Making Cheese Using a kit from CheeseMonkey 

Let's review...You found almost free milk, you already had a cheese making kit, your daughter already gave you the cheese kit, you already had a RU-vid channel where this type of project is exactly what we'd expect from you right down to the fact it started with 20 pence milk. Yep. Seems to me that you had almost no choice in the matter. The universe decided you were to make some extra cheesey content for us to enjoy. 🧀😁 Edit: I've never been called a "curd nerd" but I don't hate it lol.

Love the "g'day curd nerds" shoutout. Definitely an intersection of creators I didn't quite forsee, but I'm pleasantly surprised!

Mike, can you please thank your kids for us?? That cheese-making kit they gave you is a goldmine of RU-vid ideas. I hope you enjoyed it even though the flavors are a bit on the mild side. I certainly enjoyed this video and look forward to other cheese-making-related videos. 🧀🐄🥛

"What is this?! A spoon for ants?!" I've never seen Shrimp so angry before

The liquid left over after the ricotta was made, you could boil into messmör (swedish whey butter). It's delicious on toast, however most people buy ready-made messmör in the store these days.

Blessed are the cheesemakers. Life of Brian lives on.

Every time I watch your videos, I can’t help but think “damn, I wish he was my dad”. Wholesome, curious, values in the right place… I would’ve learned so much and gone into adulthood with way less trauma. Thanks for all your interesting experiments!

Opened and liked PURELY for the title. Brilliant! Of course it’s not meant to be taken literally, it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

'...and then I remembered I have a cheese making kit' I just love Shrimp's world.

A sink will lose heat very quickly. Just wrap it in blankets. Bulgarian origin. How mum did it. Save a couple of tablespoons of the last lot for the next batch. Very basic, but works. So long as the milk is warm, can't fail.

What a friend we have in cheeses.

My wife’s family is from Cyprus and her aunt makes halloumi for a living, obv they use goats milk but for the mint she uses it kind of like the filling in a sandwich and folds the curd top and bottom around it. Then when you slice it, it has mint running through the middle. I love it fried or grilled but the very best way is to barbecue a whole one and then everyone tears of a piece whilst it’s hot. My gosh it’s so nice. Great video.

I have been home making cheese now for a few years so I'm pleased to see you make this video to show people how easy it is. There is one big pit fall to avoid, a lot of supermarket milk is homogenised and this does not work well at all. Use pasteurised or raw milk. Mesophilic cultures are cheap and easy to obtain from Amazon & eBay and can be easily used to make a perpetual starters like with brewing washes or sourdough starters. The whey is also useful and should not be discarded. It can be frozen and used as the liquid for bread making, used to make whey cheeses or Scandinavian style mysost by reduction, even what you discarded.

Blessed are shrimps’ subscribers with his interesting content

I save the whey from making cheese and yoghurt, and use it to brine chicken before roasting, makes for a very nice flavor and tenderness.

Since you're making cheese and talking about squeak, you might want to try to make curds for poutine (they're famously squeaky). It's not a type of cheese you can buy even in most of Canada (probably because it needs to be super fresh to be good), so if you want to make authentic poutine you pretty much have to make it yourself.

I'm Cypriot i was born in Nicosia. Haloumi & tomatoes sandwich is my favourite! Cheers for that mate 😎 👌

The Monty Python reference in the thumbnail got a chuckle from me. Keep it up, Mr Shrimp! :)

That was really interesting. Would love to see you make a different type of cheese from the booklet. 🙂

The variety of this channel is amazing.

Thank God Shrimp. You being so far ahead means my inner insomniac can start enjoying non-April fools content. Thanks bud!

You can take the final whey and make caramel from it; I have done this several times, and even used it to make caramel chocolates

I wish you'd used both thermometers and we could have tested the accuracy of your kit thermometer.

I bought the same cheese making kit for my daughter for Christmas , so thankyou for this vid x

I've made my own paneer quite a few times. The process never fails to fascinate me. Same with cold-process soap. Great video, as always!

