A super quick (microwave!) recipe for Haloumi cheese, flavoured with herbs and chilli and ready to eat in under an hour.

Inspired by my recent adventures with 1 ingredient curd cheese making, I had decided to make haloumi. We love the salty flavour and squeaky texture of the cheese. The pan-fried slices of this Cypriot delicacy taste great in salads and as a snack.

How do you make halloumi?

My first attempt over the weekend became a slight failure. I used lemon juice (from 2 lemons) to help create the curd. Unfortunately, my cheese ended up more like a herbed curd cheese than halloumi. It was delicious, but a far cry from the salty, squeaky halloumi we’ve come to love.

Not about to give up, I scoured the interwebs for homemade haloumi (aren’t we blessed these days). Buried amongst others, I found a super simple plain haloumi recipe and went on improving it by adding dried herbs and chilli to the mix.PS the original recipe is not there anymore…

So, how do you make halloumi?

Make Haloumi Cheese in a Microwave

Simple and quick: you can make it in a microwave… I got really excited because I hardly ever use the microwave for anything else than re-heating tea!

And you don’t need any fancy equipment apart from a couple of things you probably already have. If not, you can easily find at your local chemist and supermarket.

You will need: a sheet of gauze dressing and… junket tablets. An electronic human-use thermometer is optional.

Junket tablet method

Now back to junket tablets. I didn’t even know they existed but apparently, they make great cheese! They can generally be found in the most obscure spot of the powdered custard aisle of your supermarket.

As mentioned, the thermometer is not entirely necessary because you’ll only be heating the milk to just below body temperature (32°-35°C // 89.5°F – 95°F). Use your clean fingers to test the milk’s temp if you like. Oh, and it also turns out that to make haloumi you need unhomogenised milk – the one where the cream sits at the top. Perhaps that’s why my first attempt resulted in curd cheese instead.

Ok so maybe it sounds more complex than I first made you believe… but trust me, it takes less than an hour to make and once you have the gauze, the unhomogenised milk and junket, you are set. And once you pan-fry it, it tastes like nothing else in the world – perfect match for a watermelon salad.

For a haloumi recipe using rennet and the slightly longer method, click here.