that was the coolest!

xrian left with us Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, which I've been enjoyably reading, partly because of the history and partly because of all the recipes. Particularly fun were all the recipes about cheese -- it really seemed so simple, take milk, add salt, get cheese. I know that it really isn't quite that easy (I am, after all, the daughter of a cheesemaker), but surely it couldn't be that difficult?

It's not! I googled for simple cheese recipes, and found George's Mom's Homemade Herb Cheese. I used 4 liters whole milk, 250 ml cream, and 250 ml skim milk, fresh thyme instead of basil, and last night I quarter up three trostomaten and spent the evening and the forenoon drying them in the oven. Our oven is too hot for drying things, so I have to keep turning it on to the lowest setting, let it go for 10-20 minutes, then turn it off for awhile, and repeat. But they dried out well enough. The recipe really was as easy as it looks; it took maybe half an hour for the milk to heat up (during which time I was partly holding my breath because I wasn't sure how much volume increase the froth would contribute, and my pot was nearly full at the start), during which time I concluded that I need one of those thermometers which has a clip on it so you can clip it to the side of the pan. As it was, I held the one I have with a needlenose pliers. I still wasn't exactly sure how it was all going to work out when I hit 195 F, but then I turned off the heat and started dribbling in the vineger and *presto*! It was the most bizarre thing, the curds started separating from the whey immediately. There I am, standing at the stove shouting to the cats "I've got curds!" It was pretty cool.

I didn't have cheese cloth but some of our rags are just about cheese cloth consistency, and I didn't have a round plastic container so I bored holes into the bottom of one of our ice cream containers (ice cream here comes in oblong or square plastic containers which are reusable; we've amased quite a few. We use them instead of tupperware, and we use pretty much all of them on a regular basis, so in anticipation of cutting holes in one of them today, I bought ice cream last night, so I'll have a new container to replace the old one. And there is something decadent about eating ice cream out of the container, which I can't do when Joel is around). It's now in the "rest for 1 hour" stage and I'd already snitched a few bits and it was good (though it might be oversalted in some places, since the curds firmed up so quickly it was hard to stir the salt into them equally. We'll see; next time I might put in 1/2 T instead of 1 T).

So, cheese! I made cheese! Cool.

blessed are the cheesemakers...

So my dad pointed out something that I had also found a bit surprising, namely the use of vinegar instead of rennet or rennin in the recipe I used. Part of the reason that I'd never tried making cheese before is that the concept of using rennet is a bit scary. I bet I could get some via my butcher shop (the Dutch term is 'stremsel'), but dad thinks I could probably even get it at the grocery store. I'll have to look next time I'm there. But the wikipedia article on rennet had a short section at the end on cheese made with acids rather than with rennet, and there is a list of acid-set cheeses. Looking at this, what I made is closest to farmer's cheese or pot cheese. It's not hoop cheese, because salt was added. Some of the other types listed on this page are made not just by straining and pressing the curds, but by kneading or beating them to get a firmer, denser consistency. I want to try that next time; I have no idea what kneading cheese curds would be like, but since my biggest fear of what I'm making right now is that it'll be too crumbly to hold its shape once I start cutting it (I'm waiting until tomorrow, to give it a full day in the fridge being pressed), it seems like a good way to counter-act that potentiality would be the knead the cheese.

The next question which occured to me (in part because we've got ~125ml in the fridge still, and this is one dairy product Slinky turns her nose up at) is whether you can make cheese out of buttermilk. Ever helpful google turned up the abstract of an article in the Journal of Dairy Science entitled "Use of Ultrafiltered Sweet Buttermilk in the Manufacture of Reduced Fat Cheddar Cheese", so if they're publishing about it in scientific journals, it must be possible.