Hello,
I'm from South West Virginia near Salem. I'm looking to get started in cheese making. I've minimal experience with cheese making but I've been involved in wine in the past so some things I'm learning aren't completely lost on me. I've no equipment at this time other than standard kitchen items. I do have a couple of local dairy farms near me that supply raw milk, they're about 40 minutes away so not extremely convenient but not too far either.
I'm interested in making some of the hard cheeses but I understand soft cheese is where most recommend starting so I'll be starting with Ricotta and mozzarella as well as some others I have in mind.
Glad to be here.
Mark
Hello and welcome! Cheese making is an awesome hobby. It's incredibly deep, so feel free to take it as far as you want :-)
Personally, I wouldn't say that soft cheeses are any easier or harder than hard cheeses. Every cheese has its challenges and you really can go as deep as you want. Many people have said it, and it really is true: Making cheese is easy. Making a specific cheese is difficult. Cheese making is incredibly subtle and very, very small changes in technique, or temperature or timing or amounts of ingredients can and will result in completely different cheeses at the other end. The specific milk you use will make a *massive* difference in your cheese, so it's always going to be a journey of discovery. You should treat recipes only as guidelines and be aware that you will almost certainly not make an authentic rendition of a specific cheese just by following that recipe. That's part of the challenge, but also part of the fun of cheese making.
The one piece of advice I will give, though, is to avoid making mozzarella early on. Any recipe that suggests adding acid to the milk is making a "quick" mozzarella. The amount of acid you need is *very* dependent on your milk. There is a *very* good chance that it will be an absolute fail. Even if it's not, it will produce poor quality mozzarella. Mozzarella is a tricky cheese that requires some understanding of how acidity is developed in cultured milk. It's a good idea to wait until you've done several hard cheeses and have a good understand of cheese making theory. I waited a good year before I did my first mozzarella and I still needed to do it several times before I had results I was happy with. Youtube videos of people doing it very easily are either: 1) done by someone who was very lucky 2) done by someone who has failed several time behind camera, but didn't want to tell you that. The unfortunate thing about luck is that if you are lucky and it works for you with milk from a large supplier, it will probably continue to work with your recipe as long as you use that milk. So people for whom it works are usually clueless about why it doesn't work for everybody.
I will double down on what Mikechar said - avoid Mozzarella in the beginning. That way lies a lot of frustration!
The reason I believe people say that making soft cheeses is "easy" is that you can see and taste the results quite quickly. Ricotta, Paneer, Farmer's Cheese - all of those you can make and enjoy within an hour or so. Cottage Cheese, Chevre, and some others take a day or so. etc. To make a Gouda or a Cheddar, now you have to wait weeks and months before you can see what happened and that can strain your patience.
Thanks for the advice on the Mozzarella and how challenging it is to make. I didn't think it would be that difficult as I see it used a lot in pizza recipes, experience is the key I suspect.
if you want to make a quick simple one I would suggest halloumi not mozzarella . Halloumi is at least really tasty when grilled. Then when you get a little more confident try brie/camembert but make sure you can control the maturing temperature - 13-15C for two weeks and then 7C . Work our how you are going to do that and you will get a good result. Too high temperatures result in disaster !