Not too long ago I found myself flicking through the SixThousand site, which is supposedly covers the Perth subculture. Right, anyway. Flicking through I saw a post about making your own cheese. Awesome.

The recipe explains the very simple process of boiling milk then curdling it to seperate the curds and whey. If you take the curds away you're left with a Paneer Cheese, which is a pretty bog standard soft cheese.

As I was already trying my hand at some Chocolate Panacotta (yum), I thought I'd give this a go as well, as I've always wanted to.

First up, I decided to make the Paneer and add some Chilli flakes, to end up with something like the soft flavoured cheeses you get at the shops. The process is pretty straightforward:

• Bring 2L of milk to the boil
• Turn off heat
• Add 1 cup of lemonjuice or vinegar
• Stir the milk thoroughly to ensure maximum curdlage (yes, curdlage!)

In the end, you end up with something like this:

Lovely, om nommy cheese. Whilst the cheese was tasty and "dericious" (thanks Neil), it was a bit crumbly - and I suspected that I squeezed far too much liquid out of the cheese.

Ultimately I ditched this after leaving it uncovered in the fridge overnight, as it had gone rock hard (strange thing that). Not letting my feelings get hurt by cheese, I decided to give it another shot, this time opting to replace chilli with pepper and chives.

Unfortunately I don't have nommy photos of this cheese, however leaving more liquid in the cheese while it was setting gave me the desired soft cheese (essentially, a hard ricotta in texture and shape).

I served this up with a glass of my red wine (more on this in another post!) at a BBQ, and it was received pretty well, and I'm stoked.

At only around $2.80 for ~500gm, this cheese is not also unique and personalised but cheap! Cheese for everyone! The secret lies in how much liquid you leave in!

I'll play with this a bit more, but am very tempted to start getting some of the low-end cultures so I can make proper soft cheeses such as boccocini and brie/camambert at home. I'm not expecting much but like my beer, wine and spirits - it's a fun experience.

More soon, I promise :)

After almost a month and a half of fermentation, it looks like I'm ready to move on my wine project this week. In order for the wine to be ready to go, it needs to have a specific gravity of less than 1005.

Currently the wine is registering slightly above 990, which means that almost all of the available sugars have been eaten by the wine yeast and turned into ethanol. I've had a quick taste test and whilst it still tastes a bit fizzy (trapped CO2 from the fermentation), its passable as wine (yay!) and thankfully not as dry as I was expecting it to be after the rapid fermentation process.

Things to do: Kill the yeast with campden tablets and stabilise, rack the wine to remove yeast sediment, agitate the wine to remove trapped CO2, filter the wine to remove the last bits of yeast, then bottle.

Bottling is going to be an interesting process, as I'll be doing a few 5L demijon/flagons for people - as well as some bottles, and I've yet to check out the local brew store to see what kind of screw top lids they have.

Time to come up with some wine label ideas ;)

It took about two hours, but I managed to strain the must off the skins and ended up with about 80L of juice to go into the secondary. After adding about 15L of water with dextrose dissolved until it had a specific gravity of 1090.

(NB: Photo is before I added the 15L of fluid... 80L of pure grape juice... Ohhh yeah!)

This vessel has an airlock and assuming it stays out of the sunlight (as I'm not fermenting in glass or stainless steel), should be ready in a few weeks or months - once it hits a specific gravity of 1005. There is plenty of available sugar for now.

That's all the hard stuff for now, hopefully I haven't stuffed anything up too badly. Now it's starting to resemble the colour and smell of wine, I'm getting excited about the final product.

Next on the list: Buy 10 cases of 14 wine bottles, bottling, sealing and labelling them when the time comes... :)