Well I put my Christmas cream separator to work this morning. I got 5 gal. of milk from the dairy and separated the cream from it. My wife has been told by her cardiologist to only eat low fat cheese; so I’m making a low fat Colby today to fit in with her diet requirements. It’s the first time I have made a cheese with skim milk, and it was an eye opener. Even though I used 4 gal. as usual, the resulting curd was only about 2/3 the volume of whole milk curd. And it seems to be much drier as well. I hope the finished product is not too dry to eat.
The benefit is that I ended up with 5 pints of cream, which is now being converted into cream cheese. I’ve tried it before using milk and it just doesn’t come out right - too grainy. Hopefully this will be as smooth as I like it to be.
But now this brings up yet another question. Have any of you ever frozen milk or cream and then used it later for cheese making? I’m thinking of accumulating enough cream to make a large enough batch of cream cheese to make a cheesecake from. My wife is the best cheesecake maker, and I’d like to try one made from home made cream cheese. Would it lose anything by being frozen???