Cream Cheese

One good thing that’s come out of this quarantine for a lot of people has been a chance to explore and experiment with cooking and new recipes. I’ve seen lots of people sharing photos and stories on social media about baking their own bread, making pasta from scratch, and even attempting a homemade Beef Wellington. We haven’t experimented with cooking nearly as much since we’ve had our hands full with a newborn, but we did make one thing we’ve never done before: homemade cream cheese.

Bagels and cream cheese is a favorite in our house. Unfortunately, we’re not very good at aligning the two foods together in our possession at the same time. We usually get our bagels in bulk from one store and our cream cheese from a normal grocery store. What ends up happening is we have cream cheese. We buy bagels a short while later, and then we run out of the cream cheese and have too many bagels left.

The other food “problem” in our house is milk. Only one person drinks milk in our household of four. But the amount of money to buy a half gallon is like 75% or more of what it costs to buy the whole gallon unless it’s on sale.  Usually I end up using some in recipes (biscuits, pancakes, cake, etc), but even then we’ve thrown out a good amount of milk gone bad at times.

Enter cream cheese. I googled how to make cream cheese one day and came across this recipe that used whole milk.

I won’t post the whole recipe here, but I’ll provide a shortened explanation with pictures of how it’s done.

Ingredients:

1. Whole milk
2. Vinegar or lemon juice 
3. Cheese cloth
4. Food processor ( I know this isn’t an ingredient, but without it, it’s pretty much impossible to make.)
5. Salt 

Instructions:

Bring milk to a simmer.

Add vinegar (or lemon juice) to curdle.

Strain Curds.

The bottom is whey.

Blend in food processor.

Add flavorings and store. This one is blueberry.

I bought these small mason jars when my daughter was younger and used them to store homemade baby food for her. We still use them now to make her breakfast overnight oat portions, portion canned fruit (vs buying the fruit cups), and I look forward to using them a second round for baby food!

And they make the perfect cream cheese containers :)