We did it! We did it! We made cheese!!! It’s easy!!! You can do it too!!!

It helps that milk was on sale for only $1.79 a gallon at Aldis… great price!

Here’s how to do it. Really simple!

Pour a gallon of whole milk into a stainless steel pot. Use stainless steel. It’s the best for cheese. Don’t use a coated pot, it’s just not a good idea.

Let it start to warm up slowly, stirring often so you don’t scald it.

You can make a ricotta out of whey, but this is a nice rich version with whole milk. Be careful to avoid ULTRA pasteurized milk. It’s a kind of new thing, but the temperatures used are very high and they tend to make lousy cheeses.

Next, dissolve a teaspoon of citric acid into a 1/4 cup of cool water. Citric acid is available in the canning area of most stores. It’s used in various recipes.

If you choose to, this is the time to add salt. For a gallon, use a teaspoon and that will give it a nice flavor. Use a non-iodized salt, like a pickling salt or, hey, cheese salt! We used pickling salt. You can leave the salt out, if you wish, especially if you are going to use the ricotta in a recipe such as lasagna and don’t want the extra salt. Add it to the citric acid water and then pour into your gently warming milk.

Slowly, so you don’t burn or scald the milk, raise the temperature of the milk, citric acid and salt, to 185 to 195 degree F. It will take a little while… don’t rush the milk!!! haha…. We had our stove on like 3 or 4… out of 10. We noticed that if you heat it too fast, it just seems to get super steamy and a little weird. Use a steel spoon or a wooden one… nothing plastic or coated.

Take your time and practice singing the cheese making songs of your foremothers.

Of course, this is IF you remember them. Ahem.
Just about the time you are thinking something is wrong… dairy magic occurs!!! The milk starts to thicken! As you check it, it’s forming little curds! And separating into whey! You rejoice and begin to think about little Miss Muffit… eating her curds and whey!
Keep stirring… always stirring… the whole process is a lot of stirring. Watch the pot… after a wee bit longer, at the curds stage, it will start to get really thick and they whey will start to clear up a bit. At first stage of curding it will be sort of milky, but as more of the curds join up and all, the whey gets less and less full of the curd stuff and gets thin and sort of clear. Not like crystal water clear, but not so milky. And you start to get this lovely cheese smell wafting up into your face! It’s pretty cool.
Turn off the heat, and set the pot off the burner to set and chill. 5 minutes. Don’t touch it. Don’t mess with it, stir it or giggle it, nothing. Set the timer and leave the room. You will want to fool with it, I’m pretty sure. We had to really avoid the temptation to fiddle with it some and marvel in the dairy chemistry that had taken place. I’m telling you now. STEP AWAY FROM THE CHEESE….
After 5 minutes, you can take it over to the sink where you have a collander waiting with a bit of cheese muslin in it. (Note… cut it a wee bit bigger than we did. Just saying.) Cheese or butter muslin is a finer, more sturdy muslin than say cheesecloth. You want something with a little tighter weave so you don’t loose your curds. Ours came in our cheese kit. However, you can buy it online or you can even use old cut up sheer curtains… washed in nice hot hot water, please.
Of course, the book said to ladle the curds into the collonder and of course, I tried to just pour it and it was kind of messy that way. Our muslin slipped because it was a little too small and so then I learned my lesson and ladled it out like I was told. Now, if you had pigs you could let the whey cool and they love it. We have a pig but it’s down the road at Miss Julia’s and so, well, we just poured it out this time. I read after the fact that chickens like the stuff too! Shesh. I tasted a bit and it was well, kinda bland and yucky. Guess farm animals like some weird things.

After it drips a bit, take and tie up the four corners of your lovely little clump of cheese! Squeeze it a wee bit, but then figure out some way to hang it for a while. We used our faucet! It was right there and perfect height and all. Some folks will use a wooden spoon over a bowl. You want it to hang and cool for about a half hour.
Now if I had thought ahead a wee bit more, I would have probably smoothed the top and made it look a little more like a ball, but hey, it was our first attempt, so you get a sort of weird top to it. But still, it was super cool. Now if you’re going to use it in some sort of pasta situation, you can leave it dry as it was. Or you can mix a little heavy cream into it, and wet it up a bit for say a dip or something. We had lasagna on the mind, so we left ours dry. It made a nice big blob of the stuff, rather like a standard size container of ricotta from the store. We used half for our lasagna and then the other half a few days later for stuffed manicotti. The taste alone is a little bland, simple. Good, just not like super crazy flavorful. But it’s fresh. Hard to explain, it was good. Once we mixed it in with some other cheeses and some garlic and chives and homemade bread crumbs… oh my! Lovely….


This was one of the best lasagnas that I’ve had in forever. It was our own tomato sauce, from our heirloom tomatoes from the moby and homemade bread crumbs, farm fresh eggs, our own ricotta… oh my! We used a decent beef hamburger and store noodles and mozzarella cheeze, but still, half home grown was pretty cool. I can’t wait till we can learn to make our own mozzarella and use sausage from our little piggie! And hey, we have a noodle machine that I’ve been dying to try out. We actually might be able to eventually make all homemade lasagna! Now that will be pretty darn cool.

Make some cheese!!! It’s fun and easy! Took us only about an hour and that included photos and fumbling through the first time! I bet you could get it made in 15 or so minutes if you tried a few times! We’re ready to take on a aged hard cheese next!!! Colby? Jack?? Who knows!!!