Cheesy grin in the kitchen...

When I was at primary school we had to drink our third of a pint bottle of milk before we were allowed to go out at playtime. For some reason, although I could manage the first three-quarters of the bottle, I was never quite able to finish it and spent many unhappy morning breaks staring out the window at other children enjoying themselves. As a result I have harboured a life-long dislike of milk and rarely touch it. The only exception being the green top milk (a green lid, rather than mouldy) we used to have at a Lake District youth hostel I worked in.

Despite a suspicion of milk itself, I am a great fan of butter and adore cheese, particularly the semi-hard English cheeses such as Lancashire and Cheshire. So as part of my drive to learn new skills, I asked my parents for a cheese-making kit for Christmas and over the weekend made my first block of soft cheese.

It takes a lot of milk to make a little cheese. In this case one litre for the starter culture (most of this is now frozen and will keep in the freezer) and then two and a half litres to produce 12oz of cheese. Despite following the instructions about warming the milk, adding the culture and then stirring in the rennet (vegetarian, of course), to the letter, nothing happened. So I started to heat the milk up again and as soon as it got warm it began to coagulate. I added extra starter and then extra rennet just to be on the safe side, wrapped the whole pan up in a towel and then put it next to a radiator to keep it warm. An hour and a half later the whey had come off and the curd was sitting in a big pile at the bottom of the pan.

Back in the kitchen I ladled off the whey and started to put the curd into the mould. It seemed a lot of curd but over the next couple of hours it settled until all that was in the pan was in my little mould. A bit of salt helped it settle and gave it a bit of flavour and by the next morning I had a small block of quite tasty white cheese.
After initial disappointment I was please with the results and am waiting now to see what we can use it for. As it is similar to twaróg then it might mean we have kluski for tea, or my favourite – kopytka. Whichever we have, I know it will taste even better with some home-made cheese on top.