Best Cheese Press for Home Cheese Making

This ~~bad boy~~ cheese press has recently just made it to the top of my “Top 10 Most Wanted Urban Homesteading Gadgets” list.

Click here for the incredible price I found!

I’ve dabbled in home cheese making a few times, and it’s mostly been a pretty colossal failure…

…mainly because of my lack of a decent cheese press.

Here’s how my hard cheese attempts have gone:

No cheese press + free weights= Dry Crumble Pancake EPIC FAIL Cheese.
Homemade cheese press cobbled together from available materials= Moldy Lopsided EPIC FAIL Cheese.
Accidental hard cheese (unpressed) when attempting to make mozzarella= EPIC FAIL Mozzarella = Tasty Dry 2-Month Aged Cheese.

So anyway, needless to say… if I want to fulfill my dream and make a decent farmhouse cheddar, I need a cheese press.

A good one.

Not one thrown together by things I happen to have sitting around, but one that’s actually, well, a cheese press.

And lo & behold, I just saw the sign (the blinking sign!) that said Cheese Presses for Sale!!

Okay maybe not, but it was on Amazon.com. Which, as you may know, is probably my favorite place to acquire my homesteader kitchen gadgets. Their prices are fantastic, service is great, and did I mention free super saver shipping on thousands of items?

So here we have it. My soon-to-be cheese press. My birthday is coming up, you know!

I especially liked that this is a dutch cheese press – meaning it is a very old design that’s been used for centuries to press cheese.

Dutch cheese presses are considered the best on the market because of the way the lever arm uses the same concept as a set of old-fashioned scales to press with the correct amount of pressure.

Let’s Talk About This Cheese Press’ Features:

Made in Europe – This is a very authentically designed cheese press. It is not a knockoff thrown together by an amateur, but is in fact a professionally made dutch press that has been build to last and consistently press thousands of pounds of cheese.
Traditional Dutch design- this particular design has a lever that allows you to essentially hang a weight from the arm and use that leverage to press your cheese consistently and with the correct amount of pressure. Unlike spring-loaded cheese presses, the pressure will stay consistent and not need continual re-adjusting.
1-2 Gallon Batch Size- I myself tend to stick with 1 or 2 gallon batches. This is the perfect size for home cheese making equipment, at least for those of us who don’t own a cow (yet!). I know I was looking for a small cheese press, as opposed to the 5 gallon sizes I generally see.
Two Molds- this press comes with two separate molds, one for a 1-gallon batch and another for a 2-gallon batch. This is nice because then your 2-gallon wheel of cheese isn’t just doubly as tall, but is appropriately shaped for it’s size.
Adjustable Follower- The follower (the big stick going up in the middle) is adjustable so you can make extra-small batches if you want to, or for pressing cheeses that have varying amounts of whey still in them.
Perforated molds- You might think this should be a “given” but I’ve seen a lot of cheese molds on the market that have no holes. Holes are absolutely necessary to expel the whey as the cheese is being pressed so that it doesn’t get moldy after it’s pressed.

What Does This Cheese Press Come With?

Dutch design cheese press
1-gallon size cheese mold
2-gallon size cheese mold
Food-grade plastic mold follower

The Good and the Not-So-Good

Now, this is the part where I normally will put on my Private Investigator hat and try and find reviews and owners to talk to about this fantastic cheese press.

However, while the manufacturer has been making these for quite some time, it hasn’t really hit “mass retail” until recently so there’s just not a whole lot of available feedback.

That, and I don’t know anyone who has this awesome home cheese press.

So until I can buy this cheese press for myself, here’s what I was able to find.

Mostly, the discussions revolve around the design itself. Like I said above, the Dutch lever design cheese press is a very old design and is considered the best design for a cheese press.

There’s a couple other designs – the pressure spring-type press, and the kind (usually homemade) that you stick your weights on top.

Here’s why you want the dutch design press instead of the others:

Spring-type pressesare nice in that they generally take up less space. Having said that, there’s a major issue – with the pressure springs, as the cheese expels whey, the spring pressure will decrease slightly.This results in an inconsistent press and can cause all sorts of problems, if anything just an inconsistent flavor but can also result in not enough whey being expelled which can make an otherwise great cheese go moldy.

The dutch design presses, on the other hand, use a lever arm that keeps a consistent pressure during the entire process, which allows you to get the same results, predictably, every time.
The type of presses that have you pile weights on top, well, I haven’t seen any commercially available. I will say this – the main problem with those is you oftentimes get a lopsided cheese if the weights are not absolutely perfectly centered on top of your follower.I’ve seen pictures, and one of the epic fail cheeses I mentioned (#2) was with one of those that I threw together. A lopsided cheese might not seem like too much of an issue, but consider that it will cure and dry out unevenly. That could pose some problems down the line as well.The nice thing about the dutch design presses are that, once again, because of the way the lever is set up, it gives an even consistent pressure on the whole wheel of cheese, and won’t favor one side or the other.

There is only one problem I can foresee with this press.

The base of the press is small enough that I wonder if hanging a heavy weight on the lever arm will cause it to tip over. Having said that, I will probably do something similar that I did with my Piteba oil expeller.

I simply bolted the expeller onto a piece of lumber that would allow me to use c-clamps to clamp it onto my countertop. It worked really well for the Piteba, which requires some pretty heavy-duty hand-cranking, so I know it will work just fine for this cheese press. Either that or even just screw it onto a piece of wood to extend the base to below the lever arm.

All in all, here’s what I care about:

I personally want to be able to have a nice small cheese press that will press a couple gallon size batches.

I want one that will give me consistent results, and won’t cause me a headache.

That’s why I think out of all the cheese presses I’ve seen, I like this one best.

It’s under $175 so is not going to cost me an arm and a leg, won’t take up half my kitchen, and it will allow me to make tasty hard cheeses that my family will love, and some wheels to give out as Christmas gifts.

I think that sounds just about perfect.

So where can you find these stellar cheese presses for sale?

Amazon, baby! That’s where you’ll get the best deal. You can find these on eBay sometimes as well, but those ones don’t come with all the molds, so then you end up paying quite a bit more to order them separately.

Go with this seller on Amazon and you’ll get the whole system for well under $175 shipped.

A review from Amazon.com:

Great press, even looks great sitting in the kitchen! It’s been very fulfilling making my own cheese from high quality milk.

(Bethany says: “Yes! That’s exactly what I was hoping for!”)

Review shortened for space, click here to read entire review.