A fantasy come true: I had cheese and wine for dinner one night last week. Lots of it. Nothing else. It wasn't a dare; I spent the evening at Murray's Cheese learning how to make fresh cheeses.
In two hours that whizzed by, we learned to make ricotta and mozzarella cheese with only a few ingredients. The class covered too much material for it to be hands-on, but instructor and Murray's affineur Zoe Brickley (straining mozzarella, at left), gave us enough of a sense of the skills and knowledge needed to make cheese that we left armed with the confidence to go home and make cheese-making plans for the weekend.
The ricotta is shockingly easy; you'll wonder why no one showed you this trick before. We used the recipe for Fresh Homemade Ricotta from Gourmet as a base. You don't need much of a recipe; it just takes this easy formula, plus a little bit of practice.
Basically, use two quarts of milk, a cup of cream and half a teaspoon of salt. Bring those up slowly to a gentle boil then turn the flame way down and stir in three tablespoons of lemon juice. Be gentle now, and watch the curdling begin. The Gourmet recipe says it takes about 2 minutes, but every time we've done it, it's been more like 30 seconds.
The mozzarella was made with a method from Ricki Carroll's Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Delicious Cheeses. The process is a little more complicated, but completely do-able for any home cook. The process is outlined here.
For any cheese-making, it's important to use good milk. This is not a time to skimp. However, we've heard reports that for these two fresh cheeses, non-homogenized (like Ronnybrook here in New York) milk doesn't do as well. So we have been using organic, homogenized and minimally pasteurized (not ultra-pasteurized) milk.
Murray's Cheese classes are offered at their Greenwich Village location (254 Bleecker Street between 6th and 7th Avenues) and cost from $50 for basic 1.5 hour classes like Cheese 101 (often includes wine), to $195 for four-hour Master Classes where you learn, hands-on, to make things like pizza and pasta with cheese.
How To Cook Fluffy, Tasty Quinoa
True Greek Recipe: Paximadi Bread Salad with Tomatoes, Feta and Capers
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Elizabeth Apron fro...
Before & After: Emily Henderson Transforms a Senior's Studio Space
Monica & Austin's Charming Bungalow
After reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I bought Ricki's book, Home Cheese Making. I was astounded to learn how easy it is to make soft cheeses It's easier than baking bread, yet so few know that it is even possible to do at home. I sure didn't.
It's exciting to cheesemaking start to catch on. It's a good (new?) addition to American food culture.
Making cheese has also made me reevaluate milk. I burned through a few gallons of milk before I realized that it's not enough for it just to not be ultra-pasteurized; it's has to be FRESH.
Apologies for my terrible typos above!
Im going to put making mozzarella on my to do list.
I love Ricotta and I am going to make it.
You can use the same ricotta technique to make a somewhat more solid cheese by simply squeezing more of the whey out (I bundle mine in cheesecloth and hang it from the bathtub tap, but you can also compress it under a container of water). After a few hours hanging, and a day or two in the fridge, you're left with something about the consistency of chevre.
Press out enough of the whey and you're left with Indian paneer.
And you can use that same technique with goat milk to make your own goat cheese -- the only thing is that pasteurized milk just doesn't make for the same tang you're used to with chevre. It's very, very mild. But just roll it in some herbs and it's practically as good.