Homemade smoked goat's cheese

My Danish wife’s been talking about how she misses the smoked Danish cream cheeses for ages. And then she came across a recipe for ricotta gnocchi. And then everything escalated from there…

Fresh goat’s cheese can be awefully expensive. And when it’s this easy to make at home or on your boat, there’s no reason not to give it a try. We ended up smoking it, but omitting the smoking produces a really nice cheese as well – try either version on our authentic Danish dark rye bread.

Ingredients

600 ml full fat goat’s milk
1 tbsp buttermilk
10 g sea salt
Large handful onion peel

Method

Find a lidded jar or container of some sort that can hold at least 700 ml. Put the goat’s milk and buttermilk into the container, put on the lid and shake a bit to combine.

Put the container on your bathroom floor or someplace else nice and warm for 1-2 days. The bacteria from the buttermilk will have infected the entire batch, so you now have soured goat’s milk.

Transfer to a pot, stir in the salt and put on low heat. As the temperature rises to 50C/122F, the acid from the bacteria in the buttermilk will cause the milk to curd and the curds will rise to the top, while the liquid whey will stay at the bottom. Keep it at 60C/140F for 10 minutes.

Find a bowl and strain the milk into the bowl through a very fine sieve or 2 layers of wet muslin cloth/cheese cloth. Put everything into the fridge and let sit overnight.

If you still think the cheese is a bit too wet, you may gently press more liquid out of it by pressing it inside the cheese cloth. Squeezing or twisting too hard can make the cheese extrude through the muslin, so don’t be too forceful.

At this point you have a really delicious goat’s cheese ready to eat. But we wanted it smoked.

We simply put the cheese in a small bowl, put the bowl in the bottom of a 3 liter pot and filled the pot with onion peel.

We made this video to illustrate the process, but simply torch the onion peel, put the lid on, and let it sit for 20-30 minutes. Et voila!