Cheese Making Our Story –
Warren & Belinda Allen
I once read that if you are waiting for your chance to become a smallholder, take the opportunity to learn how to do stuff because you won’t have so much spare time once you get there. Cheese making has interested me as we do use quite a lot of cheese in a week. I was lucky enough to be bought a hard cheese kit from Ascot for a birthday present one year. It was pretty much a chemistry set with all sort of sachets and bottles to add. Using shop-bought bottled milk, I set about making my first cheese. Varying results followed over the months most of which was edible, but we did find that a wine fridge works perfectly well as a cheese fridge for maturing purposes.
Ascot’s sell a powder called Fermenta which is a full-proof way of maturing the milk and adding the right amount of rennet. Fabulous but they soon struggled to stock it, so I had to find another source. After a quick google search, I settled for the lovely people at cheesemaking.co.uk. These people are my new heroes as they also stocked my next purchase of another book, Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll. This book is fabulous and anything it mentions in the book can be purchased from the site.
So now I feel proficient at cheese making ... but then I saw ayoutube video from New Zealand about the Mad Millie hard cheese kit. The press in this kit has gauges on it so you can judge the pressure better. It costs about £90 (in NZ$ plus postage). I was wandering through Lakeland in Chelmsford and nearly fell over when I saw it on their shelves. Add that to the Christmas list. Then my slightly mad husband decided that he would try to make brie. Hmmm. I watched over him as he made a huge round of brie. We waited for weeks and weeks but it grew some nasty looking mould which we decided shouldn’t have been there. It was given a good send off into the dustbin. Next he decided to make some stilton – that should be mouldy.
When we get to our smallholding and find ourselves over run with milk, I feel confident that we should be able to make cheese.
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