I never realized how easy it is to make homemade cream cheese. Homemade cream cheese is so much more tasty than store bought, has less added “junk” and is cheaper to make than buying the pre-made kind.
Now that I got the hang of making piima yogurt, which really is super easy, I am starting to experiment with it. It’s amazing to me all the ways I’ve been able to use it in my cooking: supplementing some of the oil in a pumpkin bread recipe and using it instead of mayo when making tuna salad just to name a few.
My latest adventure with piima yogurt involves making cream cheese. At first the idea of making cream cheese sounded a little daunting, but when I read the instructions that the local gal gave me with my original piima yogurt culture I realized it was super easy. It only involves about two more steps beyond making piima yogurt.
I just happened to have a couple bagels in the house and ran out of cream cheese so making homemade cream cheese seemed like perfect timing!
So here’s how to make homemade cream cheese:
1. Start by making a standard batch of piima yogurt (for directions on how to do this see my previous post here) in the quantity you desire.
2. Instead of letting the piima yogurt sit for about 24 hours, let it sit at room temperature out of direct sunlight for about three days.
3. Place a cheese cloth lined non-metal strainer over a bowl and place the piima yogurt on top of the cheese cloth to strain off the liquid. Don’t forget to take out some culture to start your next batch of piima yogurt first!
4. Once a lot of liquid has dripped off and the yogurt base is thick (I’ve been letting mine sit for a few hours) remove from the strainer/cheesecloth and place in a clean bowl. The liquid, which is whey, can be saved to use for bread, composted, or fed to your pets to give them a good dose of probiotics (I poured it on top of our dogs’ food and they loved it!)
5. Mix in herbs of your choice, for mine I chose fresh chives from my garden. Now it is ready to eat. See, I said it was super easy!
I also decided to try it as a spread on my sandwich with some sliced turkey and fresh salad greens
It was SO yummy and much healthier than mayo!
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Learning to make cream cheese has been on my to do list for a while. So happy I found this post!
I was amazed at how easy it was to make, I always thought it required a more complicated process but not the case!