Impress Your Family: Homemade Asiago Cheese
If you have been struggling to make a cheese that your family actually likes — give Asiago a try. This cheese got big thumbs up from all three of my kids (including a picky 3 year old) and my husband.
When I first started making my own cheeses, they were, I’ll admit… pretty bad! But over time my technique has improved, I’ve found recipes that work for me and my cheeses have greatly improved.
How to make Asiago Cheese
Asiago is a fairly simple, straightforward cheese to make. I was once told by my daughter’s friend that my cheese was “disgusting”. I recently gave an Asiago to that family and they gobbled it up!
Overview of making Asiago cheese
Heat the milk
Add culture
Add rennet
Check for a clean break
Cut Curds
Stir curds
Press
Brine
Air dry
Age
Enjoy!
What I love about Asiago
Cheese never lasts long in my household. Fussy, long aging cheeses? Who has the time or patience? My favorite thing about this cheese? It is ready and tasty in only a month!
The other thing that I love about Asiago is that it is a skimmed milk cheese. Now, you don’t want to skim all of the cream, that would give you a rubbery product. But if you skim down to about a 1” cream line, this cheese is just perfection.
This works great if you are someone who hand skims your cream anyway (don’t have a cream separator? — this is for you!) or if you are calf sharing and your cow loves to hold back her cream for her calf.
Can I make this with sheep milk?
Yes! The first time I made this cheese I made it with 100% sheep milk and it came out FANTASTIC! I’ll list some guidlines below for converting this to a sheep milk recipe:
If you would like to skim the cream, use older sheep milk that has a set cream line on it and skim it down to about 1”.
Don’t heat the milk quite as high as for cows milk, stick to about 85℉.
Use half the amount of culture called for.
Let it culture for about half the amount of time called for.
Use less rennet than called for in the cows milk recipe. You may have to experiment a bit here to know how much will work for you and your milk. When I made it I used 1.6ml rennet for 4 gallons of milk, or 0.4ml / gallon. While this made a wonderful cheese, it did take me longer to get a clean break — 1 hour and 20 minutes. For myself, next time I make this cheese with 100% sheep milk I will try bumping the rennet up to maybe 0.5ml / gallon and see what the results are like.
Be more gentle with your handling — ie, cutting and stirring, of the curds.
More cheese recipes you should try:
Quick Mozzarella Using Skim Cows Milk
Pin this for later
Join our newsletter at the bottom