Cheese, Anari

⚠ UNTESTED. A briefing.

The Cypriot whey cheese, and the best-case version of this entire page — because it is made from halloumi whey, which is the sweetest whey in cheesemaking.

⭐ Halloumi is made with little or no starter, so almost no culture has touched its whey and it drains at around pH 6.5 with its whey proteins intact. Make halloumi and you get anari very nearly for free.

🔴 Which is the honest way to think about this cheese: it is not a make you plan, it is a make you are handed. Its quality was settled hours earlier, by a decision you took about a different cheese.

Eaten fresh it is snow-white, soft and faintly sweet. Salted and dried hard it becomes a grating cheese, and the two are used so differently that most people who have met both do not realise they are the same thing.

Ingredients

• 1 gallon fresh sweet whey — straight from a halloumi make, same day
• 1 to 2 cups whole milk — see the directions about why
• 1 to 2 Tbsp white vinegar or lemon juice, only if it needs it
• Fine salt, to taste if eating fresh; a good deal more if drying

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt

1. 🔴 Use the whey the same day — ideally the same hour. Sweet whey acidifies on its own at room temperature within hours, and once it does the second cheese is gone. This is a make you start when the first one finishes.
2. Strain out the fines through a fine cloth. Curd dust scorches on the bottom of the pot and makes the anari gritty.
3. ⭐ Add whole milk, 5 to 10% of the whey volume. A cup or two per gallon. This is standard practice, including commercially, and it is not cheating — the added casein gives the denatured whey protein something to nucleate on, and it roughly doubles a very small yield.
4. Heat slowly to 175-185 F / 80-85 C, stirring, then stop stirring and take it the rest of the way to 195-200 F / 90-93 C.
5. Add acid only if it needs it. Good halloumi whey often flocculates on heat alone. If nothing is rising by 190 F, stir in a tablespoon of vinegar once, very gently.
6. 🔴 Let the raft rise, and then leave it alone for 10 to 20 minutes off the heat. Stirring now breaks it into particles that go straight through any cloth you own.
7. Skim, do not pour. Lift the raft off with a fine skimmer into a colander lined with butter muslin — not cheesecloth, which will lose most of it.
8. Drain 20 minutes for spoonable, an hour or two for sliceable. Salt lightly, or not at all, and eat it within two or three days.
9. ⭐ Or dry it, which is the other cheese entirely. Salt it heavily, press it gently into a round, and air-dry it somewhere cool with good airflow for two to four weeks, turning daily, until it is hard enough to grate.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it is not 🔴 UNTESTED. ⚠ And I am not going to imply otherwise: I list ricotta among the cheeses I have made, but I genuinely cannot say whether the ones I made were whole-milk or whey. The provenance of my own memory is not good enough to claim the harder one, and it certainly is not good enough to claim this.

🔴 Whether this works at all was decided by the cheese you made FIRST Rennet takes the casein and leaves the whey proteins dissolved. Those need heat to denature and precipitate — and they are only still there if the whey came off sweet, at pH 6.0 or above. Whey from a cheese that acidified hard before draining has already lost them into the curd. ⭐ So the drier and sweeter the first cheese, the better the second: halloumi whey is excellent, alpine and gouda whey is good, a late-drained cheddar is poor, and an acid-set cheese leaves you nothing at all. No technique conjures a second cheese out of cottage-cheese whey. The makes page has the table.

⚠ What to expect, honestly A gallon of good sweet whey gives a few ounces — three to six, or nearer eight with added milk. That is the yield, not a failed batch. The whey proteins are a small fraction of milk protein to begin with and you are recovering some of them. A second-run cheese is a bonus, not a second batch, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

⭐ One cheese, three names, three countries Anari is the Cypriot name. In Greece the same cheese is mizithra, or anthotyros — anthos + tyros, “flower cheese”. They are made from ewe’s and/or goat’s-milk whey by the method above, they are eaten fresh or salted and dried, and the differences between them are the whey they happened to come from and the border they were made on.

⭐⭐ That is this family’s whole naming problem in one line. A whey cheese has no identity of its own: it is named for its parent cheese, its animal, or its colour. Elsewhere in this collection a cheese name points at a place or a method — here it points backwards, at the cheese that came before it. See Cheese, Mizithra for the same make under the other name.

Read alongside /cheese/makes/whey-and-second-run/ on the site, and the halloumi that produces the whey.