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Natural Cheesemaking
Discover the beautiful craft of natural cheesemaking – the traditional way of turning milk into real cheese using time-honoured techniques, beneficial bacteria, and minimal processing. Whether you’re a beginner or experienced homesteader, this category covers making cheeses with raw milk, natural rennet, and wild or heirloom cultures.
No weird additives, no powdered starters, no waste, and no shortcuts – just honest, old-world cheesemaking that connects you to real food and self-reliance. Find in-depth tutorials, troubleshooting guides, seasonal recipes, and equipment recommendations, and the science behind why natural methods produce superior flavor and nutrition.
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Natural Cheesemaking: How to Make and Use Your Own Cheese Cultures
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What is a Cheese Culture? A cheese culture (or starter culture) is helpful bacteria that convert the lactose in milk into lactic acid. This process can also be called acidification, ripening, or just plain ‘culturing’. Some of these cultures are already present in raw milk, but for more faster and more reliable culturing, we will usually add something to the milk to ensure it develops the best kinds of flavours. In industrial cheesemaking, these cultures come in packets from a…
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How to Make Mozzarella Cheese at Home Without Citric Acid or Microwaves (Easy Vinegar Method)
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The difference between fast mozzarella and traditional mozzarella In this recipe I’ll be talking about fast mozzarella, which is a simple way to make stretchy and delicious pizza cheese at home. Traditional mozzarella is even more delicious, but involves slowly culturing the cheese until it reaches the right acidity, and the timeframe for this can be a bit slow and tricky to work with. With fast mozzarella, the milk is acidified by adding some kind of acid (vinegar, in the…
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Simple baked cheesecake
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Simple Baked Cheesecake Cheesecake is one of my favourite foods, but not something I used to make very often until I created this recipe. The recipe I’m sharing today is from A Year in an Off-Grid Kitchen, and could not be simpler. It features the easiest cheese to make at home – a simple whole milk ricotta. Or you can use whatever soft cheese you have around the house, as long as it is drained well and is not too…
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Creating a cheesemaking book for the rest of us: Natural Small Batch Cheesemaking
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Creating a cheesemaking book for the rest of us When I first started making cheese I thought I was failing at it. The recipes said to stir constantly for a full 45 minutes or so, and in my busy kitchen I just could not do that. The more I perfected my own style of making cheese, the more I began to think back about how things were done in the past: was the busy peasant really stirring for that whole…
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How to Make Yoghurt Off The Grid
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Yoghurt with a taste similar to what we might find in a grocery shop was something I gave up on for a long time. I made only room temperature viili for years, thinking that a good Greek or Bulgarian style of yoghurt was beyond me. At some point I decided I preferred the taste of this style of yoghurt enough to find ways to make it work, and now I make yoghurts far tastier and healthier than anything I can…
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How Homemade Dairy can Transform your Homestead
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Self reliance I sometimes get asked “how do you live without a fridge”, or “how do you get by without having to go grocery shopping all the time” and my answer every time is the same thing: We raise dairy animals and make the most of the milk they produce. When we have dairy, we have the key to self reliance. When you have milk coming into the kitchen fresh every day, there is no need for refrigeration. Milk is…
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Perfection
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I am not that great at describing foods. I sometimes laugh at the descriptions on the back of wine bottles, and at the obsessions that plague the cosmopolitan boomer-inspired worlds of recipes and restaurants, when to me there is just nothing like simple foods created traditionally, and there’s not much to say except ‘perfect’. This cheese deserves praise though. I will post pictures of it and tell its story. This cheese was the last cheese I made this year, towards…
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Roasted Butternut Squash and Spinach Salad with Cheese
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I’ve never successfully made a hard cheese with a natural rind before. On a biodynamic fruit day, back when we still had Buttercup the cow, I mixed some of her milk with some of our goats milk, cultured it, sort-of followed an asiago recipe (I am not so good with all the continuous stirring), pressed it, salted it, and put it in the makeshift cheese cave to age. Roughly once a week, mostly on other biodynamic fruit days, I would…
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Salted Caramel Cheesecake Pie (grain-free)
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There’s not much else that needs to be said when there’s salted caramel and cheesecake in the title. I will say that you could make this even more special by adding a drizzle of melted chocolate to the top after it’s cooled, or you could use chocolate instead of caramel. I made my own cheese for the one in the photos out of some Greek sheeps yoghurt, but it will work well with all kinds of soft cheeses (such as…
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Mason Jar Chèvre (easy 1 minute soft cheese)
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An easier way to make soft cheese Chèvre and other soft cheeses are pretty easy to make to begin with, but they usually begins with boiling water and sterilising everything in the boiling water, which adds extra time and hassle to the process. I’ve been getting massive cravings for chèvre, so much that I even looked at soft goats cheese in the shop (before quickly moving away, knowing that I can make better stuff at home) and knew I had…
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- Natural Cheesemaking: How to Make and Use Your Own Cheese Cultures
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