Adventures in Amateur Cheesemaking (an ongoing and possibly terrifying series of posts)

So I decided to try making cheese.

I really enjoy making something from the rawest ingredient available into something wonderful. Making cheese at home will either be like that...or I will die from some kind of mutant cheese spores.

For my first attempt at a cheese, I chose a riccotta salata . For this cheese, you basically make a ricotta but after draining as much liquid as possible from the curds, you then salt the curds and press the cheese to form a wheel and eliminate more moisture. You then salt the cheese daily while turning it so that it can shed the moisture that the salt draws out.

For the ricotta, I used the recipe at The Splendid Table because it uses lemon juice rather than rennet to break the milk into curds. (I know that there are vegetarian friendly rennets...I just didn't have any on hand when I decided to try this out) The recipe calls for whole milk; I used a combination of whole milk and half and half, so we should get a little creamier cheese. I also used some nice Hawaiian seasoned sea salt that Gillian gave us to make the ricotta, figuring it's a really simple cheese and can probably use a little flavor boost that isn't simply salt.

For the riccotta salata steps, I followed the steps outlined by David Greenberg on the very cool blog I Make Cheese . For the daily salting, I am using a non-iodized small grain sea salt.

Lessons learned:
1. No matter how firm a cheese is, it can still sweat out more fluid.
2. There is no reason that everyone doesn't just make ricotta when they need some. It is fairly quick and the result is super fresh and delicious (I tasted mine before I pressed it).

Right now the cheese is 6 days old. It is pretty firm and is beginning to develop a bit of rind in a spot or two. It smells really good. In another day or two I will be finished salting it. At that point, David rubbed his ricotta salata with paprika. I am debating paprika or herbs de provence. Either way, it will be a two week wait to let the thing age after that.

If this works out, my next attempts will be fresh mozzarella and chevre (I found a source for the culture online and I think I can get fresh goat milk at the Herndon farmer's market).

And yes, I will be trying out the fresh cream cheese from Splendid Table. More cheese tales to come.......