Home Made Cream Cheese

A couple weeks ago, I did a post about my discovery of yoghurt making. I have now taken that a step further and have discovered that with my home made yoghurt, I can make cream cheese. It so simple and here is how.

In a piece of muslin, cheesecloth or a clean tea towel, place your home made yoghurt or a good quality tub of natural/greek yoghurt purchased from the shops. 

Tie it up and suspend the yoghurt (soon to be cheese) over a bowl or in my case, a jug so that the whey can run out of the yoghurt. I used a wooden spoon to help achieve this.

Leave at room temperature for 24-48 hours when all the whey should have run out of the yoghurt. Unwrap your cloth and you will find that you now have cream cheese. How easy! One litre of yoghurt made approx 400g cream cheese. The rest was whey (which I haven't experimented with yet but I hear it's a bit of a super food, full of good protein.)

Store in a sealed container in the fridge for up to a month.

I used mine to make pastry for a quiche and to make pea, haloumi and mint pasta like in my recipe here. My quiche pastry recipe is really simple as you can see below.

110g Cream Cheese
110g Butter at room temp
1 Cup Plain Flour

In a bowl, place the ingredients and rub it through your fingers until it's the consistency of bread crumbs. Then knead the pastry on a clean bench top until it has formed a ball of dough. Add a bit more flour if it's sticking really badly to the bench. Roll it out and then flip it into a quiche tin. It doesn't matter if the pastry breaks up a bit, you can push it back together when it's in the tin.

Blind bake in the oven for 20 minutes at 200 degrees before adding your quiche mixture. (blind bake means to put some oven paper over the pastry and add a cup of something like rice to hold it down. It simply gives the pastry a bit of a head start in the cooking process before the quiche mix is added but the oven paper stops it from burning.)

I've also discovered how to make sour dough bread and ricotta cheese so keep an eye out for future blogs where I will show you how too.