How to Make Cream Cheese - Gemma's Bold Baking Basics Ep 11

Hi Bold Bakers! I have received hundreds of messages asking to show you how to make homemade cream cheese as part of Bold Baking Basics. And ask and you shall receive because I'm going to show you how you can easily make it at home with just two ingredients. We're going to start out in a large heavy bottom saucepan. Add in full fat milk. Not low fat, not skimmed, not semi skimmed, whatever. The fuller the fat, the more curd you'll actually get from your cream cheese so remember that it's really important. Now we're just going to turn it on to a medium-high heat and we just want all of this milk to come to a simmer. While it's coming to a simmer, I'm just going to stir it every so often. You don't want to walk away and scorch the bottom of your milk. You want to always be keeping an eye on it. So now that our mix has come to a simmer, we're going to turn it down to a medium controlled heat. You want it to simmer away and here I have some lemon juice. Three tablespoons of lemon juice. You can also use lime juice or actually a vinegar as well. Just a white, plain vinegar and that will work really well. Now what we want to do is take our wooden spoon and we are just going to stir one tablespoon in at a time. We're going to stir it for around a minute or so. Cream cheese is not available in all countries and I didn't really realize that until I started doing Bigger Bolder Baking and the amount of people who ask for recipes for cream cheese. So I'm really happy to be able to bring this. This is the best recipe that I tried. I tried many and this is the best one that I found that worked. So take a little look here. Do you see it starting to curdle? This is perfect. We're on the right track. So we're going to go in again with another tablespoon of lemon. There you go. See that? Right there. That's your cream cheese. I'm going to add in the last bit of lemon. Give it a stir around. Now do you see all of these lumps that have come to the top? These are our curds and this is our cream cheese. This is exactly what we want. Now you can always double, triple, quadruple this recipe if you want. If you want to make a lot of cream cheese, that's totally fine. It's not temperamental. It will take multiplying. No problem. So now we're just going to knock it off the heat and we're going to get ready to strain this liquid off. Next, you want to separate the curds from the whey. So you want to get yourself a nice big bowl and then we're going to lay over a sieve and then we're going to lay into that some cheesecloth. Now cheesecloth can be actually found in a lot of supermarkets but I'm going to put a link on my website of where you can buy it. It's really important you do need cheesecloth because it is really fine and it catches all the curds. Take your curds and just pour it into your cheesecloth. Now this cream cheese is so simple. We're not looking to use active cultures or anything like that. And also, we are just going to have to let it sit here for 15 minutes. We don't have to let it hang overnight like a lot of cream cheese do. We're just going to let him hang out here, let all the liquid drip away and we're going to come back in around 15 minutes. So it's been a few minutes and all the liquid has drained away. Now I just want to make a note, this liquid doesn't have to be thrown away. It actually works fantastically for marinades and for brines because the acid in it from the milk and from the lemon that we added in will actually break down your meat really, really well. So you don't have to throw that away if you don't want to. So with our curds here, we are going to add this into our food processor. You're probably thinking to yourself that this doesn't look like cream cheese yet and you're right because it doesn't. That's why we have to process it. Make it nice and creamy. At this point to our curds, you want to add in a little bit of salt to flavor it. You can actually also add different flavors at this point too, herbs, whatever you like you can add in there. And then we're just going to pop on the lid and process until it's nice and creamy. So this recipe yields you 8 ounces or 1 cup of cream cheese. So check the recipe that you're making, how much cream cheese you need, and then you can multiply my recipe for cream cheese. I can see it's nice and smooth. Now if you find that your cream cheese is a little bit on the thicker side, you want to loosen it up a little bit, feel free to add in a little bit of the liquid that we actually took away from the curds. Or even a drop of cream, that would be lovely too. Now just check out that homemade cream cheese. It is incredible. This will last in your fridge for 7 days and it will be happy to live there and you just use it as you go in any of your bold baking recipes. Just remember the better quality milk you use, the better cream cheese you'll have at the very end. So just like this cream cheese, I have lots more Bold Baking Basics recipes like how to make buttermilk, food dye, and food extract. So make sure you check all of those out.