We just anylized our August grocery reciepts and found that our number one expense was for block cheese. We love cheese! But our grocery spending needs to be cut back by about $150 a month. Does anyone know how to make cheese, and can you use powdered milk to do it? Once you've made it, does it have to be stored in the fridge, or can it sit on the shelf - at what temp? What special tools would I need that are not common kitchen tools?

-- Rachel Linn (kevisnot@hotmail.com), September 05, 2001

Answers

Yeah.... sure know what ya mean about the prices of cheese. I LOVE cheese, its one of my vices next to chocolate.... LOL:):)

you really need milk to make cheese. You might have success with store milk, but i have never tried it that way. Do you have a cow or a goat? If you can get access to milk, I have a TON of recipies for you.

Bernice

-- Bernice (geminigoats@yahoo.com), September 05, 2001.

The question of making cheese from dried milk is an interesting one. Since cheese is first and foremost a way of preserving milk, using dried milk to make it seems almost counter-intuitive. Still there are guys on the 'Net that say they have done just that, reconstituting the dried milk and adding cream and proceeding as usual. I don't know if I believe them, the 'Net being what it is, and knowing what I do about cheesemaking. The more milk is processed, you see, (like pasteurization, homogenization, and UHT), the harder it is to make cheese from it. These processes all really affect the curd negatively, and when you don't get the curd right, the cheese is not going to be right. So I don't understand how such a very highly processed milk as dried milk could possibly work.

Besides milk (and it takes a gallon of milk to make a pound of cheese BTW), you'll need big (5 gallon and over) stainless steel pots, a colander, some real cheesecloth (not the stuff in the local store), an instant read digital themometer, some sort of cheese mold and press, some starter culture, & rennet. Once the cheese is made, you have to age it in a 80-90% humidity, 55-65°F place. Your shelf will probably not work unless you live in a cave. Neither will your fridge unless it's running very warm and, unlike most modern fridges, has no self-defrosting mechanism. Most serious home cheesemakers have a second fridge dedicated just to cheese, with the defroster disconnected and a special regulator that holds the temperature up in the proper range to age the cheese in.

And time. You'll need lots of time. It can easily take 3 or 4 hours to make a batch of cheese, whether it's one pound or fifty, and then it needs turned daily for a couple weeks. And you have to watch your cheese closely to make sure it's not making some unexpected left turn on you, and go off. Labor intenstive cheese is, to say the least.

-- Julia (charmer24@juno.com), September 05, 2001.

I think it would be quite expensive to make cheese from dried milk Better to buy a sheep or a goat.

-- kelly (kellytree@hotmail.com), September 06, 2001.