One of raw milk’s best kept secrets is the ability to turn it into cream cheese and whey. We all know what cream cheese is. But many of us have never heard of whey, other than a part of that quaint nursery rhyme about Little Miss Muffet who sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey…

Cream cheese is actually just one of many kinds of cheeses made from milk. It is probably the easiest to make. Whey is the byproduct of all cheeses made from milk. But it is hardly a waste product. Whey may be one of the most valuable assets coming from milk, other than the milk itself. It serves as a starter inoculant for all manner of lacto-fermented fruits and vegetables. It helps acidify water for presoaking whole grains to make them more digestible. It can also be a tonic which can be consumed to aid in digestion, though it does take some getting used to (or doctoring up) the taste.

Best of all, it’s easy to make. You don’t even need to have access to raw milk to make whey and enjoy its many benefits. You can use any kind of yogurt with live cultures, homemade or purchased from the store. In fact, I recommend starting with yogurt because you have more control over the souring process, and therefore the taste of the cream cheese.

To begin, line a strainer over a bowl with a dishtowel or cheesecloth. One type of cloth that works really well is the highly porous bird’s eye diaper. Just fold one of those in half. Pour in a quart of yogurt and cover with a dinner plate. Within minutes the whey will begin dripping out. The curds of the yogurt will start drying out. After a couple hours, gather up the cloth and tie off with a string and hang over the bowl. Alternatively, you could gather up the cloth and then drop the bundle into a sprouting bag and hang that up, eliminating the need for string. The whey will continue to drip out for several hours. Once the cloth no longer drips, the curds in the cloth can be considered cream cheese. A quart of yogurt will yield around two and a half cups of whey. The whey should be stored in the refrigerator and will keep for several months. The cream cheese can last from a couple weeks to a month.

Another method for making whey is to take a quart of raw milk and allow it to sour at room temperature. When the milk has solidified and begun to separate, you pour it through the cloth-lined strainer just like with the yogurt. As I mentioned before, I prefer making the yogurt first, then turning the yogurt into whey and cream cheese because I have more control over the culturing process. I use a specific type of yogurt to inoculate my milk and I culture the milk at a specific temperature. This results in the cream cheese having a consistent flavor and consistency that my family enjoys. When you sour milk on your counter top at room temperature, you have much less control over the culturing temperature and the dominant microbes. I’ve had my cream cheese come out absolutely perfect, even better tasting than with yogurt, but I’ve also had it come out with a rather unpleasant, though still edible sharp flavor.
Of course, if you make any other type of cheese, you will be inoculating your milk with some type of cheese culture and following a specific protocol for culturing the cheese, which will also give you more control over the final outcome. I have found that whey is whey, regardless of how the cheese it’s separated from comes out.