Cheese

With all the lovely spring grass that is growing madly, we are getting more milk from our milking goat Dorka.  About 1.5L per day.  We don't drink that much milk, so every week or so there is enough milk to make a small batch of cheese.  We started off just making a soft ricotta type cheese, just with vinegar to curdle the milk, which worked fine, and made a soft cheese that was nice on crackers, or in a cheese and spinach pie.  We then decided to buy some rennet to experiment further. 

Its amazing the difference in the curdling between vinegar cheese and rennet cheese.  Vinegar is instant but the curds are small and the cheese soft.  Rennet needs to sit a bit to set, but the curds are so solid you cut them!  Its almost magical. 

The first batch of rennet curdled cheese became this fetta!  Which was great, and had a slight resemblance to halumi cheese. 

We have since made a batch of mozzarella type cheese which was nice too.

Lots of 'playing' to do, experimenting with the technique to get the types of cheese we like.  Really happy that we are able to skip yet another thing at the shops, and reduce the amount of packaging that we use.

Since I haven't posted a photo of the kids for a while, here they are growing fast (and eating enough to show for it!!!!  Next winter I will be planting LOTS of apple trees, as these 2 clean us out of apples!!!!)