I took advantage of a Mother’s Day sale to buy some kitchen equipment for Courtney. Courtney started making homemade cheese not long after Elgin was born, but has been limited by lack of a cheese press, which is necessary for certain cheeses. Because of the lack of a press, Courtney has been mostly limited to mozzarella. Mozzarella is delicious, but in the interest of expanding varieties I’ve been looking for a good, quality cheese press for some time now. Most cheese presses on the market are unable to be used for anything else, large, clunky, not particularly good looking, and not cheap.
Eventually, I settled on a cheese press made by LEM, which can either be purchased as a complete unit, or as an adapter for a 5 lb sausage stuffer. Originally, I was planning on buying the complete unit, but as we’ve moved further into self-sufficiency, we’ve started to have large amounts of ground venison on hand. Also, over the past year, Courtney has experimented with making homemade bologna, shaping it in a bread pan rather than a sausage casing. During Lent, she even made some homemade vegetarian hot dogs, which she rolled and cut in order to shape. So, with the Mother’s Day sale, I decided to buy the 5lb sausage stuffer and the cheese press adapter. Total cost with shipping was $275. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some results from its use soon.