With the gallon of home made yoghurt sitting in the fridge, it’s time to do some thing useful besides dribble sweety tasty honey over the yoghurt and dive in head first.  Time to make…Cheese!!!

This soft cheese is a quick easy cheese that can be made in as little as a few hours with only 2 ingredients.

Shiraz

(Soft Cheese)

Translation:

Use milk that is just drawn, still warm, incorporating the renet as it is, with its skin, and whipping the milk while it is warm so that it coagulates.  Then pour it into molds made from willow…sprinkle salt (over it) and set it aside.  If you wish to eat it right away, it is not necessary to salt it, in which case it is called simple cheese.

Ingredients:

1 pint yogurt (full fat)                 1 Tbs salt

OR

1 gallon milk                             1 tablet Rennet             1 Tbs salt

Note:  Rennet is an enzyme of a young mammal’s stomach that  is still drinking milk.  When the calf (cow) or kid (goat) was slaughtered the stomach lining cut into squares and mixed with freshly drawn milk to produce cheese.  Modern day solution are chemical tablets which produce the same effect with out the need of a young mammalian’s stomach lining.

Redaction:

Take whole milk fresh, if available, if not warm up a gallon of whole store bought milk.  Heat the milk to the just boiling, then mix the milk with rennet tablets.   Stirring until the milk starts to turn solid.  Pour into molds and salt.  The molds used can be anything from a butter mold to a bread mold, though a bread mold would make a very large loaf of cheese.

A second way to make cheese is to take full fat yogurt and mix with 1 Tbs of salt then pour into a lined strainer (either multiple layers of muslin or a coffee filter) that is supported in a bowl.

Drain of the resulting liquid until very little liquid continues to be produced from the salted yoghurt.

The translated recipe does not say pour of the liquid though there is nothing that the liquid can be used for.  I believe the draining part is omitted because this step is so common sense, that to include it would waste ink and paper.

Once there is no more liquid being produced take the soft cheese out of the filter and eat.

This type of cheese is much like a soft cream cheese or a farmers cheese. I put mine into the refrigerator where the resulting soft cheese can last up to a week, 2 weeks in a sealed container.  This is also known as a Persian yogurt or Persian cheese.