Cheese Making: Feta - Attempt 1

I was perusing Fankhauser's Cheese Page on the weekend and got the cheese making bug.  I've made yogurt before with some success.  What could be difficult about cheese?   I love feta, and it looked straight forward enough.  But like all things of this nature, details are important.

Mistake #1:  4 litres of milk is NOT the same as 1 U.S. gallon.  It's close but those extra two cups of liquid may have been too much.  My curds didn't become very thick, and they didn't hold together.  It looked more like lumpy milk soup than anything else.

From Cheese Making

I continued on anyway, not much to lose now. I tried draining the whey through some sterilized cloth but it was too slow. In the end I used the bags I use to strain juice for jelly and that worked quite well.

From Cheese making

From Cheese making

I let the curds drain in the fridge overnight. Mistake #2: This morning I hurriedly mixed in the salt and shove the curds into a tin-can cheese press. Around 3 this afternoon as I stared at my monitor at work I realized that I didn't line the press with cloth and it was likely that all I had done was squish the curds out the bottom of the can. Thankfully I didn't have much pressure happening in the press and not much had happened. I fixed things up proper, put some more pressure into the contraption and everything is now at work in the fridge. I even see some more whey coming out.

From Cheese making

From Cheese making

I haven't given up on this yet. If it's not firm enough after pressing then I'll have a mountain of thick cottage cheese.


Update: August 17, 2010: The press managed to squish the cheese down by 1 1/2 inches. I cut the resulting cylinder of feta into two, then into 1/8th's, and I put it all into the brine. It's still pretty soft, but it is somewhat cheesy. Maybe it will firm up after a couple of days of pickling.