Food matching suggestions for a newb

[paulyman]

Just added the cheese and pasta sauce making to the list. Going to learn to make sausages and salami soon so we can do pizza from scratch.

You know, the proper pizza..

I was going to say there was no way my missus would let me take up cheese making and smoking meat. Then I read this.

I already make sourdough, pizza dough and pasta.

If I phrase it that way, making ALL the ingredients for pizza from scratch I might just be in with a shot.

 

[WarmerBeer]

Dammit. As well as brewing beer, I also need to find the time to get into jerky/biltong making, smoking meat, distilllllummmmm, bee hives, meads, sours, ciders, chillies, veggie gardening, death metal (I'll take a rain check thanks), country music (apparently some of it's tolerable), curries, cycling, burgers, politics, foreign relations, whingeing...and now cheese making, all whilst learning a new trade. AHBCEABDFFMA

Holy crap! Are you? Are you... me?

 

[Camo6]

I don't know who anyone is anymore! :lol:

 

[Bribie G]

 

[TimT]

Tim, do you have a recipe or link to one that you use.

Indica, you will need a cheese press, cheese cloth, and a thermometer. Plus some other ordinary cooking equipment. The following is adapted from Rikki Carroll's book Home Cheesemaking.

Ingredients
1 L milk
2-3 tablespoons mesophilic culture or (some of the dehydrated stuff from those packets of mesophilic culture you get from the cheese shops)
1/4 tsp rennet dissolved in a bit of water
salt

1. Heat milk to 30 degrees C. Add culture, mix well .
2. Add the rennet, stir for a minute. Let set for 30-45 mins at 30 degrees C.
3. Cut the curd.
4. Increase the temp very gradually over 45 mins to 40 degrees C, stirring often to express the whey and stop the curds from matting. Keep them at this temp for another 20 mins. Keep stirring!
5. Line a colander with cheesecloth, ladle the curds into this, and drain off the whey. Keep that for later.
6. Pack the curds into a cheesecloth-lined mold and press at 30 lbs for an hour.
7. Remove the cheese, peel away the cheesecloth, flip it over, wrap it up again in the cheesecloth and chuck it back in the mold. Give it another press at 50 lb for 30 mins.
8. Remove the cheese from the mold and the cheesecloth; cut into blocks that, er, look like haloumi....
9. The fun part! Bring the whey to a temp of 80-90 degrees C. Place the curd in the whey and soak for an hour. By this time the blocks will have risen to the surface and will have a chicken flesh texture when broken apart. (I often find when I do this the whey spontaneously expresses a bit of ricotta too - nice!)
10. Let the haloumi chunks cool for a bit, 20 mins or so. Then sprinkle them with salt. At this point I like to spread some salt out on a plate and roll the haloumi out in it. The recipe says 1/8 of a cup salt but I find this to be too much and will cut back on it next time I use it.

That's pretty much it. You can eat fresh, or let the curds cool/the salt sink in for an hour or two. My recipe also has a brining step, but I find this a bit unnecessary - it'll add further saltiness to the curds and is meant to preserve them for a longer period of time (while they intensify in flavour). But I like to eat 'em fresh! Some of the steps look like they take a bit of time but I find I can cut corners by only letting the curd set for 30 mins, and keeping the times in the cheese press down - though you're meant to press at 30 lbs 'for an hour' the majority of the whey will be pressed out before the hour is up. So you can comfortably do this in the early afternoon for teatime, or in the morning for lunchtime, or whatever. Should take you about 4 hours.

When we made this last Easter holidays we made our own cheese mould out of an icecream container with holes in it, and used jam jars as weights.

 

[WarmerBeer]

scotch egg.jpg

Nice crust on that one, but I reckon you've overcooked the yolks.

I like them still a little gelatinous. Into cold water, bring them to the boil, then 3 minutes before you pull them out and straight into a cold water dunk to stop them cooking any further.

Damn, now where in the CBD am I going to find Scotch Eggs for lunch?

 

[indica86]

When we made this last Easter holidays we made our own cheese mould out of an icecream container with holes in it, and used jam jars as weights.

Thanks Tim. I'll put that on my to do list!

 

[TimT]

Wait a sec. I just realise I got one of the amounts wrong in ingredients and can't edit it now (would a mod please be able to fix my mistake?)

It should be 4 litres milk, not 1 litre.

1 L milk
2-3 tablespoons mesophilic culture or (some of the dehydrated stuff from those packets of mesophilic culture you get from the cheese shops)
1/4 tsp rennet dissolved in a bit of water
salt

The original recipe was in US gallons, so 4 L milk will be just over 1 gallon.

1 L wouldn't give you a very good yield.