Can I make my own cheese by letting a glass of milk sit on the counter for a week or so?

You might make something – grounds for divorce, maybe? But I doubt that you’d make a human-edible cheese that way.

A glass of milk doesn’t have all the ingredients for making cheese, it needs to be at a temperature to get bacteria growing and it has to get a bacteria to make it ferment. I believe that pasteurized milk doesn’t have what it needs to make cheese.

Try it and see.

Yes, but you probably want to boil it first.

I admire your curiosity but I hope you have good health insurance.

SPOILER ALERT pun intended

It will stink to high heaven by Wednesday.

You are preparing for the toilet runs!

Don’t you need rennet to make cheese?

I did that when I was a kid. I made sour cream and clear liquid.

I don’t think it’s possible. It takes heating milk at a steady, appropriate temperature for a certain amount of time. It also requires a starter culture. Once that is done, it is usually yogurt.

In order to make cream cheese, the whey is separated from the thicker milk byproduct through a straining process. In order to make different types of cheeses, it gets more complicated.

How Cheese is Made.

You’ll get the curdled mess I found in my kid’s room once. It will not be cheese.

Making cheese this way is an udder mistake.

Nope. All that will get you is an unpalatable clot of sour, curdled milk. But you are only a couple of easy steps away from homemade cottage cheese. Swedes do this all the time:

The Essentials of Making Cottage Cheese:

1) Heat raw (unpastrurized, unhomogenized) milk to 86F and acidify with a Mesophilic culture.
2) Add rennet to coagulate your milk.
3) Pour into a cheese cloth and hang above a large mixing bowl.
4) Once set, cut the curds to release whey which will drain into the bowl.
5) Heat the curds to 115F and cook them for an hour to expel more whey.
6) Pour curds into a lined colander and allow to drain for 30 minutes.

There’s a bit more to cheese making than just letting milk sit out to spoil and curdle.

Milk, acid, seasoning.

Nice to see so many whey in on this….

I am thinking about what sour milk tastes like. Sour milk which is a few days too old, and you don’t realize it and put it in your coffee. I can’t imagine drinking it straight. I can’t imagine it tasting like anything good like cheese does. Gross.

It would be like sour cream. I never tasted my creation. It reaked. .. . Just be careful not to cut the cheese.

@jca Cheeses come in all kinds of flavours, some of them very pungent!

No, but you will get the lovely aroma of eau de elementary school cafeteria.

Although some cheese is made with rennet, it is not necessary for all cheeses. This is how to make Cheese suitable for vegetarians.

Gross

@dappled_leaves: Yes I know! I think that drinking spoiled milk might be a recipe for getting sick, however, and eating pungent cheese is not.

@jca Haha – yes, that’s fair. But we already do so many risky things in our kitchens anyway… only we don’t think of them as risky because our parents did them, and their parents did them, too. I don’t think we should shy away from trying new recipes just because they’re not already part of our personal traditions. I know a number of people who have made their own yogurt, for example. It’s a very similar process.

@dappled_leaves: Yes but it tastes better than sour milk. :)

No. All you would get was sour, spoiled milk. And the bacteria that can form in milk is one of the deadliest known so it might even kill you. Don’t do it, @elbanditoroso! You have so much to live for!

@kritiper – thanks. I threw it out last night. No cheese for me :-) But it was a thought.