Cheese: The Biggest Accomplishment of my Life

One of the food items I miss most is cheese. I mean, I’m from Vermont. Cheese is a very important part of my life. I can eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Even dessert. Yummm apple pie and cheddar cheese.

Squeezing limes for the acid.

Anyway. Yes, there technically is cheese in Chiang Mai. Technically there is almost everything in Chiang Mai. But it’s a little out of my price range, and not that great quality either that I can tell. So, when a friend casually mentioned that she knew how to make cheese, a kind that doesn’t require any fancy inputs, only milk, an acid, and salt, I was all over it.

One Sunday evening, in between rounds of a fairly complicated but very fun board game, she taught me how to make cheese. She calls it paneer, I call it a generic ‘farmers’ cheese,’ and it can be anywhere from whipped-cream-cheese texture to a paneer or hard feta. You can also add herbs and other flavors to mix it up.

Making cheese is fun!

The next week, Jon and I taught some of our Chiang Mai friends how to make the cheese, and split a bunch of it. This week, a friend and I went super-fancy and got goats’ milk at a local health food store (told you, Chiang Mai has everything). The resulting cheese was a tart, creamy goat cheese, into which I plan to mix some of the half-kilo of dill that was the smallest size the vendor at the market would sell me. Seriously, it’s a freakin’ tree of dill. But that’s beside the point.

What’s the point? You can make cheese in a rice cooker, using milk you buy at the grocery store. It’s really easy. It’s no aged cheddar, or tangy Gruyere, but it’ll do. Especially when your main source of dairy is an overdose of condensed milk in your iced tea.

I’ll call it bootleg cheese.

Bootleg Cheese

Equipment: a rice cooker or stove and pot; a thin cloth (can be cheesecloth, we used a cheap-o handkerchief and it’s fine); colander or something else with holes (steamer tray from a rice cooker works well).

Ingredients

-Milk (however much you want. A liter will make around 2 cups of cheese, depending on how hard you want it. The harder the cheese, the less cheese your milk will make.

-An acid – vinegar or lime juice. We used lime juice, couldn’t really taste it in the outcome, don’t worry. A liter of milk will use 1-2 Tablespoons, depending on how strong the acid is (less vinegar, more lime juice).

-Salt – around a teaspoon.

Step 1: Pour milk into the rice cooker/pot and turn on medium-high heat (or just ‘on’ in the case of a rice cooker). Sprinkle in about a teaspoon of salt, depending on how much milk you have and how salty you want your cheese. You can always add more later.

Step 2: Heat up the milk to a slow boil, to where it starts to get foamy and bubbly, and a bit of a skin on top.

Step 3: Turn off the heat and immediately add your acid, slowly, until the milk separates into curds and whey. (At this point you may want to make a Little Bo Peep joke). You want to make sure it fully separates, so once it looks separated, add a little more acid. You will be able to see white clumps floating in a yellowish-clear liquid.

Step 4: Put the cloth into the straining instrument (colander, steaming tray, etc), and rest the strainer over a bowl or in the sink. (If you catch the whey in a bowl, you can use it to bake, cook pasta, etc to add a bit of creaminess to a recipe that calls for water). Then pour the ‘liquid formerly called milk’ over the cloth.

Step 5: Let the liquid sit, with the whey draining out of the cheese. Once enough liquid drains out and it looks like runny cottage cheese, you can gather up the ends of the cloth and squeeze out more whey. If you want the cheese to be hard, tie the cloth up around the ball of curds and hang it overnight over a bowl or the sink. If not, the cheese is finished as soon as it’s the consistency you want.

Keep in mind that this is a bit of an experimentation process. Measurements can’t be exact because different milks behave differently, and the acids may be different concentrations. The first time we tried this at home, it was a disaster. But also, if you mess up the separation process and it doesn’t seem to be draining, just start over – combine everything again, reheat the milk, add more acid, etc. It may end up more creamy, but it’ll be fine.