Did you know that it is incredibly easy to make a simple soft cheese right in your kitchen? It really is! The easiest cheese I know of requires only two ingredients – milk and an acid such as vinegar or lemon juice – and five tools – a stainless steel pot, a thermometer, a bowl, a wooden spoon, and some cheesecloth, and you can go from start to a finished product in two hours. The next-easiest cheese I know of requires three ingredients, the same set of tools, and a bit more time, but it’s still very simple to make and so delicious!
Kimi adds: Plus, making your own cheese can save you a lot money when you consider how expensive cheese can be. When I buy high-quality cheese from local cheese makers, it’s a frugal price if the cheese is around $12 a pound. Consider that even the highest quality milk is fairly inexpensive per gallon when you think of the amount of cheese you can make out of it! Our tip for today’s 52 ways to save money on a healthy diet is: Make your own cheese!
A little cheese-making adventure
Before writing this tutorial, I’d never tried to make soft cheese using just milk and an acid, so that was a new experience for me! The process is simple – heat the milk, add the acid, and drain the whey from the curds. The resulting cheese is known by a few different names – lemon cheese, whole-milk ricotta, or queso fresco. It is meant to be used fresh and makes an excellent spread for crackers.
Most of the recipes I’ve seen for this type of cheese instruct you to heat the milk to 180*F before adding the acid, but since I’m using raw milk and would like to keep the cheese as raw as possible, I decided to find out the lowest temperature I could use and still achieve the desired separation of curds and whey. Since most of the recipes for this type of cheese suggest using lemon juice for the acid, that is what I used as well.
Here is how I made lemon cheese:
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