Cream Cheese Anyone?

My friend Jeanie also introduced me to making cream cheese. It has been easy and a lot of fun.

After you have made yogurt and have let it thicken fully in the fridge, you can make cream cheese out of it. You simply put the yogurt in a cheesecloth bag, like the one pictured above. My bag came with my Yogourmet maker, but it would be easy to make a simple bag from cheesecloth. It doesn't need to be anything fancy.

Fill the bag with yogurt, then hang it from somewhere. You need to put a bowl under it to catch the whey that will come out of the bag. You then let it sit in the bag for 6-8 hours. At the end of the process you will have cream cheese. You then scoop it out of the bag and put it into the fridge until you are ready to make it into something. :) You can use the whey that has dripped out to add to something you are cooking. It has a lot of potassium in it.

This is what my plain cream cheese looks like. I like the consistency. It is very creamy, especially when compared to store-bought cream cheese. The other bonus is you know exactly what is in it. :) It very pure and fresh tasting.

I posted the Dill Garlic Dip recipe last week. I made with my homemade cream cheese. As shown in the picture above I also made strawberry cream cheese. I just got 1/2 C. cream cheese, 5 strawberries mashed up (you could use other soft fruits too) 1 Tbsp. agave. and mixed it all together. It was a great bagel spread. Jeanie also mentioned mixing some of it with a couple Tbsp. of peanut butter and some agave is delicious, using it to dip bananas into. It tasted really yummy.

You can basically use homemade cream cheese for whatever you usually use cream cheese for. You could make a cheesecake out of it. :) (Although I might leave out some of the sour cream in the recipe because the texture of this is so much lighter.) Let your creativity get to work.

Enjoy!