This week is the 5th lesson in my 16-week Cultured Dairy and Cheesemaking e-Course that I am taking. I learned how to make clabbered milk and clabbered cheese. What is "clabber" you say? Well, let me tell you, since I am now enlightened. Clabber is soured milk. It is allowed to sour under its own power without the aid of vinegar that we sometimes use in a pinch when a recipe calls for sour milk.
To elevate sour milk's less-than-popular reputation to a level that it deserves nutritionally, I created a special jar label to identify its contents. To make it, I scanned a vintage milk bottle cap into my computer, "erased" the dairy's name, and added the word clabbered in its place. After printing it, a quick spin of the wrist with my circle cutter and a short length of twine... done! Since I'm finding that I have several jars of various dairy products simultaneously culturing in the fridge and on my kitchen counter, I'm going to make these labels for each of the different processes, get them laminated at an office supply center, maybe insert each in a circular metal rimmed tag, and they'll be ready for instant identification. I will use the clabbered milk... don't ya love the name... as a recipe substitution for buttermilk or yogurt.
To make clabbered cheese, I first serged the edges of a double-layer square of cheesecloth to keep it from fraying when I wash it.
After draping a square of cheesecloth over a colander (actually I used my steamer basket because my colander was being used to make yogurt cheese), I poured half of the clabbered milk into the cheesecloth and tied the ends. When the whey is allowed to drain off, the end-product is clabbered cheese.