Raw healthy cheese can be made in your kitchen!

I am sharing how I make unsalted raw cheese, of the cottage cheese variety. Why? Because it's delicious, and it is another way of using raw milk to get and stay healthy! Aajonus Vonderplanitz' book We Want To Live, and the other book The Recipe For Living Without Disease, have uses for cheese, and so I use mine.

Raw milk and raw milk products are so valuable in maintaining or regaining good health! In my case it has been a regaining of health. (For more on this, you may wish to look further down in the blog in the cancer section to my story first posted in four parts on November 1st, 2007.)

I usually use the full fat milk, though I imagine skimmed milk could be used as well. If you use the full fat milk, the fat will float to the top of the bottle. I have my stainless steel strainer ready to house the cheese, once the milk has clabbered or solidified after a few days.

Now to the procedure: at first, I take a quart of milk in a covered glass bottle (or put the milk in a quart glass jar or bottle) and set it on the kitchen counter until it solidifies or clabbers. In the summer time it will solidify within a few days or less. I take some care not to jostle the bottle by moving it around too much, and I definitely do not shake or stir it. Somehow that lack of motion helps the good bacteria to do their job and make it in to cheese, right there in the bottle. Since the milk will expand as it clabbers, you may want to take a few spoon-fulls off the top before starting the clabbering process.

If it's too cold on or around my kitchen counter, I encourage the bottle of milk to make itself in to cheese by placing warm bottles of water surrounding the bottled milk (but not touching it) and I cover all of them (the bottle of milk and the bottles of warm water) with a towel. I might repeat the process of replacing the warm water perhaps once in the morning, once mid-day and once before bed time. This simply gives the bottle of milk a warmer environment, which it needs evidently, in order to become cottage cheese. You can tell when it has "cheesed" by slightly tilting it, and you will see that it has solidified, or you may see bubbles in the bottle. If so, these bubbles will likely be visible mostly down to or near the bottom of the bottle.

When the bottle of milk has clabbered, and having used the full fat milk, I use a dull knife to scoop the cream off the top and put that in a small jar. That cream will have become sour cream. Scraping the cream off the top first, has several advantages. The sour cream does not solidify in the same way as the cheese (milk) part does. If you put the sour cream in to the same strainer as you put the cheese (milk) part, the sour cream will ooze through the strainer and be lost in the liquid whey and it will be wasted. That sour cream is valuable fat since it's raw fat and is loaded with good bacteria, so you may want to save it and use it separately. I definitely do!

After having taken out the fat, I use the same dull knife to gently take the cheese out in to the strainer. I use a conical stainless steel strainer and provide enough space to drip in to a bowl below it. (That whey that dripped through in to the bowl can be used or discarded.) You may use another type of strainer, or a cheese cloth. This process as a whole may take some practice. I had a few "failures" at the beginning, but I found it was worth it. From experience I learned that it was usually due to an environment that was too cold, or, too much jostling of the milk by me, or in transport to me. You can always use the soured milk and cream anyway, even if you didn't make cheese with those first few batches.

Use this if you will, and lots of good health to you!

Barbara