How I Make My Feta Cheese

Making feta cheese is not difficult. Here are the steps I use to make mine. 

We are blessed by the provision of Edna, our dairy goat. She is a gentle, occasionally stubborn girl who provides our family approximately 1/2 gallon of delicious milk daily. That is the first and most important ingredient, raw (unpasteurized) local goat milk. You need to scout out a source for local goat milk if you don't have a lactating dairy goat of your own. (ha)

I use about one gallon of milk to make our feta batch. It is fine to use slightly more if you want more. But we find a gallon of milk makes plenty of feta for our use over the next month.  

The first step after collecting the milk is to heat the temperature of the milk to about 75 degrees in an enamel or stainless pot. 

If you mix 1/2 gallon of fresh milk from your refrigerator with a 1/2 gallon of milk straight from your goat, the temperature comes out nearly perfect. Afterwards, I heat the milk briefly until it reaches 75 degrees Fahrenheit.

The next step is to add animal rennet. This ingredient causes the milk to form into plain cheese. 

They say that rennet was discovered by a boy crossing the desert. He packed milk in a the cow stomach skin so he would have something to drink on the the trip across the desert. When the thirsty boy stopped to take a drink, however, he discovered the milk in the skin turned to cheese. Mmmmmm, a nice gulp of cheese. (Ha-ha.) Thus, it was discovered that rennet (from an animal stomach) would mix with the biological organisms in milk to produce delicious cheese. 

The rennet product we use is shown below. You can buy it on Amazon or at Cultures for Health (link below).

You only need  four drops per gallon. This little bottle of animal rennet is nearly gone now, but it has lasted us for about a year. And, we make a lot of cheese. 

Let the rennet and the milk work their magic for about 30 minutes.

Next, add your packet of feta cheese culture powder. The product we use is from Cultures for Health.

It is ok if the rennet and milk mixture has already started to form cheese. Just stir the powder from the packet in and set the pot in a nice warm spot. (We like to put it next to our chimney because the bricks stay nice and warm even with no fire in our stove.) The goal is to keep the ingredients around 70 or 75 degrees. Let it sit for twelve hours.

After enough time has gone by, it is time to cut the curds. I do this step by using a bread knife to cut a checkerboard pattern through the cheese in the pot. I like to use the handles as a guide for my angles, but you can use whatever you like to make your checkerboard slices. Then, I shake my pot back and forth as shown below. 

I shake the pot like that two or three times over a thirty minute period. 

Then, you are ready to drain the whey from the cheese. A lot of whey will have already separated from the cheese, but the curds are still soaked with whey and you want gravity to separate the liquid for dryer cheese. 

This is simple process. Just put a cheese cloth over a large pot, and gently pour the ingredients into the pot. Wrap the cheese cloth around the contents, and hang the cheese cloth above the level of the fluid. (See pictures below.)

  

I let my cheese drain for at least 12 hours. That is longer than some recommend. But I like to let all the liquid drip out. It is still soft even after 12 hours.

The final step is a brine cure. Mix about 1/3 a cup of salt and water into a half-gallon jar. Leave enough space so you can add your cheese! Then, it is into the refrigerator to cure for up to 30 days. Here are the final pictures.

 

I tasted this batch.  Oooh, baby! This is some good feta cheese. 

As an added bonus, we now have a 1/2 gallon of whey for our pigs. They love it!