Making Cheese at Home: A Round-up of Cheese-Making Kits

Emma Christensen
Emma Christensen
Emma is a former editor for The Kitchn and a graduate of the Cambridge School for Culinary Arts. She is the author of True Brews and Brew Better Beer. Check out her website for more cooking stories
updated May 11, 2022
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Making cheese at home is something that we’ve been wanting to try for years. Now that we’ve gotten our feet wet with homemade paneer, we think we’re finally ready to take the plunge. Who wants to join us?!

Click through for a round-up of the cheese-making kits we’ve been shopping…

We’re thinking that mozzarella is the place to start. If all goes well, we can always work our way up to harder cheeses!

Ricki’s Cheesemaking Kit: This kit is from the Cheese Queen Ricki Carroll in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Her workshops and small business have receive numerous recommendations from both bloggers and national magazines, and she was also featured in Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The kit includes a thermometer, butter muslin, citric acid, vegetable rennet tables (enough for 30 recipes), flake salt, and a recipe booklet.

• Ricki’s Cheesemaking Kit is $24.95 from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company.

Mozzarella Cheese Kit from Leener’s: We’ve blogged about Leener’s before–it’s one of our new favorite supply stores for lots of foodie DIY projects. Their kit includes thermometer, cheese cloth, vegetable rennet, mild lipase powder, citric acid, cheese salt, calcium chloride and instructions. The product blurb says that this one only makes about 7 batches of mozzarella for a total of 7 pounds.

• This mozzarella cheese kit is $24.95 from Leener’s.

Mozzarella and Ricotta Cheese Kit from the Cheese Supply: This is one that kept coming up at the top of our internet searches. The kit includes a dairy thermometer, butter muslin, citric acid, vegetable rennet tablets, flake salt, and a 4-page Recipe Booklet.

• This mozzarella cheese kit is $37.45 from the Cheese Supply.

Honestly, all our searching led us to believe that most cheese making kits are pretty comparable, both in terms of kit contents and the price. Most kits included vegetable (rather than animal) rennet tablets; if this is something that is important to you, definitely double check the kind of rennet before buying.

We’re off to order ours today! We’ll see you in a few weeks to share our results.

Any advice on kits to buy or things to be prepared for?

Related: 360-Degrees of Cheese: Virtual Creamery Tour

(Image: Flickr member smcgee licensed under Creative Commons)

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