The Added Value of Making Your Own Cheese

Making my own cheese helps preserve my milk resources, saving me money, but also unexpectedly enriches my connection to history, evoking tales of the Italian countryside.

The key to conserving what you’ve got is keeping track of what’s in your refrigerator and then asking yourself, “What else could I do with this?”  Often I ask myself this question when a food is going bad, and it’s just too late.  But simply asking the question gets you started.  Then next time, you won’t let it get so far before you realize that you’d better do something with that ½ of a yam that’s been sitting there for 8 days, before it’s relegated to the compost. 

The first thing that challenged me in this way is milk.  We have a local dairy that delivers milk in our neighborhood.  Since I’m into buying local if possible, we want to patronize this dairy…also milk delivery is just rad.  However, they have a minimum order for delivery and though I tend to drink more of the milk than my husband does, often it’s not enough to equal ½ gallon minimum order.  Sometimes we finish it before our next delivery, sometimes not.  It will last beyond a week, but if we forget to cancel our next order, the milk stacks up, and then what do we do?

There’s only so many things you can do with milk—you can drink it, you can bake with it.  You can cook with it, but those options are limited because it can curdle when it comes in contact with acidic ingredients….that’s it!  Curdle it!  This is how I learned to make cheese.  It was really all about not wasting our milk. 

Now, there are many cheeses on the planet that are not so simple to make.  In France, some cheeses are made by actually sticking them in a cave that hosts a particular mold that imbues the cheese with its taste and color. 

I’m not going caving any time soon, and even making a simpler cheese like cheddar or jack requires more specialized equipment than I have in my kitchen.  But mozzarella, now there’s a friendly cheese.  I first learned about how easy it is to make mozzarella from writer Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  She recommended Ricki Carol’s book Home Cheese Making, which I bought. 

It turns out there are several fresh cheeses that are easy to make and only require minutes to a day or so to prepare.  I tried many of them, and then quickly settled on mozzarella as my favorite—mainly because it takes 30 minutes and my husband can turn it into pizza.  Recently, I thought I might get more adventurous and try making something like Jack or Cheddar…for fun…because who doesn’t like a challenge?  As I was scoping through Rikki’s book, I noted a recipe for “whey ricotta”.  I had no idea how ricotta was made and knew only that it comes from Italy and I had used it a couple of times to make recipes for lasagna and manicotti.  Here’s what you need to make it: whey, cider vinegar and heat.  Whaaaaat?  It seemed too simple, so I had to try it.

Now, let me tell you about whey.  Do you remember Little Miss Muffet?  Yeah, I know you Millennials are all sophisticated-like, reading your Harry Potter and Golden Compass, so you might not know about the Muff.  Her gig was sitting on a tuffet and eating curds & whey. 

I grew up in a state adjoining Wisconsin, so when I created a picture in my head of Miss Muffet, I could understand what curds were.  But whey?  What is it?  I knew it was a liquid, but why would you have a bowl and eat your curds soused in whey? 

I finally learned what whey really is at the age of 32, the first time I made mozzarella.  Here’s how it works.  You take milk, a white, opaque liquid, and heat it to 55 degrees.  Then you dump in some acid, curdling it.  Yay!  Now I knew where curds come from…actually, I already knew this from trying to use my growing national milk reserve in soups that had acidic ingredients, to poor effect.  But when you curdle the milk, these curds are tiny—the size of a dust mote—nothing resembling the glossy strings inside a lump of mozzarella.  So here’s what you do to help.  You add rennet.  And heat. 

Oh, you don’t know what rennet is?  Neither did I.  Rennet is made of enzymes that can be extracted from either vegetables or the stomach of a ruminant, that when added to the curdled milk, causes the tiny curds to clump and separate themselves from the liquid, called at this point, whey.  The first time I experienced this, it was sort of like magic.  I added the rennet, continued heating the white, slightly lumpy, curdled milk and nothing happened.  Hotter and hotter, still nothing.  Then at about 102 degrees, fooop!  Literally within seconds, I had a pot of clear liquid (whey) with chunks of cheese floating in it (curds) like someone attending the Wisconsin state fair had dumped their boat of curdy snacks into a water-filled gutter next to the horse barn.  Except a lot cleaner. 

