The Year of Cheese: Queso Blanco

On Saturday morning, I declared to LJ, that 2013 will be The Year of Cheese (Y.O.C.)!!  (I also declared it will be the year of running, but that is for another blog post, maybe)  LJ was quite excited to hear about the possibilities of a year of cheese, though a little confused about what I meant.  I received an excellent book during our holiday family gift exchange and it inspired me to spend 2013 learning a new kitchen skill, namely cheese making.

Though I don't have a lot of the equipment that will eventually be necessary (a cheese box?), the nice thing about the book is it starts with basic cheeses and slowly moves to more advanced cheeses.  I started with one of the simplest cheeses, Queso Blanco, mostly because I only needed to find milk and cheese cloth (butter muslin technically) at the store because I already had sea salt and cider vinegar at home.  If you are interested in trying it yourself the process is so simple you can watch this two minute video and learn everything you need.

A quick note about the milk, and purchasing it.  Your standard supermarket milk won't work for most cheese making because of the way it is pasteurized and homogenized.  If you can find a natural food store or local dairy you should be able to find milk that is either raw or not ultra-pasteurized and homogenized.  I purchased a half gallon at our local co-op, but I may have to find another source for milk as the co-op finally caught on that LJ and I are not members, and joining a co-op might be just a little too Granola-y for us.

The cheese turned out, though I realized after the fact that I should have added more vinegar because my whey was still cloudy and should have been clear.  The recipe instructed to add more vinegar if necessary, but since it was my first time I had no idea what the whey should look like. (I'm also planning on using the leftover whey to make bagels with.)

The next cheeses I'm planning on trying will be feta and cotija.  I need to round up some more equipment and ingredients and they take longer to make (a few weeks) so the next post in the year of cheese may be a month or so away.