How to make Cheese(Wara)

 

So simple and yummy 😋

To make wara the traditional way, you’d need ingredients such as; Freshly squeezed cow milk, Plant extract from a certain leaf known as “bomubomu” or “ewe bomu bomu”.

 This acts as a coagulant to make the milk curdle. You’d also need a special conical shaped woven basket usually used to separate the curds (coagulated cheese) from the whey (clear liquid).

Other acidic substitutes that act as a coagulant include; white vinegar, lemon or lime juice, apple cider vinegar magnesium chloride.

Procedure

To make wara, 5 litres of milk would give you about 1 kilogram of cheese

Step 1: The first step is to prepare the juice extract from the leaves. To do this, you finely chop about 7 bomubomu leaves and place in a bowl. Pour about half cup of warm water over the leaves and leave to infuse for about 10 minutes. 

Step 2: Pour the fresh cow milk into a pot. Turn down the heat of the burner and slow cook. This usually takes 15-30 minutes

Step 3: Sieve the liquid in step 1 above into the milk in the pot. Once you do that, you’ll notice the curds would start to separate from the whey immediately. If they don’t separate, add more juice. 

Step 4: Keep stirring so it doesn’t burn. After sometime, the whey (liquid) would get clearer while the curds (solid) would get larger. 

Step 5: Now it’s time to strain out the curds from the whey. You get the woven basket or a pap/cheese sieve and pour everything inside and strain. The whey protein is very important as well as nutritious for other things so don’t discard it. 

Step 6: Leave the whey to drip out of the cloth or basket and squeeze the excess liquid out. The sellers usually add water to it to keep it fresh. And your wara is ready. You can fry it to make Beske or add to your salads or dishes.