Halloumi, yeah! Making your own is the way to go

On the rack. (Photo: Gordon Wright)

By Gordon Wright

4 Mar 2022

Writer, cook, charcutier and all-round Karooster Gordon Wright seems to have added another arrow to the quiver that is his CV … cheese therapist?

Cheese glorious cheese! You just gotta love it. Personally, I’m a massive fan of all things cheese, with the possible exception of cheesy music...

Offcuts of cheese, by my own hand. (Photo: Gordon Wright)

Every nation has cheese of some sort, the prouder the nation, the more famous the variety of cheeses they seem to produce. I mean just look at the French with Camembert, the Italians with their Mozzarella, the Dutch Gouda and of course the British with their Smelly Stiltons and the Greeks their Feta & Halloumi, the perennial favourites.

It’s a delicious tradition that goes back to the earliest of times and with some of the best of quotes to go with them:

‘You can’t make everyone happy. You’re not cheese.’

– Anonymous

‘I just don’t see the point of not eating cheese. I mean, if God didn’t want us to eat cheese, would he have let man invent it?’

– Lisa Samson

‘How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?’

– Charles de Gaulle

‘You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.’

– Anthony Bourdain

As a cook, carnivore and charcutier, I like to think I know my way around a good bit of meat, mould and cheese but the reality is that although I have seen plenty of cheeses being made, have consumed many body weights in cheese and cooked with it more times than I care to think of, I have never, actually, by my own self/hand, made my own cheese... The shame is real, my friends.

Until now...

Hallalloumi! I am a cheese virgin no more. Thanks to a nice Lady in the Cape by the name of Elize Nel, of Yellow Edge Food Ingredients, who very kindly sent the team at TGIFood a cheese making kit to try and no one was brave enough to do so. Even our fearless leader, the esteemed, revered and of course, award winning Editor Tony Jackman ran screaming into the night at the mere thought. (Well, truth be told, it was more like a case of “Too finicky for me, send it to one of my minions...)

Thus it was with great joy, rapture and no small measure of trepidation that I received said package with the instruction from up high: “Make the cheese, send me the story and don’t screw either up!” (Anyone who knows TJ will know too that this is a bald faced lie, but it does not make great reading if I smudged this story with nothing but Amabhungane style truths – this is entertainment after all.)

But we digress.

The package supplied by young Elize comes as a cooler box (and can be delivered countrywide) and pretty much complete kit with instructions for making your favourite cheeses, sans the milk, obviously.

This one had all the gear to make about 1 kg each of feta and halloumi. All I had to supply was the cow juice, some of my valuable time and a little technical acumen...

The Kit. (Photo: Gordon Wright)

I also decided to enlist the “Phone a Friend” assistance of an award winning cheese-maker mate, as well as everyone’s font of all things informational, Mrs Google. Just in case.

Now I am not going to give you the recipe as you actually need all the other kit and the recipe and you can always ask Elize for that, but I will tell you that, despite myself, I managed to turn out, in an afternoon, a 1.2 kg batch of really tasty raw milk halloumi cheese.

I needed 10 litres of fresh milk, the kit and an afternoon to spare for a large pot of steaming curds and whey. (I decided on raw milk cow juice, as the traditional goat and sheep varieties were not at hand)

By early evening I had salted some, herbed some and spiced some. I had cut it up, packaged it nicely and stuck it in the fridge in order to woo my friends and family when they come to visit.

Most important, I spent a most splendid afternoon in my kitchen, totally self absorbed in my own little cheesy world, the background music playing, sipping on a glass or two of wine and life passing by.

On the rack. (Photo: Gordon Wright)

Sure, there was possibly a google search or WhatsApp to my outsourced experts and I even remembered to take a few crappy photos, but most important, never once did my mind wander off into the darkness with (well, frankly, dark) thoughts of Eskom, politics, the state of the nation or the price of fuel. Not even once did I contemplate the condition of our roads, the Ukraine issue or if Boris Johnson should get a haircut.

I just made my cheese.

And it was lovely.

So, my backyard cheese therapist advice to you is thus:

If you want an awesome little bit of stress relief and a tasty snack of succour in these trying times, just make a little piece of cheese… DM/TGIFood

Contact Elize Nel at [email protected]

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