I rounded out a collection of homemade dairy products this week in my Twice as Tasty column for the Flathead Beacon with sour cream. I love the tangy richness of sour cream and spoon it over everything from nachos to baked potatoes to Sourdough Empanadas. It’s an essential flavor on and in Mushroom-Filled Blini and makes Onion Lover’s Dip irresistible.

I bake with sour cream as often as buttermilk, because it provides loft in recipes like Chocolate–Sour Cream Cookies and lightens scones, including Savory Herb and Sour Cream Scones. But homemade sour cream, cultured buttermilk, and fresh yogurt are just the starting point. Once you become comfortable with the techniques and ingredients for soft creations, your first homemade cheese is just a recipe away.

Learn more about making and using sour cream and other homemade dairy products and get the complete recipe for Homemade Sour Cream in my column.

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If you’ve grown comfortable with Homemade Small-Batch Yogurt, start your cheese-making adventures with farmer’s cheese. The process is so similar that I teach people how to make both in a single cheese and yogurt workshop. I also wrote a step-by-step guide and shared a recipe for this cheese with in-progress photos for the Old Farmer’s Almanac website.

I often use lemon juice instead of vinegar when making farmer’s cheese. It imparts an especially bright flavor when you press that cheese into Fresh Paneer.

If you decided to pick up a mesophilic culture for Cultured Buttermilk or sour cream, you have one of the key ingredients you need for several types of cheese. Soft Homemade Fromage Blanc, the cow’s milk equivalent of goat chèvre, uses this starter. So does a completely different cheese: Dry-Salted Feta.

Other easy cheeses include ricotta, which you “set” with citric acid. Use ricotta as a fresh, soft cheese or press, salt, and age it to create firmer Ricotta Salata. You use citric acid for some stretchy cheese too, like Quick Homemade Mozzarella.

Learn more about making cheese and additional tools and ingredients you might need on this page.

Want more Twice as Tasty recipes? Get my books! Click here to order a personally signed, packaged, and shipped copy of The Complete Guide to Pickling directly from me. I also share tasty ways to use pickles in The Pickled Picnic; it’s only available here.