Cheese of my very own

I just finished "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver.  Great book.  She mentions making her own cheese and after finding a kit to do the same at the Ferry Building Farmer's Market last month, I set about the project Sunday.  

The only ingredient I needed to contribute outside of the kit was milk.  I decided to get some raw milk.  And I decided all the milk needed to be in glass bottles.  Just because it seemed to fit more than a plastic jug of 2%.  

If making my own cheese didn't stir my genes to some nostalgia outside of my lifetime enough, then the glass jars certainly did.  The raw bottle was whole milk from happy California cows.  The other was just organic from Straus dairy.  I tried a sip of both and having been a several years ago convert to Soy (because dairy goes bad so much faster) the taste was lovely and also nostalgic of my growing years when I drank huge glasses by the meal full.

First step - put all the milk in a big pot and start to heat it up.  There is no picture of this, but I'll leave it to your wild imagination.

I added the rennet and then raised the temperature slightly.  Then I added the citric acid.  In less than 30 seconds what had been a lovely pot of warming milk became a very distinct separation of whey and curd:

Amazing!  I squealed with delight over this chemistry before my eyes.

After I took it out of the whey, the water continued to flow out of the 'almost cheese' in the bowl.  I am suddenly having a vague reminder of a fairy tale in my memory where a small person battled a large person and one of the challenges was to squeeze water from a rock.  He deftly used cheese.  This was exactly that experience.

When I took the cheese out of the warm water bath for salting and stretching, it was melty and stringy and begging to be eaten.  It was good later on when I finally did serve it to guests that evening, but in the future it would be the perfect immediate appetizer.  Or, something to throw onto a crust with leaves from the basil plant on my kitchen table for a margherita pizza.

Anyway, the final product: