So far the only dairy related homemade product I’ve shared about has been butter. That’s because the butter is the only thing that worked well. We made yogurt from goat milk, which did work, it just was very thin and didn’t taste all that great. I know, I know, it’s plain yogurt and not sweetened like what you buy at the store, but we’ve been buying plain yogurt for some time now and sweetening and flavoring it ourselves, so I am used to the plain yogurt taste. This smelled like yogurt and had the same tart taste, but there was also a little bit of a farm flavor to it as well. I’ve still used up all 2 quarts of it though. After drowning it in blueberries I was able to choke down some of it. After that I decided I would just use it in baking. Today I used up the last of it in the molasses cookies. I THINK what we did wrong was to pasteurize our milk before making the yogurt. The recipe said I was supposed to, but the taste we ended up with is the same taste that we got when we tried pasteurized goat milk. So, I am going to order some yogurt starters to try (we had used just store bought yogurt to start ours with) and next time we won’t heat the milk too much. In fact, I found some starters that work at room temperature so you don’t have to heat the milk at all. I will let you know how they work.
Yesterday I tried to make cheese. I thought I’d start with something easy, so I followed the instructions in my book for pot cheese. This cheese doesn’t have a starter or rennet, it just makes cheese with the natural bacteria in the milk. I set out my farm fresh milk for 24 hours and then tried to gently heat to produce the curds. Nothing happened. I don’t know if my mistake was in heating the milk too much (it did get pretty hot even though I had it on low) or if when the book says “farm fresh” it means it has to be straight from the goat or cow with no cooling first. I didn’t want to waste a whole quart of milk though, so I added some lemon juice to get the curd going and was able to get enough of something to drain it in the cheesecloth. It’s pretty runny, and again, the flavor is not what I would like, but at least it is something. Rennet and cheese starters are on my list of things still to order so we can try some thicker cheeses. I’m hoping soon I’ll have some successes to share. 🙂