Hi and a huge welcome to Steve's kitchen Have you ever made cream cheese before? I'd
love to have your comments down below. I know it's super simple to make. Now let's
get and talk about the two methods which are most commonly used. The first method
is to take a regular whole full fat milk that is and just heat it up and add some
citric acid, which separates out the curds
and then you can strain that and make a most delicious cream cheese. This is a
method commonly used and I've done it myself.
The second method and the one I'm going to be demonstrating today, which I prefer,
is one that we used to make a lot when our kids were younger because we made a
lot of homemade yogurts and you quite often have spare yogurt around. It's very
easy to turn those yogurt curds into a cream cheese which I think has just that
extra little bit of flavour by way of the cultures from the yogurt. So if you've
got some greek or normal yogurt for that matter at home and you want to use it
and make some lovely delicious cream cheese, that will rival those
Philadelphia's and actually taste a lot more flavorsome, then this is how. Now one
of the advantages of greek yogurt over regular yogurt is it's already a
strained yogurt so some of the whey is already out of here and we're getting
more bang for our buck. We'll start by flavoring our yogurt if
you want to ,you don't have to add flavoring to it but I'm going to put it
into a bowl. I'm going to put half a teaspoon of salt in with my yogurt.
Salting the yogurt curds is important to draw the whey out. Now you can decide
whether you want to further flavor this with garlic or any sort of fresh herbs
you like. I really like to use Italian herbs. It's a mixture of sort of garlic
salts and and regular parsley, sometimes we've used cayenne pepper or turmeric.
Comment down below, let me know what sort of flavors you like in your cream cheese.
Just thoroughly mix that through, now just the look of that makes me think I
want to add a little more herbs, so I've gone for a teaspoon and a half of
Italian mixed herbs. Now taste your mixture, it's going to give you an idea
of what it's going to taste like as a cream cheese. It will be more intense
than this so don't be tempted to over season it. Now we're going to
condense this yogurt by draining it through a sieve and some cheesecloth.
Pour your yogurt into the cheesecloth
and then what I like to do is just fold the cheesecloth over into the center. Now
the whey is already starting to drip out. Now when I used to make this for the
children when they were younger, we had a conical shaped sieve and it made this
lovely little pyramid of cream cheese but this will work just as well. You want
to set this aside in the fridge overnight or for several hours until
most of the whey or majority of the whey anyway has come out and I'll show you
what it looks like when it's ready. I decided to leave that overnight so it's
had about eight hours and you can see here just how much whey has drained out
of the curds. I'll just pour it into a glass.
So it's time to take this yogurt based cream cheese out of the muslin. You can
see just how beautiful that looks. What I tend to do now is tip this out onto a
plate, just take the muslin off and you can just wash that and reuse it but just
take a look how beautiful and creamy that is now and I'll give a little taste
test. I'm going to pop it on to a really nice cracker. Oh it smells so good. Now
this will last for four to five days in the fridge quite easily. I'm going to give
this a try.
Well that cracker is super hard but the actual cream cheese is delicious. That is
much nicer than any of the Philadelphia's or anything you get in
the supermarket. It's rich, it's full of flavor. Now this is not a proper style
cream cheese, actually I've got a buddy here on YouTube Gavin Webber
the Cheese Man, I'll leave a link he's got some fantastic cheese recipes but
this is really, really good and if you decide to make it, share across some
comments, your thoughts, any photographs on social media and I will see you again
for another fun episode in Steve's kitchen next time, see you later.