New Cheese Press

I built Sheila a cheese press, here it is in action, with 35 pounds of old dumb bell weights on it, pressing some Queso Fresco that she made:

Sunday Update

STRAWBERRY GRANITA

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup warm water

3 cups sliced strawberries

2 Tbls. lemon juice.

Put sugar and water in blender and mix until sugar dissolves. Add strawberries and lemon juice and blend til smooth.

Pour in an 8x8 pan and freeze for 3 hours

GOUDA CHEESE

Made a much firmer curd than the cheddar.

Here it is in the warm water bath.

Had to immediately work the curd into the mold. The curd is much creamier than the cheddar was at this point.

The first make shift cheese press didn't work very well, too off balance. The one shown above seems to be working much better. It gets pressed for a day, and then it will soak in a brine for a few hours, be left to dry, waxed and aged for about 8 weeks.

CHICKEN NOODLE SOUP

I made a whole roasted chicken Friday night for dinner. I've had a hankering for homemade chicken noodle soup so I used the leftovers to make a huge amount of soup.

Plenty for lunches this week AND three containers for the freezer!

Weekend Update

Yesterday, J pulled out a container of frozen tomato sauce that I had put up over the summer. I decided to make ricotta and mozzarella cheeses and make baked ziti for dinner.

I had made mozzarella a few times before and it was good, but kind of plain. I decided to go to a local dairy and get some raw milk to use for the mozzarella and just used store bought milk for the ricotta.

Ricotta is pretty easy. Just add citric acid to the milk - it starts to curdle almost instantly.

Then heat and you have ricotta.

Drain off the whey

And - TA DA! You have ricotta. I drained out all the whey so I'm left with a very dry ricotta.

For the Mozzarella - Take your milk.

Add your citric acid.

Heat and add rennet (sorry for the blurry pic)

Cut the curd and heat again.

It should not be this gooey. I will need to adjust the recipe going forward with the raw milk.

But it still turned out a decent mozzarella. Definitely a LOT more flavor with the raw milk as opposed to store bought milk. (There is a picture missing of me stretching the curd)

Yummm. There is nothing like fresh tomato sauce in the middle of winter! Can't wait for summer to get here...

Baked ziti. The only things not homemade are the sausage and pasta noodles. J asked if the plan of eating fresh foods is going to include homemade pasta. After we clean out the pantry - it probably will!

Cheese and Bread Making Day!

So, today was the first attempt at making a hard cheese. I've made mozzarella a few times and it's turned out pretty good. Great texture, but a little under salted each time I've made it.

Hard cheese, though, is a much more involved process and I've been wanting to do it for a while now. Finally went to the homebrew store yesterday and got the last few ingredients I needed. Decided to start with cheddar. I figure I'll choose a different cheese to make every weekend til I've used up the kit.

The farmers market was closed when we made it there yesterday, so I went with store bought milk.

This is what it looked like after all the cultures were added and it was heated. I was nervous that this was going to be screwed up from the start, because I allowed the milk to overheat by 10 degrees...

But the curds cut clean! YAY!

Had to let the curds heat up again, so that they shrink. Then I strained the curds out.

Here, the curds are hanging in cheese cloth to get more of the whey out.

After they hung, I added the cheese salt and broke up the curds a little.

By the way - the cheese is white. In order to get that ORANGE cheddar look, you need to add coloring. Jason doesn't like the look of orange cheese (thinks it looks cheap and fake) so we decided to stick with natural

coloring. Apparently, the type of milk you use will naturally change the color (a grass fed herd will produce a more creamy color than a grain fed herd). This is store bought milk, so it's pretty white.

Then, I packed the curds in the cheesecloth lined cheese mold.

So here is my homemade cheese press with just over 20 lbs of weight on top. It needs to sit like this for 24 hours, then air dry for a week, then cure for at least 8 weeks and as long as 7 months. The longer you age, the stronger the cheese.

There was SO much whey leftover. I tried to make ricotta from it, but I didn't catch much, I

don't think my cheesecloth was fine enough...

I feel bad wasting it all, so I made whey BREAD! YUMM!

4 Loaves! The big round one is a cheese loaf (not homemade cheese...), two of the loaves are garlic and the other is plain.

Needless to say, I'm pooped. 2 lbs of cheese and 4 loaves of bread, plus I got all the christmas decorations down and packed up. Nice to have a productive day!!