Triumph!

My first batch of goat cheese was just the tiniest bit disappointing. I was expecting the sort of creamy, tangy spreadable cheese that I associate with the term chevre. I now know it was a learning cheese. It was a quick cheese which used cider vinegar to coagulate the milk and then hung to dry for a few hours. The resulting cheese was mild tasting and much drier and firmer than I'd expected.

I'm learning a little bit with each batch of cheese I make. I now know that vinegar makes a somewhat rubbery cheese and long draining times make a drier cheese. Nearly every recipe I've tried so far has come from either The Home Creamery or Home Cheese Making, both of which are excellent books full of promise. But I also tried a little freestyle cheese making last week, adding to my goat's milk some heavy cream and homemade yogurt which I wanted to use up before a trip out of town. The resulting cheese was unlike anything I've ever tasted and I was so tickled! Ed, my source for ultra-fresh goat's milk, tells me if I created it, I should name it but so far it's just The Awesome Cheese. I don't know why, but adding the cow's milk cream and yogurt to the goat's milk seemed to enhance the goaty flavor in a really good way. The cheese was a little dry but sliced nicely and disappeared all too rapidly. I'll try again and if I can duplicate my results, I hope to share the recipe here.

I still hadn't managed a creamy, tangy chevre and after a bit more research realized that I needed a starter culture and time to let things age properly. I ordered the Fresh French Goat Cheese kit from The New England Cheesemaking Company and soon found myself in possession of two types of starters, four cheese molds, more rennet, butter muslin and a recipe booklet which talked me through all the steps for a classic chevre. It's not quick--it takes a few days what with sterilizing the milk, incubating the culture, and draining the curds, but it worked! Two full days after I started the process I was rewarded with four tiny rounds of delicious cheese. I'm so jazzed about this! I really can make cheese in my kitchen from milk purchased nearby fom the happiest goats I've ever seen. Today I tucked some thin wedges of the cheese into pitted dates and wished I could pat myself on the back for my cleverness.

You won't be surprised to learn that I've added a few new blogs to my RSS reader. Curd Nerds, I Make Cheese, and Cheese Underground really hit the spot for me these days. But after reading/gawking at this fabulous photo essay on artisan cheesemaking in the Alps, I am starting to think that maybe the world needs another cheesemaker more than it needs another ESL teacher.

Dairy Adventures

After I wrote about my Dairy Magic class a few weeks ago, you surely knew that homemade cheese was sure to follow. I bought myself a copy of The Home Creamery and have started to experiment.

The first thing that caught my eye was chevre, a fresh cheese made from goat's milk which is actually something my entire family enjoys. I went off to New Seasons and grabbed a couple of quarts of goats milk not long ago, started heating everything up, reached the proper temperature, added the cider vinegar and....nothing happened. Nothing. I knew from making paneer and mozzarella that the curds and whey tend to separate pretty quickly so I figured something was wrong. When I dug the milk cartons out of the recycling bin I realized I'd missed one of the first details Chris mentioned to us: ultra pasteurized milk is no good for cheese. And sadly the Meyerberg goats milk so commonly available is, in fact, ultra pasteurized. I ended up tossing half gallon of warm, sour milk down the drain as I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use it.

Earlier this week our homeschool co-op was scheduled to visit a small family farm outside of Camas, Washington. I figured we'd go and pet horses and chicks and whatnot but as it turned out, Conway Family Farm is a licensed dairy selling....you guessed it--fresh raw goats milk. Hooray! Despite their long list of customers, they had a couple of half gallon bottles to spare and I was in business!

I made the cheese yesterday morning and it really was super simple. You heat the milk (half a gallon in this case) to 175 degrees, hold it at that temperature for 10 minutes, add 1 cup of cider vinegar, watch for the curds to form, and then strain using a colander lined with a clean tea towel. You then wrap the curds in the towel and hang to drain for and additional few hours though I found mine was well drained after an hour and beginning to get quite firm.

This isn't the creamy, tangy chevre that we buy at the farmer's market. It's a firm cheese with a clean, pure dairy flavor. I was able to slice it and eat on hearty bread with a light sprinkle of coarse salt-heaven!

The goat cheese went so well I decided to give yogurt another go. My first experience a few weeks ago was using the crockpot which sounded too good to be true. My result was runny and stringy and not very tasty at all. This time I used the stovetop method outlined in The Home Creamery and it was a snap. Really--heat the milk, cool it down a bit, add some starter and stir. The big issue is keeping the milk somewhere warm for 9-12 hours while it sets up. I used a large picnic cooler and nestled my jar of yogurt among some large jars and bottles which I'd filled with hot water. Once I closed everything up in the cooler, the temperature stayed nice and warm, perfect for turning milk into yogurt. Ten hours later, I opened up the cooler to find a perfect quart of yogurt awaiting me--so exciting!

I'd wanted to make granola to eat with my homemade yogurt but didn't get to it right away so today's breakfast was a tumbler full of banana lassi. I put a cup of yogurt in the blender with a banana, some crushed cardamom seeds, and a dab of honey. So simple but so, so good. Of course ripe mangoes make a lovely lassi, too.

Now that I have the book, the thermometer, fresh rennet and starter cultures, I guarantee there will be more dairy adventures in the near future.