Matthew Woolen is a master pastry chef and has worked in a variety of Seattle restaurants, including gastropub Old Sage, Zhu Dang, and a gluten-free restaurant called Capitol Cider.

Matthew Woolen

Farmer cheese, or fromage blanc, is a great entry point for making cheese. It’s super simple to make and gives you hands-on experience with the fundamental process by which all cheeses are made: turning milk into curds and whey. And if you use sous vide to make farmer cheese, it’s even easier to get consistent, deliciously complex results: a soft, smooth, spreadable, and slightly tangy cheese that tastes like a distillation of milk, perfect for blintz or pierogi fillings or turning into a dip to serve alongside crudité.You’ll need milk, a bacterial starter culture, and rennet (a coagulant used for cheese production). The type of culture you use determines the culturing temperature; for this recipe, we call for a mesophilic culture, which means it consists of bacteria that like moderately hot temperatures (mesophilic means “middle-loving”). The culture kick-starts the microbial activity that’s responsible for giving the cheese its complexity of flavor and its acidity, while the rennet coagulates the proteins into solid curds that can be separated from the liquid portion of the milk, or whey.The precise temperature control of sous vide gives you the ability to reliably culture the milk, even if you choose to do it for an extended period of time. And since the longer you culture the dairy, the more flavorful the final cheese will be, sous vide might just be the best method for making fresh cheese at home.

Sous Vide Farmer Cheese