Here is another goat milk cheese that we love to make!  SO easy and sort of fun too!

It’s called Fromage Blanc and it’s a French style soft cheese.  A bit like a farmer’s cheese, but a little bit more complicated, because you do need to purchase the culture from a cheese making supply company.  That being said, it’s easy to do, and if you are like us, we order several packs and it’s very reasonably priced.   We keep our cultures in the freezer so they keep for a very long time.

With this cheese…  you bring your fresh goat milk up to a nice gentle heat of only 86 degrees.   Hardly very warm at all.   Just to bring the milk up to a comfy temperature that the culture LOVES.   Once at 86 degrees…  just remove from heat and add the packet of culture.

I like to let mine lay on the surface of the warm milk for a few minutes and hydrate.   Then I give it a gentle stir, put the lid on and move it to a nice warm place in your home.

If you are lucky to have a nice warm kitchen in the wintertime, then just let it sit on the back of the stove or the counter for a good 12 to 15 hours.  Undisturbed.  Our house is still a little too cold…  the cheese likes about 70 degrees or so, so I brought it into our warmest bedroom and let it just sit on a nightstand!   Haha…  making cheese can be a little weird.  Since you don’t stir or fuss with it, I think it is fine to just sit there and make cheese!

Once done, you can take it back to the kitchen and open up the pot…  you will be greeted by this lovely heavy layer of CHEESE in your pot.   And this is the fun part.   You take a nice big knife and you cut the cheese into cubes.  This is the curd!  I cut mine up fairly small…  several passes gently through the heavy top layer.

Once that is done, you can drain off the whey and use it for all sorts of things…  and I gently transfer the lovely curds into my cheese cloth laden colander.  I like to let it drip for an hour or so…  you can cut the curds up a bit more, or leave kind of lumpy, it’s really up to you.  I like this cheese a little more like a soft cottage cheese…  so I tend to cut up the curds fairly small.

Now, the really neat thing about this cheese is how nicely it blends with a variety of spices and flavors…   we have made our sweet, savory and spicy!  Of course, not at the same time, but it’s fun to mix it up and see how it works.   We liked the sweet  (drizzled with honey and a dash of powdered sugar and a wee bit of cinnamon!)  but really like the savory…  and the easiest way to do so is to add a dip spice mix to your cheese!   For a gallon batch, I add a half a pack of Knorr’s veggie dip to the soft cheese.  Stir in well, and then let rest in the frig for 12 hours or so.   It really lets the cheese and the spices blend together nicely and you end up with a soft cheese that is awesome with fancy crackers, spread on fresh bread or with your favorite veggies!  SO yummy!

I guess the stuff keeps like a normal soft cheese in the frig, but ours never seems to hang around more than a day or two at the moment.  It’s so good, it gets eaten up pretty quickly!  If you have goats or cows and you need a nice soft cheese that is so easy, give Fromage Blanc a try!   It’s a winner!