So, what about Miss Muffet?  Clearly, her mom had just made mozzarella.  She had strained out the big curds and given her kid the leftover tiny chunks of curd within the whey as a snack.  Apparently, whey is very good for you—full of vitamins and minerals, so Miss Muffet had a good mom.  Apparently, she was also Italian.

Back to this ricotta business.  You are obviously going to eat the mozzarella you just made, but what do you do with the whey?  You can drink it like Miss Muffet—apparently its pretty good chilled, which is what Rikki suggests.  I only did that once though—just couldn’t get into it.  So mostly, once I extracted the cheese, I dumped the whey.  Therefore, I hope you can understand why I was excited about making yet another cheese out of it. 

Why was I so surprised about ricotta?  When you make mozzarella, the process makes sense.  Milk is white.  You curdle it and then white bits start to separate from the clear whey.  The rennet only helps that process…so it appears that you are using chemistry to extract what you can already see.  But, if whey is mostly clear, where does the ricotta come from?   

For those of you who have seen ricotta, close your eyes, envision the cheese, and then tell those who haven’t seen it what it looks like….hmmmm…it’s refrigerator white (whiter than my Swedish-heritage tummy) and totally opaque.

So I suspended disbelief that I could get a white opaque cheese out of two clear liquids and I tried it.

Like with making mozzarella, you heat the whey, then add the vinegar.  But what happens is that the clear whey turns opaque.  Whaaaat?  Near microscopic white particles suddenly appear within seconds as you are heating!  Now, this is really like magic. In actuality, you are precipitating albumen, which is a protein.  In the case of ricotta, you don’t have a way to clump the newly-formed curd, so you pour it in something called butter muslin and let it strain over night.  You don’t get very much cheese from this process, but it appears that you can make free food out of seemingly nothing. 

What I didn’t expect was the psychological benefit of making cheese that goes beyond simply feeding yourself and saving your money.  The process was so mystical, I found myself thinking about the Italians, how they came up with this whole process that is so unobvious.  Here’s what floated into my brain. 

The Roman empire is dead, and it’s the Renaissance.  Seemingly all the cultural action is in central Italy, near Florence and Rome.  But one evening, on a farm in the countryside near Naples, some young girl is doing her regular chores, which includes milking the cow out grazing in their field.  But today she’s forgotten her ceramic milk jug to catch the milk.  Darn.  But no problem, they just slaughtered sheep that morning and the stomachs of the sheep are still piled in with the rest of the guts on the edge of the pasture. She grabs one and fashions a catching bag to use for the milk.  But when she’s bringing the milk-filled stomach back to the house, her brother starts chucking chestnuts at her, and she sets down her milk bladder and chases after him.  She forgets to come back and bring the milk inside.  The next day it's blazing hot.  Her mother finds the bladder filled with milk after lunch.  It has curdled, but not in the normal way—the curds are huge!  What is this?  Her mother tentatively tries it and the curds taste good.  Mozzarella is born. 

This new food spreads across the countryside until one day a woman in another household is making mozzarella over a fire.  After scooping out the curd, she accidentally spills vinegar in the leftover whey.  Oh well, now its ruined to drink, so she leaves it over the fire while she’s distracted by another kitchen task.  She returns to the whey to dump it a few minutes later, and it has turned milky!  After quickly making a sign of the cross and muttering a prayer, she takes her whey outside in the sun, where she notes tiny little particles in the whey (she’s luckily blessed with good eyesight).  She strains it through a towel and tastes it.  It tastes good.  Ricotta is born.

Of course, I’m making this whole story up, except that mozzarella is first mentioned in a book in 1570 alongside ricotta, and the name comes from a Neopolitan dialect, but the point is that one can see how the food was discovered just by virtue of the process of making it.  These women aren’t biochemists here, it’s just lucky chance and people who are paying careful attention to the resources they have. 

Through participating in this ancient process, I evoke in my brain the origins of tales of magic and the mysteries captured by religion, and feel a deep connection to our ancestors.  It’s a feeling of connectedness similar to what you feel when you sit down to a nice dinner with family or friends, except it goes deeper into history.  So when you think, “What else could I do with this?”, yeah sure, you are saving money.  But you are also connecting to the deep past, the origins of the foods we eat, and the people who discovered them, and that fills your spiritual bank account in addition to your physical one.