Within 24 hours I have watched a single channel beautifully, and beigely bait bastard (bit)scammers, and cheerily create, chop and chuck curds on the cooker. My life is full. Thanks, Atomic Shrimp. :)

Hi Mike! Me and my boyfriend are big fans of your videos, and we especially love Eva cameos too! We would love to request a classic challenge video but this time limiting energy resources such as gas and electricity due to current events. We love to see how you negotiate these challenges and I think the whole of Britain might be in the same boat soon lol!

Perfect up load for a Saturday morning. Thank you very much Mr shrimp. You have no idea how much calmer I feel when I listen to your soothing and inspiring voice.

It's just calming to watch and listen to

"What is this??? A spoon for ANTS?!" 😂 I'm a severe insomniac and very sleep deprived. I lost it at that line. I love the time difference because it means I get to watch right when you post during me pretending sleep will come ❤

I had no idea how heat and work-intensive cheese making actually is until I watched this video. Shout-out and respect to all the cheese-makers out there!! Thank you for all your hard work in making one of this planet's most delicious and unique foods.

Always wanted to make my own cheese just for the experience but I always chicken out. It seems so simple and I’ve watched so many people do it. Great content.

I absolutely love making my own versions of my favorite cheeses. I'm in the process of aging a couple of wheels of something very similar to a hard-cooked parmesan, and two wheels of cloth-bound cheddar.

Awesome video, as always! I see on Cheese Monkey's website that you can also make canadian curd cheese. I would love to see you try and make poutine, Québec's national dish (a delicious mix of french fries, gravy and curd cheese).

"What is this, a spoon for ants?!" All the best videos have a Zoolander shout out.

I used a cheese making kit before and I loved it. I made feta cheese several times and kept all the whey to make a very healthy (and in Austria well known) drink. It’s called Latella. You mix the cold whey with fruit juice. Refreshing and very delicious 😋

Your assumption is correct, Mr Shrimp; grilling cheese has to be made in Cyprus to gain official 'Halloumi' status.

Omg I'm so so in love with trying to make different cheeses but have never seen a awesome kit like this. This was a awesome gift I think also a another awesome video

I've never had so much fun watching someone cut the cheese. 😀

If you decide to revisit homemade cheese in the future, here's a free pro tip! Save some water that was used to wash rice, instead of discarding it. (Real rice, not the instant stuff.) Put it in a container with a lid that can breathe (like a piece of cloth or a napkin, affixed with a rubber band) and leave it sitting at room temperature until its smell changes to a sweet kind of scent. This will take a couple days. Don't leave it too long, to where the scent becomes sour, or you'll have wasted your effort up to this point. Once it smells sweet, mix the water with up to ten times its volume in whole milk. (So if you've got a hundred milliliters of rice water, you can mix it with as much as a full liter of milk.) Put this into a bigger container with a breathable lid, and let it sit at room temperature until the milk separates. Keep the solid mass on top because it's basically cottage cheese, but the important part is that the whey on the bottom is now swimming with lactic acid bacteria...which means, congratulations, you now have your own home-made cheese culture for making cultured cheeses!

Definitely would be looking forward for more recipes from this book!

In biochem lab we had a food fermentation excercise where we could choose what we want to produce. Most groups did alcoholic fermentation (obviously), but the best result was from a group that made brie cheese (with bree as starter culture). It was almost liquid on the inside wich made it imho even better than brie you can buy.

I love your channel. It's as watchable as post10. Just a man going about the business of being fabulously competent.

Atomic Shrimp is just looking on the bright side of life. Edit: have you ever considered taking on the Indian curd dessert, rasmali?

Ha - blessed are the cheese makers 😂 halloumi cheese is quite expensive these days - you got a bargain.

A cup of tea, a nice cheese sandwich and Atomic Shrimp’s new video - that has become much enjoyed weekend routine for me.

I have used leftover whey after making ricotta (with lemon juice) in chicken soup and it was incredibly rich. It adds a fullness to the soup and the soup becomes really filling like a meal in itself. I love making cheese but it definitely takes all afternoon.

