Soft Goats Cheese

This was a wonderfully easy cheese to make and actually yielded a reasonable amount as well. Had I used cows milk this would have worked out far cheaper than buying a spreadable cheese. As it was it worked out about the same, but with the added bonus of having that lovely goat sourness to it as well.

All I needed for this was 2 litres of goats milk brought up to 72degF (sort of room temperature).

I mixed a drop of liquid rennet in to 4-5 tablespoons of skimmed milk (I could have used water, or other milk).

Then I added this and an ounce of mesophilic starter culture to the milk and stirred it in an up and down motion for about a minute.

Then I simply covered this with cling film and left it in a cool room out the way for about 20 hours. After which time the cheese was curdled enough to ladle into some moulds lined with cheese cloth.

I left these to drain in a cool room for 2 days and they lost a lot of liquid in that time.

I tipped out the contents of the cloth into a bowl and stirred in a pinch of salt.

Next I spread out a sheet of cling film on the work surface and generously ground pepper all over it.

I spread the cheese out on the cling film...

... and carefully rolled it up into a log, trying to get as much pepper around the cheese as possible whilst also trying to avoid trapping air in.

Then I simply left this in the fridge for another day for the flavours to develop a bit and hey presto, done!

It really was a fantastically easy and tasty cheese and so inexpensive I’ll be making it a regular. I served it with some home made chutney and sourdough bread.

For future batches I’m going to try draining the cheese for an extra day to hopefully produce a slightly firmer cheese and maybe gently press a little after draining. Then try rolling in something different, such as herbs like chives, or perhaps some crushed dried chilli peppers. Or I may just leave it as it is and have it on toast with honey, one of my favourite ways to enjoy goats cheese.