My First Cheese

Here it is, my first cheese. It’s a Queso Fresco — a very simple simple cheese made by heating the milk to between 185 and 190 degrees, then adding a little bit of apple cider vinegar and continuing to heat until the curd has precipitated out, and the whey is clear. Then you drain it into cheesecloth (I used a small-mesh coffee filter that I’ve used in the past to make yogurt cheese) and there it is. It took about twenty minutes total, and now I’ve got about  2/3 of a cup of crumbly, white, slightly sweet Queso Fresco to put in on eggs, or in say, the bean burrito I might make for lunch. Rancho Gordo beans, some tomatoes dug out from under the plastic covers in the garden, the last of the basil, some crumbly white queso fresco — sounds like lunch.