How we were making cheese

Hello everyone everywhere! How's your weekend? It's freezing cold here, the temperature dropped to 10.4F and it's windy which makes everything even worse. Days like this are good for sitting at home and cooking something tasty. One of our recent culinary experiments was making cheese! Yes, you read it right - cheese. I don't mean cottage cheese which is relatively easy to make, but that other one )) We decided to start with making string cheese since "soft cheeses" are a bit easier to start with rather than hard cheeses that have to age for a while. As you might know to make any kind of cheese you need to get milk and regular store milk won't work. So on Saturday morning my husband and I went to the local farmer's market and bought 4 liters (1 gallon) of milk and rushed home to pasteurize it and to start the whole process. Prior to it, I ordered a cheese starter culture because without it nothing can be done. Pasteurizing is a very "fun" process. You need to bring milk to 78 degrees Celsius (172F) and then quickly cool it down to 35 C (95F). To not overheat milk we had a kitchen thermometer and followed the temperature on it. Once we did it the next step was to ass the starter and let it the milk sit for 45 minutes. At first, it looked like nothing is happening, but then

That's how you know that you pasteurized the milk the right way because the "cheese body" formed and now you are one step closer to making your own cheese. So the next step was to break the cheese body into cheese grain:

Next we drained our cheese grain and let it cool down in a cheese shaping cup

After 2 hours our "string cheese" was ready for the next stage. In order to shape it into a smooth looking head of cheese, we had to bring water to boil in a pot and put our "rough cheese head" into the hot water and "knead" it with a wooden spoon. When the water cooled down a bit I was able to knead it with my hands. It didn't come out perfect but when the cheese was put back into the cheese forming cup it "finished shaping itself" while cooling down.

We put it into the fridge and the next day went through the final stage - kept cheese head in the salty water for 3 hours. THE END!!! ))) It came out great and the best part is that we made it ourselves! The next stage will be to make feta cheese and then we hope to move to more complicated aged cheeses! Hope you will like my story and it will inspire you to do something you've always wanted to try but hesitated. Till next time! Stay safe!