The Purple Guide to Learning Cheesemaking in 10 Days

Chapter 1: First Day

Welcome. If you're reading this, you've probably looked at a wedge of aged cheddar or a soft, creamy chèvre at the store and wondered, "Could I actually make that?" It's a question that has started many a kitchen adventure, and it's the exact question this guide is built to help you answer. We're not going to get into the deep science or try to turn you into a master affineur in a week and a half. That's not what this is. This is a focused, honest, ten-day experiment to see if the act of making cheese is something you enjoy enough to keep doing. And by the end of today's short session, you will have already made your first, very simple cheese. Let's get started.

Forget everything you've seen on glossy cooking shows. Making cheese at home, especially at the very beginning, is remarkably simple in its raw materials. You need one basic ingredient: milk. And you need one basic catalyst: something to make that milk curdle. That's the entire foundation of cheesemaking, the small miracle you're about to witness in your own kitchen. You're coaxing liquid milk into a solid curd, and then draining off the liquid whey that's left behind. That's it. Everything else - the aging, the washing, the pressing, the molding - is built on top of this single transformation.

For your very first session, we're going to make a soft, fresh cheese called ricotta. Now, to be clear, true Italian ricotta