Homemade Friday: Homemade Feta

I made feta.

A large part of me feels like I need to apologize for that, like somehow me making homemade feta cheese is causing someone else reading this feel bad for not making homemade feta cheese.

(If that is you, fear not.  My house is covered in clutter.  I hope that makes you feel better.)

But the rest of me feels pretty awesome, because I MADE HOMEMADE FETA.

How cool is that?

I can't remember what first made me want to make feta.  I knew that it is usually made with sheep's milk, but I had a ready supply of cow milk from my sister and so hoped that I could work something out with it. 

I'd already made mozzarella, and have a continual supply of yogurt and kefir going at all times. So I guess I needed a new challenge.

In this situation, Google was my friend, as it usually is.  I searched around until I found a recipe that would work for me and didn't include doing a magical cheese dance or sage cleansing in order to get good results.

This one was relatively simple, and one I knew I could do.  I ordered milk from my sister and supplies from the cheese lady and my children to bed early so I could have enough time to get going.

It started off like this:

Three gallons of milk!

 With these supplies:

And then it looked like this:

Then this:

 Then I hung it over a pot on my stove to drain:

And then it looked like this:

I drained it some more, then I drained it even more - that last time over the utility sink in the back room because it had to stay there for a couple of days.

It left my house a bit ripe, if you know what I mean.  I started it when Chris was out of town for work, and when he came home he asked what smelled like sour milk.

I told him it was sour milk.  Duh.

After it drained for a couple of days I transferred it to one of Chris' beer grain storage containers.  Don't worry - he told me I could use it.

It stayed there for around two or three weeks to age.

When it came time to taste it, I admit that I was a little nervous.  I'm not really sure why, because I was there for every step of the process.  But I was worried that somehow I'd screwed everything up and would get food poisoning.

I didn't. 

It's absolutely delicious.  It's salty and sharp and creamy and crumbly and absolutely perfect.

Here's a blurry picture of last night's dinner - shrimp sauteed with collard greens, onions, garlic, tomatoes and green peppers.  Topped with homemade feta.  It was pretty freaking awesome.