Making cheese...

Erma loves to make fresh cheese.  

Here it is called Queso Fresco and it is soft and crumbly and 

great to use in quesadillas or grilled cheese sandwiches. 

 This is a version straight from our farm and our cows, 

but you can do this at home with the kids using store bought milk.  

I first boiled our milk for 20 min to pasteurize it.

If you are using pasteurized milk, just heat the milk to 110 degrees then let it cool to the touch.

The recipe is so simple:

Ingredients for a 1 pound cheese
1 gallon of raw milk * or store-bought
1 rennet tablet ** (this is called cuajo here and I had to buy at our pharmacy in town)
Salt to taste

**  you could buy liquid rennet online. 

You can also use one tablespoon of white vinegar when rennet is not available. 

So no excuse, you can make it. 

While heating the milk, dissolve the rennet into the milk.

For about an 1 hour we heated the milk barely by turning the fire on in the front burner 

and put the pot on the back burner.  I turned it every 5 minutes.  

The curds were beginning to form.  

We used a shallow bowl and pressed into the cheese and dreamed off all of the liquid.

Now I think we did this the hard way, but it worked.  You could also use a cheese cloth.

The dogs LOVED the liquid.  We did this about 6 bowls full.  

When most of the liquid is out, put in a cheese cloth or a cheese 

form like this and let it drain and solidify for about an hour.

When we finished it was very late

 We ate the cheese and crackers and went to bed.

This is the finished product, 

we ate ours before I could photograph so this is from a mexican blog.

It was like a yummy science project for our kids.

Enjoy, Buen provecho!