They turned out great. Loved this video look forward to other future cheese videos

That Zoolander line out of nowhere completely made me laugh out loud!

Blessed are the Cheesemakers!

So.. a little bit of science nerdery here; in the theory of cheesemaking, the 'true optimal shape' of curds after the initial rennet activity is _round_ - however, cutting with blades or strings cannot really produce rounded curd chunks very easily, but producing squared chunks is very easy and very easily standardized for serialized production runs. A trapezoidal or pyramidal curd cutting is therefore also 'more optimal' than the conventional squared curds that is used in most factory cheese productions as well as scaled artisenal cheese productions, though also harder to implement in a standardized fashion. The reasoning is 'of course' the maximization of surface area to inner volume - the larger surface area to smaller inner volume ratio means draining additional water content from the curds both goes faster by, and leaves behind less of the water-soluble vitamins and minerals that help provide some measure of taste and healthiness to proper full-milk cheeses. (none of this holds entirely true for cheeses made from pre-processed milk as pre-processing destroys most vitamins and deposits a lot of the mineral content outside of the milk you end up using to make cheese in the form of bottom-pellets, though some artisenal cheese productions re-use the bottom-pellets in making cheese from skimmed or low-fat milk to add taste to what would otherwise be rather tasteless cheese) Also take my comment with a grain of salt, as I don't currently work in cheese production at all, but diagnostic microbiology - I just have half a mind to take a slow turn towards cheesemaking as I age towards retirement, so I learn and comprehend as best I can in preparation - please do feel very much free and welcome to provide corrections or differing opinions if you are a professional or artisenal cheesemaker and consider my comment erroneous! :)

Oooh blessed are the meek, I 'm glad they got somthin coz they had a hell of a time!

It would be interesting, if even possible, to compare this with vegan alternatives of how to make something similar to cheese.

I really enjoyed that! Wonderful use of a product about to go out of date. I can only have goats milk and I sometimes long for cottage cheese, so when you said the curds just before cooking were like cottage cheese, I thought I might have to try this. And also try to make goat halloumi. Unless you could do a video on that too! : ) Thank you x

I really enjoy cheese and I have been so interested in getting a kit like this for my brother in law but it’s one of those gifts that he’ll either enjoy or be frustrated by it.

I love buttery cheese. This is the first time I ever heard about grilled cheese, thanks, very interesting.

Iv seen a few people on my foraging pages that make a vegan version of a rennet from good old fashioned stinging nettles. I don't have the exact method on hand as it's not something iv tried myself. I don't even know if the nettles impart their own unique flavour to the end product. But it's deffo an area to look at if you want to go as natural (and cheap) as possible when it comes to cheese making

A SPOON FOR ANTSSS

Sometimes I feel like I've learned more in your videos than in years of school... thanks! I love your stuff!

that spoon should be at least three times bigger than that!

I think Halloumi has to be a mix of sheep, goat and cow milk. Possibly traditionally just sheeps milk. So it has to be called cypriot/greek style cheese if its made with cows milk. Im definitely making this if i can get some bargain milk like you did. Cheese is one of the great joys of life, so much variety.

Little Miss Muffet’s got nothing on you! I’m saving this video so that I can make cheese after society breaks down (or a week next Tuesday, whichever comes first)

9:29 did you just give us the curd nerd version of the Nuremberg defence?

This channel and the likes is what RU-vid was created for. Just people to share whatever they find interesting or enjoyable. It's wonderful.

Really great stuff, and what a goldmine of a gift from your kids!

I’d love to have a go at making cheddar, but I can imagine it’s damn hard.

Oh great, I was given this exact kit for Christmas and have been... hesitant to try it. Thanks for this, will give it a go!

This is awesome! I have missed eating Saganaki since I had it in Greece 8 years ago. I'll give it a try too, since the local milk where I live is very high quality!

Favourite RU-vidr! your videos are calming, entertaining and informative

Blessed are the cheesemakers? What's so special about the cheesemakers?

I think I would have added lots of salt and mint to the curds at the first stage to ensure there was a nice well-seasoned flavour running through it.

