cheese please

How to make a simple goat cheese in Uganda:

One of the things we miss the most here is good cheese! A lot of what you find in stores (if you find any!) is rubbery and tasteless. If you do find the rare good cheese, it is very expensive. I have never made cheese before, and I was a little cautious of trying it because it sounded so complicated: rennet, cheesecloth, cheese press, waxing the cheese ... huh?

I came across this very simple recipe for goat cheese that didn't require rennet, only lemon juice: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/02/how-to-make-goat-cheese-recipe.html  I followed the recipe almost exactly except that I put in extra lemon juice, because the lemons here seem to be less... lemony. 

Step 1: Find goat milk. There are goats everywhere -- everywhere! -- but if you ask anyone about goat milk they look at you funny. I looked it up, and there is a guy outside of Jinja who is one of the few dairy goat farmers in the country (probably in East Africa!) He's made a little business for himself with his herd of dairy goats, and is trying to make people aware of the benefits of goat milk. A supermarket within walking distance (sometimes) carries his company's goat yoghurt and goat milk. One day I was lucky and they actually had jugs of goat milk in the fridge!

Once you have the goat milk, the rest is easy. There's probably half a dozen ladies on my street who sell lemons, I borrowed a thermometer from a friend (couldn't find that in stores -- but if you don't have one, I wonder what would happen if you just heated up the goat milk on a gas stove for 20 minutes like I did?), and from what I hear cheesecloth can be substituted with many different materials (even read that clean handkerchiefs work). My neighbour had cheesecloth, so I borrowed his.

The final product: goat cheese! I added some garlic, salt and a bit of rosemary. I found I liked it better the next day, after I had pressed it together and left it in the fridge. It was good, but I'm still tweaking it to try to make it creamier. It was very good with spaghetti and mango salsa, but I'm still not confident enough to serve it on its own! For a first try, it was a success.