DIY -- Ozark clabbered cheese

Damn. It's spring, you're house-cleaning, and you just found a jug of milk in the fridge with an expiration date so long ago, there are chunks in the milk.

Don't throw it away! Some cow worked long and hard to produce that milk. Do you also have sour cream in the house or, what's better, do you drain the whey off your chained yogurt to make a sour cream equivalent? Then you are golden.

You will need a strainer, some butter muslin, salt, and a pot big enough to hold your clabbered milk.

Here's the link with the recipe.

Notice that your clabbered milk should have been raw at the start, and your jug no doubt came from a store. If it's ultra-pasteurized, fuhgeddaboudit. You can't make this with ultra-pasteurized milk.

Raw milk is illegal in my state. That still gives me three choices: the normally pasteurized milk in my local small business; lightly pasteurized milk at a store 5 miles away; or a dairy about 100 miles away.

The Amish use yogurt to make hard cheese. Goldie's recipe sounds like it will be cheddary. You can also make buttermilk cheese by draining out the whey and salting it, and you could also try this; it's a mesophilic culture like what you need for cheddar cheese. Try it both ways and see which you like.

If the milk is old and a little smelly but not necessarily chunky, make your own queso blanco. This is a lot like making paneer, but the queso blanco recipe calls for changing pressure on the cheese, for which you need a cheese press. You don't need that for paneer, just fill the pot you used to heat the milk at least half full of hot water, to soak the crust off the bottom; put it on top of the wrapped curd package for 40 minutes.

You can hardly go wrong with these three options. You'll avoid food waste, and paneer is hugely expensive.

Does it annoy the hell out of you that so much whey goes down the sink? Well, in Victorian and earlier novels you may have come across the term "white wine whey". You can use that whey to make a drink. There's lots of nutrition in that whey, and this recipe was used to make a medicinal drink.

Notice that any time you heat milk to a certain point, you can add something acidic like white wine and make it curdle. But if you don't want to pour off all that whey (and you have a little Viking in you), here's a recipe for blaand.