I’ve made my first Stilton! I followed the recipe on Jack Schmidlings cheese recipe page. I’m interested to see how it turns out; but having a two month wait to get feedback is a little nerve-wracking.

It’s important to have tools cleaned and sanitised.

This is the milk, with the culture, rennet and mold. It has already started to coagulate together.

After the culture and rennet have done their thing, the curds are ‘cut’ then allowed to rest; then placed in cheesecloth to drain. This gets rid of most of the whey. Next, the curds get squished for a couple of hours in this jury-rigged cheesepress.

These are the curds once they’ve been pressed, then broken into pieces to be salted before being placed in a mold (It turns out that a 500g yogurt container is pretty much exactly the right size for the amount of cheese produced by two litres of milk).

The next day, the cheese was unmolded. I opted to split this into two shorter rounds – it seems to be a bit easier to handle that way.