I found this really fascinating. Not just watching you make cheese is interesting, but now I’m wondering how the first people to make cheese figured it out? I wonder what comes up if I search for “history of cheese” on RU-vid?

Congratulations on being a father. I'm sure this is old news but I didn't know! Woo hoo!

I have never seen dairy with a reduced price like that before. Meat, baked/canned/boxed goods etc, yes. Maybe I shopped on the wrong days or something else but I believe dairy goes back to the plant to be reused or it is simply dumped like they do vegetables. I had a temp job at plant once where one of my duties included dumping expired cartons of icecream into a large mixing barrel being careful to not mix flavors, what happened next I never saw, but I received a few different answers from various people.

I've read online that whey from yogurt making can be used as a soup stock base-- theoretically so too could your cheese whey after making the ricotta with it, bc you've changed it from a sweet whey to an acid whey. I mean, sweet whey would probably also make soup stock, maybe would be better at it? Idk lol. My cats love the acid whey as a treat, but making yogurt creates a lot more than they would ever drink

Hi Mike! Thanks for the upload, my hubby Dave, was interested so 24 hours later, (UK time, not Phillipino time 🤣👍) Amazon delivered the same kit. Can't wait and thank you for your channel so much, Caz B

The time invested is well worth the result, thank you very kindly. The only other simple cheese recipe which is faster is for Queso Blanco, or white cheese.

Grilled cheese is not automatically Halloumi or "fake" Halloumi; it's Grilled Cheese. I have often heard that it's little to not known outside of Germany and the Netherlands but there is a very big difference in taste and texture between Grilled Cheese and Halloumi. In our supermarkets we have at least 5 different kinds of Grilled cheese AND Halloumi and they all vary between squeaky, silky, stretchy, creamy etc. We are quite enthusiastic about our Grilled Cheeses lol.

Now I want to check the local markets to see if they have cheese kits and make some. Really looking forward to recipes out of the cheeses you made very soon.

I very much enjoyed this. Cheese is one of those things that seems too complicated to attempt but you made it look easy.

I noticed you removed the cheese from the pan on to the drainer Caerphilly 🤣

That's a great Christmas gift and a great video. Now I too want to make cheese.🧀

That was fun Mr. Shrimp. Thanks for taking us along!

This was something that I hadn't given any thought to before, other than making a mild cream cheese from yogurt and herbs. I am intrigued enough that I am going to look for a cheese making kit.

So hungry now. also got a bit excited when you mentioned paneer. Maybe next time

Loved watching this! I’ve never watched anyone make cheese in their own personal kitchen.

You could try making Yarg, Mike. When it's made, it's wrapped in nettles.

That's quite good actually and worth the effort

Sainsbury's have unhomogenised Jersey cow milk, milk with the cream on top. If you want to make any traditional thing with milk, that's your milk. It's the best you can get, unless you're sitting the stool squirting milk at the cat.

Great video, you have inspired me to scan the reduced shelves for milk on my next shopping trips, I see some cheese making in my future.

I use the whey in several recipes. I use it in breads, making American biscuits, and - when I've curdled using lemon juice - I use it in smoothies or anywhere I want a bit of tartness.

Having a cheese making video by AS uploaded on my birthday is definitely a good birthday gift

Wow they turned out great, i do hope you try more from this kit next time there is reduced milk in the shop!

Will be fun to see you get to the paneer in another video. It is the easiest to make and nice to cook with or eat on toast.

Love all your vids, keep up the great content 👍

I use olive oil when frying Haloumi and add liberal lemon juice and freshly ground pepper before it leaves the pan. Served with asparagus also fried in olive oil .One of the best entrees ever

Looking forward to watching this with my cup of tea, made with full fat milk!

Cool, thanks. I look forward to the next video.

Cheese-making fascinates me. I've tried it a couple of times, but it can be kind-of 'hands-on' in terms of having perfect temps/conditions/etc. That grilling cheese looks *very* interesting though. I'm tempted to try again!

surprised Gavin hasn't left a comment yet. He's a god among us peasant curd nerds.