Beginner cheese maker - Feta cheese

My journey as a beginner cheese maker continuous and today I want to show all of you how to make feta cheese. Feta is a cheese made of sheep’s milk. Unfortunately, I live in rather small town and the shops provide only cow’s milk so I had to use that one instead. The sheep’s milk is rich in lipase which gives feta the distinguishable flavour that cow's milk doesn't have. Fortunately it is possible to add this enzyme during the cheese making process and I could get a hold of it to enrich my milk. This way the taste of cow's milk feta is very similar to the one made originally made with sheep’s milk. 

Cheers, 

Suzanah

Ingredients to make feta cheese:

• 4 L of milk (do not use UHT milk)
• ¼ tsp of lipase
• 1 tsp of calcium chloride (makes harder curds when pasteurised milk is used)
• 2x ¼ cup of water
• Mesophilic bacteria cultures
• Rennet (used according to package, different rennet’s have different strengths)
• 1/3 cup of salt (salt should not have iodine) 
• 2L of water - optional

  1. Dissolve lipase in water and set it aside for 20 min. Do the same with the calcium chloride. 

2. Pour milk to a pot, add dissolved lipase and dissolved calcium chloride. Then heat up the milk to 30oC and when these temperature is reached add mesophilic bacteria culture. Set the milk aside for 1 hour keeping the temperature at 30oC. 

3. After 1 hour add rennet and stir the milk gently but very well for a couple of minutes. It is essential to mix in the rennet well with the milk. After mixing, cover the pot and let the rennet do it’s magic of setting the curds for 1 hour at 30oC. 

4. After 1 hour the milk should be set and the curd should cleanly break when knife is inserted on an angle and lifted slightly. If the curd doesn’t break cleanly give the milk couple more minutes.  

5. Cut the curds in 1.5 cm cubes. Cut diagonally through the curds pot to make sure all curds are cut down to the bottom of a pot. Then set the curds aside for 10 minutes so they release whey. Afterwards gently stir the curds for 20 minutes. The curds will shrink substantially. 

6. When stirring is done drain the whey through the cheese cloth in a colander, and hang the curds in a cheese cloth over sink to drain for 4 hours. Afterwards take the cheese out of the cheese cloth, cut it in as big or as small pieces as you want and either salt to taste and place it in a fridge for couple of days or add it in a salt bath for couple of days. With the salt bath there is a risk that the cheese will become soft and will break (or rather dissolve) so I recommend not to use the salt as this happened to my feta I made before I made these one so be careful.

And the cheese is done!! It is feta salad time for me now :) 

If you want to see how to make other cheese types, please take a look at my earlier posts:

• Lebneh
• Halloumi