By Jean Mansfield, How to Make Cheese Making cheese is no harder than baking a cake. I’ve helped children to successfully make basic cheeses, and if they can do it, you can too. It’s just milk and an acid, lemon juice or white vinegar, and you can make the simplest of cheeses in just half an hour. It can be soft, or you can press it and make it harder – it’s as simple or as difficult as you want it to be. Most people learn the little techniques and tricks from baking with their family and cheesemaking used to be like that too, until it was commercialised in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now it’s a mystery to most cooks, something I want to bring out into the open. There are three aspects to cheesemaking that commonly trip up the beginner. 1. Not keeping it clean There are minute bacteria living on everything, some good, some bad, and the trick to safe, delicious cheese is introducing ‘good’ bacteria and eliminating the risk of cultivating ‘bad’ bacteria. The number one way to do it is to have a good sanitisation system in place. Cleaning and sanitising is half the effort, and in fact it’s 100% of the safety aspect of it, you must get that right because that’s crucial to the success of your end cheeses. It’s not hard to do, it’s just two buckets half filled with water, one to rinse utensils, one with sanitiser in it to clean them, and you have the successful combination, that’s it. Equipment like pots, pot lids and moulds must also be sanitised before cheesemaking begins, and there are several ways to achieve this: you can add 4% strength chlorine bleach or iodine to water, use baby bottle sterilising solution or tablets, or brewing sterilising tablets or solution (if suitable for dairy). 2. Not understanding their rennet The second major mistake by beginners is getting confused about what strength rennet they have and how to use it with different recipes. There are three different types of rennet and it comes in three different forms (liquid, tablets and granules). If a recipe doesn’t tell you definitively what type, strength and form that you should use and you guess (and almost inevitably get it wrong) you’re going to either have a curd that doesn’t set or you’re going to make a rubber ball of a cheese If you get that part right then your cheese is going to have the correct texture and is going to age correctly. If you get it wrong you’re going to end up with soppy cheese or a brittle cheese or a cheese that will turn bitter as it ages. When you buy rennet, it will have an IMCU (International Milk Clotting Unit) measurement of its strength on the packaging. This tells you how much of that rennet you can use for a specific measure of milk, eg 10 litres. It’s then simple to calculate what you’ll need when a recipe isn’t specific about the type of rennet used or you’re using something different to what is specified – you just work it out using the milk quantity as your guide. 3. Thinking you need fresh milk The cheapest way to make cheese is to source milk from a farmer or to farm the animal yourself, but you can still make beautiful artisan cheeses from milk that’s available at your supermarket, and they’ll still be great value. The best milk is non-homogenised ‘farmhouse’ milk (4% fat in New Zealand, but it varies depending on what country you’re in). Look for the creamiest one, where you have to clear away the cream from the top of the bottle or container. However, you can also use 3%+ fat milk for some cheeses too, you just won’t get as great a yield of cheese. Even if you pay $20-$25 for the milk you need for something like a blue Stilton, that’s still a quarter of the price of buying that cheese at your supermarket. ©  Jean Mansfield, author of How to Make Cheese