DIY All-Purpose Cheese*

Last week, my neighbor, Bron, and I attempted to make cream cheese.** This "recipe" has been passed around in the missionary community, and we're a population that's learning to get creative and make due with what we have available. Cream cheese isn't something you can normally find here, so when we heard about a way to make it on our own, of course we had to try. I thought I'd share the process with you in case you'd also like to give it a try.

1. Pour five liters of fresh milk into a large pot and bring to a boil. (Our milk came from a local supplier and needed to be pasteurized.) Allow milk to cool completely.

2. Once cool, scrape the cream from the top of the milk and remove.***

3. Reheat the milk to the point where you can only leave your pinky finger in for two seconds. It's super technical and precise, I know.

4. Then add one tablespoon of plain yogurt for every liter of milk. In our case, this was five tablespoons of yogurt. Stir.

5. Cover the pot, and incubate overnight. We wrapped ours in four bath towels and placed it in the oven. Others have wrapped it and left it in a cooler.

6. In the morning, pour the contents of the pot into a cheese cloth. Or an old t-shirt... Just whatever.

7. Tie it closed, and hang it over a container to catch the whey. Yes, this is the stuff people now pay big bucks for so they can add it to smoothies and protein shakes. (Don't worry about the fact that this draining took place in the bathroom...I've been without water for 11 days now, so the bathroom wasn't being used for much else last week.)

8. After 24 hours, it will have reduced in volume by about half. The longer it hangs, the drier it will become. We took ours down after 26 hours, and... ta-da!

...What it is, you ask?

You're not alone. We asked the same thing. Is this yogurt? Is this cream cheese? It doesn't look quite like either one. What in the world did we just make? Because now we have a lot of it... and it's kind of unrecognizable. And smells funny.

After some further research, it turns out that we made something called strained yogurt or "yogurt cheese." Because of course we did.

Basically, steps 1-5 are how to make yogurt. Continuing with steps 6-8 will leave with you drained, thicker yogurt.

Or as I now like to call it...all-purpose cheese.

It seems strange at first, but this cheesy-yogurty spread works well for all sorts of dishes. So far it's been swirled and baked into a chocolate cake, used as a creamy topping for scones and jam, sprinkled with chives, and mixed with mustard to spread on fresh bread with basil and a poached egg. It could also work well as a baked cheesecake filling, in cream cheese frosting, or in mashed potatoes.

It can be sweet. It can be savory. It doesn't discriminate.
(And it loses its funny smell after spending some time in the fridge.)

In the end, we decided we were pleased with the outcome. Just don't go into this hoping to make something resembling Philadelphia cream cheese.
Because you won't.

Oh yeah. Feel free to Pin that.

You're welcome.

*If that title doesn't get me a million re-pins in Pinterest, I don't know what will.
**Disclaimer: This recipe will not actually provide you with cream cheese in the end.
*** That was our first clue... Why is there no cream in this "cream cheese"?