Making Homemade Cream Cheese

We hadn't made cream cheese in quite a while.  Azure Standard, a co-op that we order from, just started carrying Cultures for Health and Tricia decided to order a starter kit to try out the cream cheese to see if it would work for making cheesecake. With Thanksgiving right around the corner, we normally buy a lot of cream cheese from the store to make cheesecake and radish dip and we normally put big dollups of our pepper jelly over a brick of cream cheese.  No sense in buying all that when you can make it yourself with Daisy and Rosie's rich milk/cream.

So here is the kit, complete with instructions and 4 culture packets.  Each packet is to be used with 1 gallon of milk.  Traditional cream cheese is made with 50% cream and 50% whole milk.  For richer cream cheese, use whole cream.  Tricia just used a gallon of whole milk from Daisy.  Her milk is the richest.  Let's do this!

Slowly heat a gallon of milk to 86 degrees.  Don't heat it fast.

Once at 86 degrees, remove from heat and pour in your starter packet.  Mix it in using an up and down motion versus stirring motion.

Cover it and let sit for 12 hours at room temperature.

After 12 hours, scoop all the curds in a colander in a bowl lined with a cotton rag and lift the rag, tying up the corners, allowing the whey to drip from the curds into a bowl placed below it.  Let drip for 12 hours.

Take it down, opening it up to reveal your cheese.

Knead some kosher salt into it.  Tricia found that in using 1 gallon of whole raw milk, it made:

• 1 3/4 pounds of cream cheese or 28 ounces, and 
• 3/4 gallon of whey

Tricia put 10 ounces of homemade cream cheese aside in a bowl as she was going to make a cream cheese icing for my birthday cake.

Here she is mixing cream cheese, butter, powdered sugar.  Once it is mixed, she stirs in chopped up pecans.

And the result is....  Perfection!

Yeah, we won't be buying cream cheese for Thanksgiving baking this year. Homemade cream cheese was, well... THE ICING ON THE CAKE!