Cheese glorious cheese… And butter. Dairy is associated with the holiday of Shavuot and making cheese and butter is not a very difficult project to do with children of all ages. This post includes a number of recipes for cheese as well as how tos based on our experiments with making butter and cream cheese.
To Make butter:
Take some cream and place it in a closed container. Shake it for about fifteen minutes. If doing this with small children, you can trade off to make it easier for them. The container above shows the resulting butter.
Cream Cheese:
To make cream cheese, use yogurt, sour cream or shamenet matok. You can use cheese cloth or alternatively, an old, clean (broken/undesired) undershirt to strain the water out of the dairy product of your choice. To make your cream cheese more exotic you can also add spices or other seasonings to taste. A little salt goes a long way to make it more cream cheesey.
Other cheeses to try
Rennet
We have been experimenting with trying to make rennet using fig leaves. Rennet is an ingredient needed to make harder cheeses like mozzarella and chedder. Rennet is often made from animals, and therefore any rennet we would want to use in making cheese would need to be kosher. I did not find any rennet locally. However, I read about making vegetable based rennet and one of the possible sources was fig leaves. We have access to fig leaves so we decided to try to make our own. We had fun trying to make mozzarella with home made rennet. However, the mozzarella was far from any mozzarella I have ever seen and our rennet did not quite work as intended. Maybe one day.
For more about Kosher cheese and rennet:
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