Make Homemade Cheese in 48 Hours or Less With Fromaggio

Unlike sourdough bread or pickled vegetables, cheese isn't one of those artisan foods that tastes even better when you make it at home. Though some fresh cheeses like ricotta and mozzarella are well-suited to a home kitchen, hard cheeses like cheddar and parmesan traditionally require months of sitting in a temperature-controlled room to develop the right flavor and texture. But a new product on Kickstarter aims to change that. With Fromaggio, you can make hard cheeses on your countertop at home in 48 hours or less.

Fromaggio is a fully-automated cheesemaking machine. To use it, you just need to add your ingredients—milk, culture, and rennet—to the inner chamber and select one of the default cheese options on the touchscreen display. If you don't see the cheese you want to make in the system, you can connect the appliance to the companion app and select a custom cheese recipe from your phone.

Fromaggio does the rest, from heating the milk and draining the whey to pressing the curds into the right shape. It can churn out almost any type of cheese, including mozzarella, blue cheese, cheddar, feta, Swiss cheese, cream cheese, and provolone. While complex hard cheeses can take up to two days to make, some soft cheeses are ready in as little as 30 minutes.

If you want to experiment with the flavor of your cheese, you can take it out and age it after Fromaggio has pressed it into a hard block. The system also makes non-cheese dairy products, like yogurt and kefir, and it can cook non-dairy foods like tofu when you use it as a sous vide cooker.

The product's Kickstarter campaign has already raised double its original $50,000 goal (and there's still more than a month left to go). If you want more homemade cheese in your life, you can reserve your Fromaggio with a pledge of $299. It comes with a packet of rennet for an extra $15 and cultures for an additional $30. But even if you pledge today, you'll still have to settle for store-bought cheese for a while; the cheesemaker won't be delivered until March 2020.

Buy it on Kickstarter.