How to Make Homemade Leicester Cheese

Similar to Cheddar, but much milder, Leicester Cheese is a delicious alternative.

Leicester is a hard cheese is normally coloured with annatto and can be dark yellow to red in colour.  This is where the term Red Leicester comes from.

It was traditionally made in the shape of a flat wheel, so I used a 165mm width cheese mould/basket and adapted the recipe to 8 litres (2 gal) of milk.

This recipe uses a traditional cheddar process, including cheddaring the curds, but is lighter on the colouring.

To convert the recipe in the video to a Red Leicester, you will need to add 32 drops diluted in half a cup of non-chlorinated water and add it to the milk at the indicated timeframe.  This is a dose of 4 drops of annatto per 1 litre of milk.

To make this cheese you will need the following ingredients;

• Full Cream Milk
• Mesophillic direct set culture MO 030
• Annatto
• Liquid Vegetarian Rennet
• Cheese Salt
• Calcium Chloride if using pasteurised/homogenised milk.

You can also make this cheese with our Hard Cheese Kit and press it using our Stainless Steel Cheese press.

I usually mature mine to the full 4 months for a full flavoured Leicester Cheese!  It is a nice variation on a Farmhouse Cheddar and a little bit saltier too.

Enjoy making this cheese curd nerds!  I certainly did.