Life as a Spectator Sport

I have solved--or at least addressed--the cheese aging problem. Although I've read of others aging their cheese in the family refrigerator, the cheese book I have says unequivocally that this isn't good for the cheese. So I bought a large cooler, plastered "Cheese Cave" on the front of it, and stuck the cheese in it with a couple of "blue ice" packs. If I change them once a day, the temperature on the bottom stays pretty close to 55 degrees. So far, so good.

But there's that little phrase "temperature on the bottom." There is a temperature differential of 10 to 15 degrees between the bottom and the top, so I'm going to have to figure out some way deal with that. I'll also have to rig up some racks to sit multiple cheeses on. But for the moment, my cheddar is aging at something near the right temperature.

My primary focus right now seems to be on food rather than fiber. I made up three 2-liter bottles of ginger ale today, using David Fankhouser's good old recipe. I guess I've made a couple of hundred jugs of ginger ale using this recipe and every single one of them was great. The A & W bottle was the first one I did, and it's already beginning to fizz up. Like butter and cheese and real milk, there is just no comparison between real ginger ale and the supermarket version. All it needs is some grated ginger, sugar and yeast. You can add the juice of one lemon if you like it that way (I always do). The original recipe suggests using ordinary bread yeast, but I have champagne yeast on hand for my winemaking, and I like its less intrusive presence better.

On the needles: (yes, I actually have been knitting), a Ballband Dishcloth in pink and a variegated pink/white/brown kitchen cotton. I needed some instant gratification to make up for these long drawn out sock projects. It's not far enough along to warrant a picture, but I'll post one in a day or so.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Ode to my Bosch mixer

How do I love thee... let me count the ways: you knead my bread dough, and if that was all you did, you'd be worth every penny I paid for you. But you also grind wheat, and you flake oats. And now you make butter!

I've been skimming off and collecting the butter from each week's batch of milk, except for the week I made cheese (and the first week when I greedily drank everything, cream and all!). I froze it for several weeks as it accumulated, and this morning I made butter! Years ago, when I could get cream from a local dairy, I made our own butter, but since then I've had to depend on organic butter from the supermarket. While it claims to be organic, it's still from unknown sources and heavily salted to boot.

I always used a hand mixer before (the old-fashioned kind, not a stick mixer), and that was what I planned to do this time too. But I glanced over some web pages to see what others had tried, and found the Walton Feed site, source of so much good information. Halfway down the page was a description of how someone had made butter with cream straight from the fridge in their Bosch mixer.

This has to be the easiest butter-making experience I've ever had. I poured all the cream into the mixer bowl, affixed the cake mixing whisks, secured the lid, and away we went on the slowest speed.


After about five minutes, I had whipped cream. This wouldn't have taken as long if the cream had been warmer, but since the mixer was doing all the work, I didn't mind.


It's just beginning to get granular here. You can see bits and chunks of butter separating from the whey. As the cream thickened, it climbed up the walls of the bowl, and I thought I'd have to clean it off with a spatula to get it back down in the whisks. But as it turned into butter, it became heavy enough to fall back into the bowl from its own weight.


We have butter! Lovely chunks of bright yellow butter floating in whey. I poured the whey through a strainer/funnel into a quart jar. The few little bits of butter that flowed out with the whey stayed in the strainer and went back into the bowl.


It's important to get just as much whey out as you possibly can, because it will sour and spoil the butter even if you keep it in the refrigerator. So I worked it well with my hands, poured some cold water in on top and worked it some more, and finally had a pound of butter and a quart of sweet buttermilk. In older days, the cream would have been soured first and the buttermilk would have more of the sour taste we associate with today's cultured buttermilk.


I haven't decided what to do with the whey. It takes about a gallon of whey to make a half pound of any of the whey cheeses, so this isn't nearly enough. It'll probably just get drunk up.

The only problem with all of this is that I use butter a lot faster than I'm accumulating cream. I talked with my milk supplier about substituting some cream on occasion for some of the milk, but he said he doesn't have a good way to separate out the cream yet. He bought a cream separator, but he isn't happy with the way it's working. So for now, I guess I'll have to ration my butter to make it last until I have enough cream to make more. I'm going to treat myself right now, though, with homemade bread (thank you again, my lovely Bosch!) and homemade butter.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

More cheese pictures

It's been a crazy week--work, bad weather, piles of laundry, no knitting. It's a darn good thing I made the cheese last week, because it wouldn't have been done at all otherwise.

Here's what it looked like drying on the counter (sitting above a moat of water to keep the blasted ants out of it).


