How to Make Goat Cheese

Arkansan Susan Harper gives us a lesson in making goat cheese.
Goat-cheese making is a very process. If I can do it, anybody can. It's a very scientific thing. You have to have a good recipe. You have to have really good milk. You have to strain it to get all the impurities out of it from where you've done the milking.

Sometimes I get hay in it or feed or little particles of dust and dirt and hair. And then all the other parts of the cheese you can order on the internet, generally. You'll need rennet, which is the coagulator, and you'll need bacteria for your specific sort of cheese. And since I'm making chevret here, which is a fresh cheese, I've just used one certain bacteria. It makes this fabulous cheese and adds a little bit of taste to it.

I do always pasteurize my milk because in Arkansas, there's a law, because if your cheese is not aged 90 days, then you have to pasteurize your milk. So I'm always pasteurizing my milk before I make my cheese. It's a very easy process, too. And all you really do is pasteurize your cheese. Then the chevret takes three to four days generally, a day of draining after you mix in your bacteria and your rennet. You leave it to sit for 24 hours. And then the next process is molding the cheese. You scoop it out with a slotted spoon and fill the little molds up.

The next day, it drains. The next day after that, you take the cheese out and you flip it in the mold so it's very uniform on both sides. And the next day, it comes out of the molds and gets salted. And the salt -- in the salting process, it actually inhibits the growth of bacteria on the outside of the cheese. It also adds to the taste. And the third thing it does is, it helps to dry out the rest of the moisture out of the cheese. So when it dries, it's this nice, uniform shape and the right texture.