Fresh Cheese

The day after Thanksgiving, I had apparently not had enough of cooking, because I decided to make fresh cheese. The recipe is from How to Cook Everything. I was toying with the idea of posting the whole recipe here, but the pictures are really crucial to understanding how it works, and the directions are too involved. So, instead, I found it on Google Books. All it takes is milk, buttermilk, salt, and cheesecloth (which you can find at the grocery store).

I'll just give you my impressions. The cheese itself was, I thought, very good. It tasted like a mix between ricotta and cream cheese. I think undersalting it is a definite problem, and I also had trouble with cheesecloth management. I either had too many plies, which made it very hard to squeeze whey out of the cheese, or I had too few plies, which made it very easy to squeeze curds out of the cheese. This can probably be improved with practice. It was actually harder than I thought it would be, squeezing the whey out, and I probably could have benefited from a conspirator or two to help with the squeezing.