Early in the afternoon I was stirring a pot of boiling nettles, thinking I sure hope this works.
I was making my second attempt at a simple recipe for creating rennet, which is a thickening agent used in cheesemaking.
Folk wisdom, “hacks” and surprising suggestions are seemingly endless out there in the homesteading world. Increasingly, I find it takes some good humor, problem-solving and substitutions to make them work for you. Even if they don’t, you can learn something.
I wanted to create my own rennet, which has been a hassle for me to buy when making cheese in the past. While researching, I quickly came up against the fact that I didn’t know anyone with a spare animal stomach, nor did I have housemates who would likely tolerate me processing one. Traditional rennet is made of enzymes from the stomach lining of young calves, sheep or goat kids.
Then I read that I could make rennet at home with just nettles (or thistles, sorrel or lady’s bedstraw), salt and water.
I chose nettles to test because they were available dried from my local health food store for cheap. Since it uses a common weed, I thought the recipe would be a cheap and simple way for our readers to use up extra milk from their animals. Twelve hours later, I had nothing but stinky nettle milk looking sad and brown in the fridge.
When I can’t get something to work, I often find it difficult to rest until I solve the problem. This led to four containers of near-boiling milk on my kitchen counter a few days later, trialing different recipe tweaks from abandoned blogs and sustainable living forums.
Use 15 times the quantity of salt, one advised. Add lemon juice, suggested another. What if I tried four times as much rennet as milk, just to see if curdling was possible?
We weren’t going for a gourmet meal here; all I needed was proof of concept, so that I could recommend whether it was worth a try. I wanted it to work; I wanted a simple solution from nature.
Only the lemon juice experiments separated curds from whey, unsurprisingly. Even if that was my only takeaway from this project, it reminded me that simple cheesemaking is quite accessible.
Maybe I faced complicating factors; the only milk I had to spare was from the grocery store, and I suspect fresh nettle leaves would have worked better, though the internet insisted it doesn’t matter.
Another aspect of homesteading I’ve learned to make the best of is that you often don’t have everything a recipe or project design or recommendation from someone else requires, and you can use your accumulated knowledge to help you substitute and adjust. It’s hard to learn if you don’t try.
For example, my lemon juice bowl produced a nice, simple soft cheese that made a decent lunch when mixed with salt and herbs.
Even if your nettle rennet fails like mine did, you can make soft cheeses like mozzarella, farmer’s cheese, cottage cheese, ricotta, cream cheese and queso fresco with no rennet.
Leaving a pan of milk on the lowest heat for an hour or two is a simple addition while you’re busy elsewhere in the kitchen. It will yield a fine cheese, as it has for me many times.
Have you ever made rennet from plants? Email [email protected] and tell me all about it.
