Okay, at this point, the milk should´ve adequately curdled and formed chunks in whatever container you used. If not, leave it for another 10 minutes. What you want to do now is slowly start pushing all the curdles to one side of the container. Slowly, because you´re trying to push as much liquid and air bubbles out of the curdles as possible, so you want to add pressure to it slowly. This takes about 15 minutes, and at the end, you should have all the curdles pushed up to one side of the container forming one large block.
The liquid left around the block is called suero. You can dump this out, although animals really like drinking it, and is supposedly good for plants, so do what you want with that piece of info. With the remaining block, you want to cut that into maybe about 4 pieces, and shape each piece into a ball. It doesn´t have to be perfect, the point of this step is just to get more of that suero out.
This next step might be a little tricky to explain. In a bowl, put one ball of cheese in. Crumble it (so that it resembles feta cheese) and add a pinch of kosher salt (aka sea salt or rock salt). On a slightly curved stone ¨board¨, smoosh the cheese crumbs with a stone ¨rolling pin¨. You´ll end up gathering all the smoosh and forming it into a ball again, which is the actual final cuajada product. These tools are actually very similar to those used for making mole in Mexico.
So these stone grinders aren´t just lying around your kitchen like they are here in Nicaragua. I´m going to suggest either trying a mortar and pestle, but only if they´re made out of stone. If not, I´d say a regular chopping board and wooden rolling pin is your next best option.
Anyway, so try this out, and if it works, let me know! I´ll post whatever comments or suggestions you may have for other people who´d like to try making cuajada,
