I wondered if asking people to make their own cheese and devise a recipe around it would be a step too far. I envisaged the tumbleweeds blowing across my blog throughout the month, as I frantically made cheese myself and cooked it up to make things look busy. But I under-estimated my fellow bloggers big-time and the sound of whey dripping through tea-towels echoed across the globe. A couple of them in particular (no names mentioned… ;)) seem to have become quite hooked on the entire process and I look forward to some magnificent creations clogging up their fridges and cellars very soon. But onto the round-up…
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Tag Archives: home cheese-making
March’s Cheese, Please! Challenge Round-Up – Fresh Cheese
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Possibly Poutine
Am I a food blogger? Well, I write about cheese which is, after all, one of the major food groups. I cook stuff and stick photographs up of each excruciating chopping, stirring, braising stage for all to see. So I guess I must be.
But on the other hand, some food bloggers always have beautiful photographs of perfectly cooked dishes quivering on vintage china with flowers in the background. They never seem to have disasters where their pie crust cracks down the middle or they leave a sauce simmering to go and break up a row about a mouth organ and come back to find it’s burnt to the bottom of the pan. I’m certainly not one of those food bloggers. And this post bears testimony to that. So before an angry hoard of Canadians takes up arms and heads for the suburbs of Tooting, look, I know it’s not worked out perfectly, okay?
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Beetroot, Ricotta and Rocket Tart
Anyone who read last Friday’s post will remember that I was in a grumpy, sorry-for-myself pizza-eating mood. It was therefore pizza that sprang to mind when I received some stunning yellow beetroot in my weekly veg box. Not only is it as pretty as sunshine it also has the advantage of not turning you into Lady Macbeth when you try and peel it or of causing alarm when you go to the toilet the next day (ah, come on, we’ve all done it). This photo doesn’t do it justice but here it is anyway with its traditional cousin.
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Yorkshire Curd Tart
Once more it’s time to venture into the highly-terrifying world of traditional recipes. As I said recently, when I wrote about Kleftiko, when you tackle a traditional recipe you can guarantee someone will always pop up and rubbish one of your ingredients or techniques as anathema to their grandmother’s way of doing things. But given that I’m half-Yorkshire genetically, I’m willing to take them on. (Yes, I use nutmeg! Sue me!)
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March’s Cheese, Please! Recipe Blog Challenge – Fresh Cheese
It’s March which over here in Blighty means it’s the start of Spring. Everyone is muttering ominously about snow but there are defiant little signs of life popping up everywhere. For instance, here are some tiny daffodils that managed to push their way through the cat poo in my garden; how cute are these:
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Home-Made Stilton
It’s been a while since I bid a fond farewell to my home-made Cheddar, known as Tooting Gold or E-Colin for short. Anyone who has read this sorry tale before will recall that Colin, despite maturing apparently happily down in my cellar for six months was judged (quite literally, by a judge) to be distinctly below par. It was a disappointing result but hardly surprising, given my complete lack of knowledge about cheese-making when I set out to create him. Dr Frankenstein had nothing on me as I cobbled together moulds, picked off hairs and chased away mites to create my cheese monster. Poor Colin.
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Lacto-Fermented Vegetables with Dill
It’s fair to say that on hearing about Miss Muffett’s troubles, most people don’t give much thought to the whey that’s mentioned. (Or indeed the curds; I think most of us are thinking about the prospect of a great hairy arachnid landing on us.) But when you realise that to produce one kilo of cheese it takes about ten litres of milk and you’re therefore left with nine litres of whey, you can start to ponder about what happens to it all.
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Home-Made Paneer Cheese in a Balti
Despite the lump of impenetrable mousetrap that was my home-made Cheddar, Colin, I was keen to get back on the cheese-making horse but felt that I need to do some limbering up before I tackled anything too complicated. Paneer is about as simple as cheese gets; milk is curdled and then pressed into a lump. It’s difficult to get wrong and suitable even for an inveterate cheese-mangler like me.
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Tooting Gold: Judgement Day
Anyone who’s been getting their cheesy fix from this blog for a while now will know that in the bowels of my house, amongst the old abs toners and rusting tins of paint, lives a home-made cheddar which goes by the name of Tooting Gold (or more affectionately E-Colin, or Colin for short). Colin was made in June 2013. I’d been learning about cheese for about six weeks when I thought it would be interesting to see for myself how it’s made and so, with zero knowledge about milk, cultures, rennet, temperatures, acidity, timings, hygiene, maturation or indeed pretty much any aspect of cheese-making, I plunged right in there and tried to make a cheddar. Not an easy ricotta or even a little chèvre. Oh no. A cheddar, which requires rennet and cultures and cheddaring and moulding and maturing and all manner of what-not.
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Home-Made Buffalo Mozzarella
Okay, stop sniggering at the back, please. The title of the post doesn’t say that I made my own bodyweight in mozzarella or enough mozzarella to keep Papa John’s afloat. I will admit that it’s not the largest haul of cheese ever produced but that’s the thing about artisan cheese, right – quality over quantity. So there.
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Fromage Homage 