Homemade chèvre: Easy cheesy!

For my first real homemade cheese, I decided to make fresh (that is, unaged) chèvre. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, cow’s milk production here is heavily regulated by the Dairy Farmers of Ontario, which makes it difficult to find a small-scale, independent cow’s milk producer. Goat’s milk and sheep’s milk are easy by comparison.

Second, I already had a recipe for fresh goat cheese, in the fall 2010 issue of Art of Eating magazine. Given that the only cheese I’ve made in the past is ricotta, which is a completely different process, and I didn’t have any other recipes on hand, it seemed like as good a place as any to start. Besides, goat cheese may be something of a 90s cliché, but I like it!

Cheese-making requires a bit of scheduling and a lot of “hurry up and wait.” The process took about 19 or 20 hours end to end, though I wasn’t rigorous about timing. Fortunately, the first step involves leaving it undisturbed for 8 hours, so I warmed the milk and added the culture and rennet just before bed, and when I got up and made my way down to the kitchen 9 hours later (OK, so there was an extra hour in there), the milk had formed a beautiful solid curd with some whey floating on top.

I ladled the curd into my brand-new molds, breaking it as little as possible, though this was easier said than done. Art of Eating said to have six St-Marcellin molds for 2 litres of milk, but I only needed three. As the recipe had indicated, I couldn’t quite fit all the curd into those three at first, but didn’t have enough to start a fourth, so I had to let it drain for 10 minutes to add the last bit of curd.

I left the molds on a rack suspended over a roasting pan for 4 hours, then tried to flip the cheeses over. I was only partially successful. The curd was still very soft at this point, and they ended up more or less on their side. After another 3 hours of draining, I salted the tops, flipped them again – more successfully this time, with 3 hours’ less whey in them – salted the reverse side, and let them drain for another two hours. By then, they had compressed to around a quarter the height of the mold. I unmolded them, and put them on a plate.

After that time investment, I wanted to try the cheese right away, I really did. Art of Eating said it was at its best before ever being refrigerated. Unfortunately, the timing was exactly wrong: by the time the cheese was ready, I had just finished dinner, and didn’t have the appetite for it. Into the fridge it went, until some of it ended up on my pizza, along with some garlic sausage and pesto. I was a little amused by the fact that the cheese, sausage and dough were all homemade, but the pesto was store-bought!
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