How to make cream cheese from scratch!

Ingredients

• 2 litres whole milk
• 6 – 7 tbsp white vinegar / lemon juice

Method

1. Pour 2 litres of milk into a large saucepan and bring to boil. You need to make sure your milk is piping hot before adding in your acid so that it curdles! Bringing to boil will bring it to the right temperature
2. Reduce the heat to medium and add the lemon juice 1 tbsp at a time. Keep stirring the mixture in between additions of lemon juice. The mixture should start to curdle—keep stirring! The reason why we don’t just dump the whole lot in is to make sure our cream cheese doesn’t have an overly sour taste. You’ll know to stop adding in emon juice once curds start floating on top of a green liquid, which is known as the whey.
3. Remove the pan from the heat once the mixture separates entirely.
4. Pour the curds through a sieve to remove the whey. As a tip, don’t throw away the whey! You can use whey instead of milk or water in baking recipes which call for either.
5. Leave the curds to cool for 15 -20 minutes so the whey can drain out of the curds properly. It may come out watery or too loose if you don’t leave it to drain.
6. After 20 minutes, blend the curds in a blender with 2 tbsp of whey. Blending it will make it nice and smooth and stop it from coming out grainy. This should take 10 minutes.
7. Once nice and smooth, flavour with some salt to give it flavour. You can also add in extras like honey and walnuts or garlic and herbs if you wish!
8. You can store the cream cheese in a container and it’ll last for 7 days in the fridge.