Make Yogurt Cheese — Yes, You Can!

Yesterday’s post described the incredibly simple task of making yogurt from store-bought milk. Of course, you can make it from raw milk as well but it must be pasteurized. There are many ways to pasteurize milk (and a quick online search will bring you to how to do that, so I will not address it here). Now you have yogurt. You might have a LOT of yogurt, more than you could ever eat. This is where you can start to get really creative.

You can continue to process your milk turned yogurt and turn it into yogurt cheese. Oh, this again sounds mysterious and difficult but it is almost as easy as forcing shrubs in winter by cutting them and placing in water or merely stirring already made yogurt into your milk and culturing it at low temps (yes, you can also use a purchased culture and even probiotics from capsules). But I digress and should probably revise the previous post adding all of this information.

Here is how you make yogurt cheese from yogurt:

• Place yogurt in cloth: muslin, flour sack, even multiple layers of cheesecloth
• Hang from cabinet knob or some other stationary object
• Place bowl beneath the cloth filled with yogurt
• Allow to drain for several hours

Yogurt hanging from my ricer in a flour sack towel.

You end up with yogurt cheese in the cloth and whey in the bowl. So very simple. Anyone can do it. Really.

Scrape the cheese out of the cloth and use it to make spreads, in recipes, or anyway you might use a goat cheese. It is almost cream cheese, but not quite. Ask me how I know this. I tried to make frosting from yogurt cheese and it was too runny. Now, maybe if I had placed it in a centrifuge of some sort I would have gotten enough whey out to use it as cream cheese for frosting, but I don’t own a centrifuge so no go.

One day I got creative and minced some of my fermented garlic, added a little salt and dill, and voila! a delicious cheese spread for crackers. Oh, the kids ate this up quickly. You can use your yogurt cheese in any goat cheese spread recipes. It will be much softer than goat cheese, though. Enjoy!