Homemade Farm Cheese

So a friend at church was telling me about making cheese at one of her RS meetings and it sounded like a lot of fun! They used a tablet to make it form. I hunted around online and found that you can also do it using lemon juice.

1 gallon whole milk
1 tsp. salt
1/2 c. lemon juice

1. Heat the milk and pinch of salt in a heavy duty pot over medium heat until temperature reaches 190'F (frothy on top like a simmer).
2. Add lemon juice and stir. You should see it curdle. Let sit for 10 minutes.
3. Line a seive with doubled up cheesecloth, a clean handkercheif, or a non-terry dishtowel. Pour liquid through seive. The seive will catch the curds. The whey will flow through. Gathering the corners of the cloth, squeeze out excess liquid. Store refridgerated approx 1 week (or to the date of expiration of the milk you used).
Yield: approx 1 lb cheese

Helpful hints culled from reading lots of comments on other recipes:

• Do NOT used ULTRApasturized milk. Just regular.
• If the liquid going through your seive is white, your milk wasn't hot enough. Pour it back into your pot, reheat to 190'F, add (another) 1/4 cup lemon juice and try again. The whey should be yellow. (I had to do this because the first time I heated to 180' like in some recipes-didn't work.)
• You can add in herbs (or probably anything else) as you're straining it before you form it into a ball if you want.
• You can reduce the recipe:  I used 4 cups milk, 1 T lemon juice, pinch of salt and ended up with a baseball sized round of cheese.

Slices of cheese fried and served with tomato and basil, fresh cracked salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil.

Mom and Dad's cheese with finely chopped onions and basil.