I'm so excited to report that I made my first batch of homemade cream cheese yesterday!
It was astoundingly easy. And the best cream cheese I've ever tasted. (I haven't liked Philadelphia cream cheese and other commercial brands for a while now. So gummy and tastes artificial.)
Here's how you make it... (recipe from "Nourishing Traditions" by Sally Fallon)
1. Buy a quart of plain yogurt with nothing added (I bought 2 500g/17 oz containers of this brand:
http://www.fageusa.com/products.html).
2. Put a strainer over a glass or stainless steel bowl, a dish cloth or cheese cloth (that's why they call it cheese cloth!) over the strainer, and dump the yogurt onto the cloth.
3. Loosely put another cloth over the whole thing to keep it covered and clean, and let it sit overnight (8-10 hours).
4. In the morning, you will have some liquid at the bottom of the bowl. That's whey! Pour into a glass container or Mason jar, cover, and keep in the fridge for up to 6 months (you can use this for lots of things, which I will get into later).
5. Now take your cloth with the cheese in it, tie it onto a wooden spoon (being careful not to squeeze), and rest the spoon on a glass pitcher or a glass Pyrex measuring cup so more whey can drip out. When the bag stops dripping, the cheese is ready.
The cream cheese will keep for a month in the fridge, and the whey will keep for up to 6 months.
I'm going to have some right now on toast. Yum! Especially good with a little raw honey.
Here's an article about the dairy, Organic Pastures, where we get our milk and butter (soon they are going to expand into cheeses!)
http://www.newfarm.org/features/0103/california/mcafee/index.shtml If you live in California, you can probably get this milk at Whole Foods, Wild Oats, or other health food store. It's more expensive than regular pasteurized milk but it's totally worth it when you consider all the benefits:
* Clean, healthy milk from clean, healthy (and happy) free-range cows
* The milk is not boiled (pasteurized) so it still has enzymes (which help you assimilate nutrients and fight cancer-causing free radicals, as well as other things -- most foods we eat do not have enzymes)
* The enzymes also help you digest your food -- so if you are lactose-intolerant, you would probably digest raw milk just fine
* Because the milk is not heated, it also contains all the good microorganisms (probiotics) we need in our gut to keep us healthy. It is precisely these microorganisms that fight the bad germs (like the flu and viruses).
* Support a farm that is doing things the right way, letting their cows roam freely and eat grass -- not a factory farm where cows live in cages, eat soy and other grains (which they are not meant to eat) and are treated like machines, overmilked to a ridiculous degree (not to mention sick and pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones)