Goat Milk Cream Cheese Experiment

Cream Cheese is normally made from, well, cream. Hence the name. But its really hard to separate out the cream from goat milk. It doesn’t separate the way cow milk does. You can skim a little bit off the top of a jar after letting it sit in the fridge, but not an inch or more like you can with raw cow milk. But I want to make cream cheese pound cake using home made cream cheese. So I decided to experiment and see what happened if I used a cream cheese recipe but used whole goat milk instead of cow milk + cow cream.

I used the cheesemaking.com recipe for cream cheese using buttermilk culture and rennet but with one gallon of whole, raw goat milk rather than 1 gallon of cow milk + 1 pint of cream. I probably should have added an extra pint (at least) of goat milk to make up for the missing cream, oops. Because I used less cream, my milk ripened more quickly than the recipe indicated. I let it sit over night and so I didn’t get around to checking it until it had been ripening for about 10 hours and the curds had all sunk below the whey so I went ahead and strained off the whey and proceeded to follow the instructions for draining. I let it drain for about 7 or 8 hours and by that time it was pretty firm and I decided I didn’t want it to get any dryer so I removed it from the cheese cloth and put it in the fridge.
My first thoughts on tasting it are that it just tastes like normal chevre. I’ll let it sit in the fridge over night and tomorrow I’ll taste it side by side with the chevre I made a couple of days ago and see if I notice any difference. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to try to make pound cake with this “cream cheese” or not. I may try a batch of cream cheese using goat milk for the milk portion but adding a pint of cow cream. It would be interesting to compare the results. I don’t have access to raw cow milk/cream but I can get locally raised low-heat pasteurized, non homogenized cow milk and cream which should still work fine for cheese making.