Not sure if this is the place to post this, but here goes:

Traditional Feta – By Flip & Tiffy

Ingredients

1 Gallon Raw Goat’s Milk
1 packet of Mesophilic Culture
½ Teaspoon Liquid Rennet (with ¼ cup non-chlorinated room-temperature water)
5 tablespoons kosher salt
20 oz. Whey

Directions

* Slowly heat milk to 86 degrees, stir gently 5-10 mins to ensure milk is evenly heated.
* Remove from heat and add 1 packet of Mesophilic culture, use skimmer and make up and down motions to draw cultures down and evenly (do NOT break surface).
* Let stand for five minutes to rehydrate.
* Maintaining 86 degrees, let stand and ripen for one hour.

        * During ripening dilute ½ teaspoon of liquid rennet in ¼ cup non-chlorinated water, stir for 20 seconds.

* Once milk is done ripening for one hour, add rennet solution to milk and stir with up and down motion for one minute (do NOT break surface).
* Let stand for 30 minutes, keeping 86 degree temperature.

* Check for clean break, if necessary let the milk sit for ten more minutes.
* If clean curd break occurs, cut curds to ¾ inch cubes and let stand for five minutes to firm up. (Vertical cut, horizontal cut and 45 degree cut; vertical and horizontal).

        **(Other recipes call for thirty minutes of stirring gently after cutting the curd, I’ve found this to be counter-productive, I ladle curds almost instantly after the five minutes.)

* Ladle curds gently into butter-muslin lined in a colander, let drain for 5 minutes.
* Pick up the butter-muslin (filled with the feta-curds of course!) and slowly for ten minutes squeeze the excess whey from the curds. (Yes, this can perhaps be done other methods, but I’ve found this to be more “personal”).
* Afterwords fill a mold with the curds. Curds will be soft but will firm up enough to flip after ten minutes.
* Drain in colander for one hour, flipping the cheese in the mold every 15 minutes.
* “Knock” the cheese in the mold once in a while to ensure whey expelling.
* Once one hour of flipping and “knocking”, let drain at room temperature for 24 hours.
* Dress the cheese for about four hours in a mold/colander and apply three pounds of pressure.
          * Once 24 hours of ripening has finished, produce your (refrigerated) whey-brine (20 oz of whey and five tablespoons of kosher salt.
* Age feta for a day and a half for semi-crumbly texture. Three days to produce a normal-crumbly feta texture.

After feta has aged keep in refrigerator for up to one week and of course , enjoy!

Thanks for the recipe! !

If you keep your feta in whey brine, you can keep it for months in the fridge.  I kept a batch in 2008 for nearly a year before it was all ate up.  Yummy.  I have another batch in the fridge now!  Couple more week of ripening and chow time!

9mmruger, that sounds interesting. As the recipe says, after about three days the cheese becomes a perfect crumbly feta…I wonder what a year sitting in a whey-brine would do to the cheese?

I have kept previous batches for several months with no ill effect.  On my latest batch however, the cheese began melting in the brine.  I did some research and found that I should add calcium chloride to the brine to keep the salt from leeching the calcium from the cheese.  I made the modification, let the cheese dry again and put it back in the brine.  I will let it go a few days and check it again.  From now on however, I will add CaCl2 to all my brine.

Thats when using the whey is the best since its already balanced with the cheese.

Hey Neil, My feta was melting in the whey brine, not standard brine.  Someone at another CF suggested that I add the calcium chloride to the whey brine as well to prevent this.  I will from this point on.  Cheers Buddy!

Interesting, so it go leached out, maybe depending on the salt content.

I have been making feta with my goats’ milk for 3 yrs now and our feta has not stayed in the fridge long enough to go a year, but it seems it would! We just finished last years feta off (it was 7 months old i think). I have read that if the feta does not stay at room temp long enough (2-3) days then it may become soft in the brine. I also had some that were in a bad fridge and kind of froze and then it went soft in the brine. I think if you let sit 2-3 days room temp it becomes crumbly too as I have a friend I shipped some to during that time period (priority mail) and she said she sat down and ate half of it before it got in the brine! LOL Gets better with age but it is good enough to eat, I find, even a couple days in brine!

Feta cheese can be frozen without bad affects. I keep my Greek Feta in the fridge when I bought it by the 5lb brick.