Cheese from raw milk

[Wolf]

So I forgot about some raw milk I had brought to my room the other day, so it's been sitting in my warm room for about two days and I just saw it and it looks like this now:



So, what I want to do is turn it into cheese now, since it already looks half way there.  The only thing is that I don't know how, and all of my previous attempts to make cheese without much instruction ended up pretty bad with no cheese in the end at all.. just a bunch of wasted milk.  I've never seen my milk get so perfectly separated though, and especially that it doesn't even smell sour at all, I kinda just wanna eat that top layer by itself, but I don't think that would taste as good as making it into cheese.

So if anyone knows how I could turn this separated milk into either..
just some regular cheese
cream cheese
some other awesome cheese
those super sweet indian cheese balls thingies, called gulab jamun I will love you forever if you can tell me how to make these things raw because I tried some before and I was addicted to them but they're cooked so if I could make them raw omigosh

Please let me know, I don't want this glass of milk to go to waste especially when it looks so perfect..

[van]

pour it slowly through a cheese cloth or fine strainer.  You could let it go another day or two, let your nose tell you.  Let it sit in the c. cloth or strainer for a few hours, and more and more of the whey will strain out.

[Wolf]

I had bought some cheesecloth but the uh, the fabric is so loosely woven that everytime I ever tried to strain my curdled milk in it, everything went through and nothing was left in the cheesecloth.  I don't think I know where I put it anyways, so is there another cloth I could use as a cheesecloth instead?

And I just realized that the indian gulab jamun actually has flour in it.. so the one I want to make actually is the bengali rasgulla. 

[cherimoya_kid]

I had bought some cheesecloth but the uh, the fabric is so loosely woven that everytime I ever tried to strain my curdled milk in it, everything went through and nothing was left in the cheesecloth.  I don't think I know where I put it anyways, so is there another cloth I could use as a cheesecloth instead?

Just use plain cotton, or even a coffee filter.

[Wolf]

Uuuuhm, okay so I used a coffee filter to separate it and now it looks like this..



...now what do I do?

[van]

put it in your mouth and eat it.    You've made a soft cheese variety.

[Wolf]

eck.. I already tried a tiny piece of it and it's not very tasty actually, can't I age it or something?  How do you make hard cheeses, does that involve heating it?  Or can I make a hard cheese without heating it?  How do I make cheddar or parmesean or even feta, it looks like feta kinda..

[eveheart]

You can learn about aging cheese curds at lots of sites online.

As far as the taste of your batch, I'm thinking that most of the cheeses we are used to have salt, so you might be missing that part of the flavor. Also, the natural elements that make milk curdle vary in taste, so you might not like the flavor of the enzymes, yeasts, and bacteria that are present in this batch of curds.

[cherimoya_kid]

Like eveheart said, it's probably the lack of salt that is making it seem bleh.

If you want a hard cheese, just put the lump of curds inside a clean cotton t-shirt, then twist the fabric around the lump and squeeze. That will squeeze out the excess liquid whey.

you can also just air dry it, and it will get drier and drier until it's quite hard.

I don't recommend eating cheese though.  Butter and fermented cream are the only dairy products I ever eat.  Cheese and milk have an unbalanced  calcium:magnesium ratio (too much calcium, not enough magnesium). Butter has no calcium, and cream has very little .

[Wolf]

I know milk and cheese aren't the best dairy, but they are my favourite dairy.  x.x;  At least hoping I can make some raw cheese without salt, I know it might be the no salt making it bleh but I was eating a lightly salted raw cheese before I stopped eating cheese and even that tasted over salty to me at times, so.. I think it's just the excess whey is making it taste sourish and both being salt free and somewhat fresh it doesn't have much taste to it otherwise so I was thinking maybe aging it a bit more would give it some taste, or something.  I just don't want it to go too sour is all, I don't really like that sour milk taste.

[cherimoya_kid]

Is the milk from a grassfed cow?  That can cause taste issues, if it's not.

[Wolf]

Is the milk from a grassfed cow?  That can cause taste issues, if it's not.

yes, the milk was raw grass-fed cow milk.  I think I ended up feeding it to my cat because it was too sourish for me.