Jump In, The Water is Fine.

The possibilities are vast. I bought 2 gallons of skim milk, 2 qts of heavy cream, 1 qt of cultured buttermilk, 1 qt of greek style yogurt -- at Target...it matters not where you get it...well maybe it does, you want to make sure the milk is fresh and storage coolers are appropriately cold.

Separately, I bought rennet from an online source, The Cheesemaker.com. There are other sources and I will try them out and post them. Steve Shapson, responded very quickly. I ordered on Friday and by Monday morning my order was in my post box. How's that for service?

On Saturday morning I started a batch of sour cream, and a batch of yogurt.

This is a picture of my first ever batch of yogurt.

YUM!!

So today I started a second batch of yogurt, and a batch of Neufchatel cheese. I didn't use any bacteria in the Neufchatel, because I made a classic mistake of leaping before I looked...I realized I couldn't make Mozzarella like I planned because I didn't have citric acid...I'm sure that's in the mail as I write...but I didn't have it this morning and I had already brought my milk up to room temp...I didn't want to get too complicated without first deciding on a cheese and reading up. So I quickly looked online and found the most simple cheese in the world to start with...Neufchatel.

It takes: milk, buttermilk, and rennet. (I make an alternative to raw milk using skim milk and heavy cream...this works better than using whole milk from the grocery store). You don't even have to cook it. Just bring the milk to about 70 F. degrees and mix in the buttermilk. According to the recipe 4 drops of rennet per gal, and I had a gallon of milk plus a pint or so of cream plus a couple splashes of buttermilk, so I dropped in 5 drops. Then just cover it up and wait for the curd to set...we'll see how long it takes.

So you might think me a little contradictory, my title advocates jumping in and making everything your feverish little mind can dream up, but I had to back-peddle a little to keep from wasting a gallon of milk and a pint of cream. Well heck...there are worse things in life than a little waste. One of them is not allowing your creative self to have a bit of fun.

Cheese is fun. I think I want to make butter now.