I shall try again.

I tried to have a travel blog once, but the problem with that was that when I was travelling I was way too busy to write anything or even feel guilty about it not doing it. And I had lost interest by the time I got home.

So I'm taking a different approach this time. This blog will be more general in its subject matter but may lean toward food and other stuff that I like and get kind of excited about. Mostly things I do at home.

So on that note, here is my first tale of the easy, the cheesy, and the Glam:

I like cheese. I like it a lot. I'm also into DIY - food-wise and otherwise - and have long pondered the intricacies of cheese-making. I have dreamed about having a little farm with some cows whose milk I use to make delicious things, so when I stumbled upon A Chow Life's intro to cheese-making with a recipe containing only four ingredients, none of which were bacterial, I was intrigued. I knew that fresh, unripened cheese was doable at home, but this actually looked like it might be good. Thus inspired, I did some calculating and substituting, and came up with the recipe below.

DIY Dill Cheese

1 litre of 2% milk
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice (about half of 1 large lemon)
1/8 tsp salt
2 tbsp fresh chopped dill

First, put the milk in a pot and heat it on medium-high heat until it just starts boiling. Stir it often while heating or else it will burn to the bottom of the pot. Once it has boiled, take it off the heat.

Second, pour in your lemon juice and stir until the milk has separated into curds (will look kind of like ricotta cheese) and whey (not gonna lie, looks like spinal fluid). It should take less than a minute. Apparently if your milk doesn't totally separate, you can put it back on the heat until it does... I didn't need to.

Third, pour your curds and whey through a strainer lined with cheesecloth or some similar fabric in your sink; I just used some cotton crinkle gauze that I had in my fabric stash. Gather up the top of the fabric so your cheese doesn't fall out and either put a weight (jar of beans, bottle of wine, etc) on top of the cheese and let it drain for a while (30-45 min) or, do like me, and just squeeze the liquid out.

Finally, peel your now-fairly-cheesy curds out of the cloth and add the salt and dill. You can do this with a food processor or with your hands - in either case treat it how you would treat bread dough. Basically you just need to break up the individual curds to make it more homogeneous and mix in your spices. You can now roll your cheese into a log, make little cubes, cookie-cutter it into alligator shapes... whatever you want. Then refrigerate it.

My thoughts on this recipe:

This cheese turned out pretty hard... like a mild cheddar. I think using a milk with a higher fat content like homo (whole milk, for you Americans) or adding some cream would make it a bit more spreadable. This could be seen as a benefit since I found my cheese kind of rubbery in texture.

It doesn't taste like much, though it is perfectly edible. If I were making this as plain cheese with no herbs, I'd use significantly more salt. Dill isn't a terribly strong spice, but I don't think I could add any more than I did since it kind of reduces the structural integrity of the cheese. I found the flavour to be stronger after a day or two, so maybe it intensifies with time. I can't vouch for that, the cheese didn't last that long.

You need a lot of milk to make a little cheese. For me, volume reduction was more than 3/4. 1 litre of milk made less than 125 ml of cheese.

All the negatives aside, it is wicked cool that I could make my own cheese, with ingredients that are easy to come by and without having to wait for it to age for anywhere from one month to seven years. I might not become a regular cheese maker, but maybe on special occasions.