s book Home Cheese Making.  As reflected in the name, the biggest change in this vs. farmhouse cheddar is that the curd is held at 100 degrees and Read More …

To be continued

I saw on the internet an interesting article from Louetta Hill on an easy and relatively quick way to make a blue cheese log out of goat’s milk.  The main problem with implementing this idea was that I found that all the goat’s milk I could locate in Richmond was ultra-pasteurized, and thus useless for Read More …

There are many recipes on the internet which aim to duplicate the popular French fresh cheese Boursin.  Most of them start with purchased cream cheese and butter, which are mixed together and then flavored.  I was looking around for a version which involved actually making a fresh cheese as a starting point.  I found a Read More …

This post is documenting my journey on learning how to make a pressed cheese.  I picked farmhouse cheddar as a starting project since it is a simplified version of cheddar cheese.  A key part of the learning experience has been learning how, in my kitchen and with the equipment which I own, to keep the Read More …