making goat's cheese

[burek]

I have found some recipes and my neighbour has an excess of goat's milk at the moment so I was thinking about trying to make goat's cheese. Anyone know how many pounds/kilos of cheese you get per litre/pint of milk? Any alternatives to rennet? And for how long does it keep?

[Clara]

I have a little experience, but more as a spectator so I hope I can remember this right....

For an alternative to rennet (assume you want to avoid dead animal products?) you can use the sort of purple fronds from the cardoon (type of artichoke). You should be able to source this and other veggie rennets by googling it.

How much to a litre? I think that might be a how long is a piece of string question, depends on type and density of cheese. However I´m sure it would be worth making even if all you had was a litre.

You can also make "fresh" cheeses, i.e. those that only have a shelf life of a day or so and are fairly liquid in consistency, by adding lemon juice or vinegar at the point of boiling. To be sure you´d have to look it up, I can´t remember the method exactly.

And don´t forget yoghurt....shop bought comes nowhere near in comparison to home made.

I hope some of this might help. Let me know how you get on, I have to get my act together once the baby goat has..erm..left

Clara x.

[pskipper]

This site has goat cheese recipies and stuff

http://fiascofarm.com/dairy/index.htm

[farmerdrea]

I can't think of a vegetable rennet at the moment, but you should be able to source one from a cheesemaker's supply in the UK (you surely must hvae at least one!). I'm in NZ now, but still get supplies from the US, from Ricki Carroll at New England Cheesemaking in Massachusetts. www.cheesemaking.com/ I started off with her book and her starter kit about 6 years ago, and learned from the book and this website: http://biology.clc.uc.edu/Fankhauser/Cheese/Cheese.html

I do hard and soft cheeses from goats' and cows' milk, and it takes about 10 litres of goats' milk to make a 1 kilo hard cheese (or about 3 cups soft cheese), and 10 litres of cow's milk to make a 2 kilo cheese.

With milk to play with, it's worth it to give it a go; soft cheeses are a lot easier to experiement with, and you can make a very very simple vinegar cheese from adding a good quality, organic apple cider vinegar (you can use any vinegar, I just think this one tastes nicest), adding just enouch to make the milk curdle. Blood temp milk is best to start with. You then strain the curds from the whey and drain it in cheesecloth, and you have a basic ball of cheese which you can eat as is, or use seas salt and/or herbs to flavour.

Hope this helps.
Andrea
NZ

[ina]

VegeRen from Just Wholefoods is a vegetarian rennet - you should get it in most health food shops. I've made quite decent soft cheese with it (don't have my own milk at the moment, so I'm not bothering with hard cheese).

[Shirley]

We've used vegeren, but also used lemon juice/vinegar too.