Cheese Cheese Cheese Cheese

For those of you who don't know, I have ALLERGIES.  Quite a few of them.  I manage to get along just fine without the beef and the chicken, but the food I miss most of all is CHEESE.  I love cheese.

Here's the thing.  I may be allergic to dairy, but only to COWS dairy.  That's super important.  That means that I can eat other kinds of dairy.... goat, sheep etc. YAY.  But the selection of alternative cheese out there is slim.  You can get some goats feta, traditional goats cheese, you can even find some cheddar cheese.  What you can't find is..... cream cheese

Lets just say that my bagel is very lonely in the morning.

Soooo I looked it up on the internet and decided to make my own cream cheese.  yummy.  And for my first attempt it actually went alright. There were a few mistakes, but that's to be expected.

This is How To Make Goats Cream Cheese:

I started out with 4 litres of goats milk, some rennet (don't google this if you have a weak stomach) and some dairy culture (mesophilic m).

basically all you do is heat the milk to 30 degrees Celsius, mix in your culture, mix in you rennet and then let cool for 11-12 hours.

After the 'cheese' has sat for 11-12 hours all you do is pour everything through a couple layers of cheese cloth (or hand towel or clean pillow case or really any fine mesh fabric), squish it down and let it drain for 8-9 hours and then you have cream cheese.  That's it.

Sounds easy right?  How could I possibly mess that up....

I added too much rennet, which won't really hurt but it does make the cheese bitter.  Goats cheese is already bitter so lets just say that it was a little over-powering.  Also I got impatient and put weight on the cheese while it was in the cheese cloth to make it drain faster.  And then I forgot about it.  Overnight.  So the texture is no so creamy and more solid.

But its been a learning experience and I will give it another try soon. 

On a side note: 
I was really disappointed in how my pictures turned out of the milk and cheese, because in real life everything looked almost perfectly white. Blinding white. Turns out that in the photography class I missed (because I was in Lloyd) my teacher had gone over how to make whites whiter and blacks blacker and how your camera tries to turn those colours into 18% grey.  I've experimented with my camera since and I think I've figured out the trick... but that's another post.  Next time I make cheese the pictures will turn out better.