How to make your own moon cheese at home

There may be a light layer of oil on the surface as the butterfat content of homemade cheese in the spring is high.

The cheese will be hard and crunchy when done and may be lightly browned.

Rotate the trays after each 12 hour period and test for doneness.

If you dry the cheese too quickly the sugars in the cheese could burn. Place in the dehydrator in the coolest spot.

Place in a single layer on the dehydrator tray.

I had my dehydrator on anyway to dry the pulp from my juicer, so it didnвЂ™t use any extra electricity to dry the cheese. The ВЅ inch cubes took 36 hours to dry in my dehydrator. You could make them smaller, depending on their end-use.

Remove the cheese from the fridge and cube the cheese into ВЅ inch cubes.

This develops flavours and evens out the moisture levels within the cheese. Wrap in plastic wrap or an eco-friendly alternative, and leave it in the fridge for a week or so. Then wipe the excess salt from the cheese, blot any extra moisture from the cheese surface. Rotate the round of cheese, after 6 hours to dry both sides. If your cheese seems too moist, rub the outside of the cheese with salt, and let the salt draw the excess water out of the cheese, in the fridge, for 12 hours.

After making your feta or farmhouse cheese, allow it to age for 5 to 7 days in the fridge.

Step by step guide to making dried cheese IвЂ™ve only done this with farm-fresh, homemade cheese with no additions except probiotic culture.) If you choose to try this with store-bought cheese let me know how it works for you. Some store-bought cheese has additives to make it melt more easily at lower temperatures. I havenвЂ™t tried it with store-bought cheese. (There are questions in the comments about using store-bought cheese in this recipe. I hope youвЂ™ll try this to extend the shelf life of your precious homemade cheese, too. IвЂ™ll definitely be making more dehydrated cheese. There are way more uses for dehydrated cheese than just trail mix. It adds protein, minerals, and vitamins to your trail mix or granola. It squeaks a little when you first bite it, but then itвЂ™s crunchy and chewy at the same time. It was sweet and caramel-y with a hint of saltiness.

And the result was amazing! ItвЂ™s mild tasting, not the sharp acid taste I was expecting. So the new batch of feta cheese I made went into the dehydrator after it had aged a week in the fridge to develop the flavours. DonвЂ™t you? And I know that IвЂ™m not the only homesteader that canвЂ™t eat the food I produce faster than the bad microbes consume it. ThatвЂ™s the second pound of cheese IвЂ™ve thrown out since we started milking in April. I just tossed out a pound of feta cheese, that I made from our goatвЂ™s milk because it had gone funky in the fridge. #NoFoodWasted is my goal but I failed this week. It was chewy, sweet, crunchy and just a little salty.

Recently my friend, Connie, came to visit and offered me a taste of a trail mix that she had made with dried fruit, nuts, seeds, and dehydrated feta cheese. But making cheese is a lot of work for dog food. Last winter we fed a lot of cheese to our dogs, because of the freezer taste. After that, it takes on a вЂњfreezerвЂќ taste and isnвЂ™t as nice. Because of the high-fat content, cheese placed in the freezer is only good for about 3 to 6 months. But cheese changes texture in the freezer and becomes more crumbly. You could put the extra cheese, sour cream, and butter in the freezer for winter. Many of you are still waiting for your cheese press, right? While you can build it, it is out of the reach of most beginning homesteaders. To age cheese properly to store it without refrigeration you need a climate-controlled cabinet that controls both temperature and humidity. Even when you add cheese making, sour cream making, yogurt making, kefir making, whipped cream, and butter making into the weekly chores, you can still end up with more dairy products than a family can consume before it goes bad. The daily milk harvest can quickly engulf a family. Homestead abundance is overwhelming sometimes. Dehydrated cheese is a nice addition to homemade trail mix, cereal snack mix, and fruit and nut mixes. You can dehydrate cheese and save it, without refrigeration, for future use.

How to make your own moon cheese at home