Here's some cheese you can make at home

Sure, you could craft your own block of cheddar cheese, create some Havarti or whip up a batch of gorgonzola.

But why would you want to?

Most cheeses require rennet, an enzyme found in the stomach of cows (and sheep and goats). Rennet is what gives cheese its texture, but it also adds a few steps to the cheese-making process — and why bother when you can just buy cheese at a store?

But there are a few cheeses that need no rennet and require practically no labor at all. That's my kind of cheese, at least when I want to make it myself.

Ricotta, queso fresco, farmer's cheese and buttermilk cheese are all fast and easy to make, delivering a large amount of satisfaction for very little effort. Each is fairly simple in flavor — rennet also adds complexity — but they are also wonderfully rewarding.

They are all made the same way, with the same ingredients: milk or cream, acid (vinegar or lemon juice) and salt. Once you've mastered one, you've mastered them all, although they are so easy there really isn't anything to master.

They taste different, though, because of the proportions used. Different textures come from aging.

Some cheeses, such as cheddars, will be aged for as long as four or five years. Fresh cheeses can age all the way up to one hour.

It is not aging that is taking place, anyway. With fresh cheese, you have to drain the whey out of the curds. The longer it drains, the firmer the cheese will be. Up to, as we said, an hour or so.

It is the part about separating the whey from the curds that makes fresh cheese. First, you get milk nice and hot. Then you add some vinegar or lemon juice, which curdles the milk.

That is, it divides the milk into curds (lumpy white things) and whey (a thin, chalk-colored liquid). The curds make the cheese. In fresh cheeses,...