Feta selber machen

Next door to me lives a cow. More precisely, several cows. Even more precisely, I’m temporarily living next door to them.

Every morning at five, the milking machine starts thundering away. These days, it does the job that used to be the rooster’s responsibility: waking everyone up.

But hey – country life shows no mercy, the alpine pasture knows no sin, and the cow gets no holidays. She has to be milked, otherwise she’ll get mastitis – and then she’ll make a lot more noise than any milking machine ever could.

The upside of having bovine neighbours is an abundant supply of excellent raw milk, straight from the source. And since our current favourite dish is feta & meli – feta with honey – and supermarket feta somehow tastes a little dull, why not make our own cow’s-milk feta?

I decided to put the hot weather to good use. After no-bake cakes and no-knead bread, here comes no-heat cheese.

This is how it works. If you have the opportunity and the patience, you absolutely have to try it. It was SOOOO good!

Ingredients

• 2–3 litres raw milk

• 2–3 tbsp ready-made milk kefir

• a small pinch of rennet

• salt

Bring the milk to 30°C, stir in the milk kefir and leave it for one hour. In my case, I didn’t heat the milk at all – I simply put it out in the sun. With summer temperatures outside, that worked perfectly. The milk reached exactly 34°C, which was ideal.

After an hour, dissolve a small pinch of rennet in a little water and stir it into the lukewarm milk. Don’t stir for long – just distribute it briefly, then hold the spoon still in the centre to bring the milk to rest as quickly as possible.

By then it was already early afternoon, so I left the pot undisturbed in a quiet, shady place for an hour. The rennet causes the milk to set, giving it a firm, pudding-like consistency.

Then take a knife and cut the “pudding” – or, to use the proper cheesemaking term, the curd – into lots of small cubes. Wait five minutes.

Next, stir slowly with a whisk. Over the course of about 20 minutes, gently stir the curds every now and then until the pieces are roughly the size of a little fingernail.

Drain off the whey and transfer the curds into a cheese mould. If you don’t have one, use a cloth and a sieve – the cheese won’t have quite such a pretty shape, but it works just as well.

I let mine drain for about 2–3 hours, turning the cheese in the mould once every hour so that the curds knit together evenly.

Finally, prepare a 6% brine: 60 g salt per litre of water.

Put the cheese into the brine and leave it there for two days. Keep the container at room temperature. This is when the actual fermentation gets going: the cheese even expands slightly and develops its characteristic little holes.

After two days, transfer it to the fridge in a small amount of brine and let it mature for another 2–3 days.

Then: EAT!!!!

Video tutorial: How to make feta at home: