My First Farmhouse Cheddar

I started making cheese a month ago. The aim is to be able to store the abundance of Summer/Autumn goat milk for the leaner Winter months. I chose to store it in the form of cheese! 🙂 Never having made hard cheeses before, this was a steep learning curve. Luckily for me, Ricki Carroll’s book ‘Home Cheese Making‘ is easy to follow with step by step instructions. My very first hard cheese was the Farmhouse Cheddar (p104). The only variation, between the recipe and my cheese, is that I made it with raw goat milk, not pastuerised cow milk. We prefer to keep our milk raw, to retain all the health giving enzymes that naturally occur in the raw milk. This cheese was aged for 30 days, under wax, in the cheese cave, and the great unveiling occurred last night! It was with much excitement that I cracked open the wax on my first ever Farmhouse Cheddar! The structure looked good, reasonably soft with some good holes. It sliced well, was slightly crumbly, and the flavour was great, with a nice tang, if a little too salty. I can remedy the saltiness next time, by reducing the amount of salt I add to the curds. All in all, a success, and I will continue with my amateur cheese making whilst I have a plentiful supply of milk! 🙂