Homemade Goat Cheese
Author & Photographer: Paige Resnick
You know when you’re at Trader Joe’s and something catches your eye and you just HAVE to buy it? And then you come home with fermented mango hot sauce, freeze dried broccoli chips, and a carton of goat milk and no bone-in skin-on chicken thighs like you planned? No? Just me? Well I had a carton of goat milk and I needed to do something with it.
I have recently been binging a PBS show called The Mind of a Chef that you can stream on Netflix (I highly recommend, it has very mediocre video quality, graphics created by someone certainly on an acid trip, plus narration by Anthony Bourdain. What more could you want in a TV show?). One of the episodes features famed California chef David Kinch making goat cheese from scratch in only a couple hours. Without a culture. I don’t care if you are David Kinch. That’s impressive to me.
So obviously I had to do it myself. The Mind of a Chef episode plus a quick internet search shows a pretty general consensus on how to achieve this goaty creamy magic--boil the milk, add lemon juice, let curdle, strain through cheesecloth. Done. Seems easy enough. But a couple problems stood in my way: 1. I don’t have cheesecloth just lying around (although after this experience I think it might be useful to stock up), and 2. You can’t buy unpasteurized goat milk in Trader Joe’s. Or even pasteurized goat milk. Only ultra-pasteurized. And I don’t have a goat lying around that I can milk at my convenience like David Kinch does. Bummer.
The first problem to fix was the cheesecloth. There are actually lots of alternatives to cheesecloth according to my trusty internet device. Apparently you can use pantyhose to separate the curds from the whey, but that sounded chemically and gross to me. Another option is using a coffee filter, but I don’t drink coffee so I didn’t have any of those. The trick that I used was a paper towel on top of a fine mesh sieve with a bowl underneath, which actually worked perfectly. I would just suggest pouring the milk through the contraption very slowly to avoid overflow and running the milk through twice to really catch all the curds since they are very small.
Now to the milk issue. The reason unpasteurized milk is the way to go is that it contains good bacteria which help to turn that milk into cheese, and at the same time give the cheese much more flavor and nuance. When milk is subjected to high temperatures in the pasteurization process, all that bacteria is killed off. And because the United States is scared of bacteria (and immigrants, and women presidents, and people of color, the list goes on), it’s almost impossible to find unpasteurized milk. The internet says that pasteurized milk still has enough bacteria to turn into cheese, but cautions against ultra-pasteurized. Well too bad. Trader Joe’s only has ultra-pasteurized. I guess we are breaking some rules here.
Even with these alterations, I was totally able to make goat cheese. In about 2 hours. Which is magical. While the cheese was definitely more of a spreadable cream than a solidified cheese, the taste was nice and tart. I would suggest not being shy with the salt and adding some dried herbs at the end to punch up the flavor.
Ingredients:
1 quart goat milk (pasteurized if you can find it, unpasteurized is even better, but work with what you got)
⅓ cup lemon juice
2 tbsp white vinegar
kosher salt, to taste
dried herbs of your choosing (tarragon, oregano, parsely, go wild), optional
Instructions:
In a medium pot, heat the goat milk over medium heat until it reaches 180ºF and begins to foam a bit on the top, stirring occasionally to maintain even heating.
Take the milk off the heat and add the lemon juice and vinegar. Stir until just combined. Let sit, undisturbed, for 30 minutes. You should see some curds forming, but they will be very small.
Place a paper towel in a fine mesh sieve over a medium bowl. Slowly pour the milk through the sieve into the bowl. If the liquid that collects in the bowl still looks pretty white, pour it through the sieve again. Let drain for at least 1 hour, or until there is no more whey dripping into the bowl. The whey collecting in the bowl should be a clearish pale yellow color. Also, don’t be scared if it looks really liquidy at the start. It will work! Just believe and give it an hour (or more if you are really anxious).
Your goat cheese has been born! Scrape the cheese out of the sieve and into a clean bowl. Mix in salt and dried herbs of your choosing. Refrigerate for a couple hours to solidify it even further. Tastes great served on crackers or crusty bread, and even better on salt and vinegar potato chips. Trust me.