And here's a final picture, waxed and ready to be aged in the refrigerator. My refrigerator sits at the recommended 42 degrees, roughly 10 degrees colder than the best temperature for aging cheese. I don't know what this means, whether it's going to just take longer to age, or it won't age properly at all, or what. Guess I'll find out in about six months, if I can wait that long!

Some dedicated amateur cheesemakers use a small dorm-type refrigerator to age their cheeses, with a thermostat that can be set between 50 and 60 degrees. I know I'm going to be doing a lot more of this, but so far, at least, I'm not willing to invest the money in the fridge itself or in the operating costs. So if it can't be aged in the regular refrigerator, it isn't going to get made.

I learned from the waxing procedure this morning that it's best not to sit your cheese on a plate that you don't want wax on. I could easily have covered the plate with a paper towel, but didn't think of that until much too late. I'll sit the plate in the freezer for a while, and the wax will probably pop right off.

I haven't decided yet which cheese to try next. I really like Stilton and other "blue" cheeses, but those are said to be more difficult than plain Cheddar. In any case, it will be at least another week before I'll have enough milk for a batch of anything, since I'm happily drinking up this week's milk.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

My brain hurts (and my feet hurt too!)

One of my old computer customers had an employee who was a real clown. She'd moan and groan all day long about how hard the work was, and at the end of the day, her refrain always was, "I worked so hard today my brain hurts!"

That's how I feel today. I've been home for three days now, and was aggravated with how little I'd accomplished in that unexpected free time. So I was determined to get everything finished up today. Maybe not laundry, considering that we were supposed to be snowed upon. But certainly all my dairy projects. I had three quarts of milk left from last week that wasn't exactly sour yet, but definitely wasn't as fresh as when I picked it up. I was still drinking it and putting it in coffee, but it wasn't going to last another day. And I had two gallons of very fresh milk waiting to be made into something.

So I made a batch of lemon cheese (milk coagulated with lemon juice) with half a gallon of last week's milk. Here it is in its cheesecloth wrapper, hanging with multiple knots from the plant hanger over the sink. By the time I took this picture, it had pretty much finished draining, and had contracted into a firm, fairly dry, ball in the cheesecloth sack.


After the whey had all drained away, I crumbled the cheese into a container and threw a bunch of dried herbs in it --thyme, basil and marjoram, I think. Tasted good, anyway. This is too crumbly to be used in a sandwich, but it will make a good addition to salads and scrambled eggs, the same way you'd use feta. It's my all time favorite fast cheese, basically a panir. You can use citric acid to curdle the milk, but I prefer lemon juice. It's more traditional, and I like the slight lemony flavor.


Then I started a batch of cheddar cheese, which is something new for me. I've made soft cheese for years, but never invested in the equipment to make the hard cheeses. Now that I have access to good milk, I thought it was time to make some good cheese. So here is two gallons of fresh raw milk in my next to biggest stainless steel pot, warming slowly from refrigerator temperature to 90 deg. F. What look like spots of something on the surface of the milk are just shadows from droplets of moisture inside the glass lid.

I had to do this in a laundry tub, because my stupid mobile home sink isn't big enough to surround the big pot with water to heat the milk. You're basically creating a water jacket type warmer, and without the laundry tubs I couldn't have done it. It never occurred to me when I put the laundry tubs in last year that I was enabling cheese making almost a year later, but I'm sure thankful that I did it. That's my candy thermometer floating in the tub checking the temperature of the water (before I read the fine print on the back of the thermometer that said it wasn't submersible, and before I noticed the water sloshing around inside the tube getting the paper with the printed scale on it soaking wet). So I may be buying a new candy thermometer before long.

After the milk reaches the proper temperature, you add the particular type of starter for the cheese you're making, let it sit for a while to ripen, and then add rennet. After it sits for another length of time, the resulting curd is cut into cubes with a curd knife, and the curds are slowly heated to 100 degrees. This was the hardest part for me, because the blasted milk did not want to get any warmer than the 90 degrees I had already managed. I finally had to add water heated on the stove to get it to the required temperature.

Then I stirred and checked the temperature, and stirred and checked the temperature, and added hot water to keep the temperature where it was supposed to be, and stirred some more. Half an hour of stirring, yuck. Mom, you will remember how much I hated having to stir a custard or cream sauce when I was little. I don't like it any better now. But the half hour finally passed, the curds had firmed up in the 100 degree water bath, and I reluctantly drained the whey down the sink--another good reason to have chickens. I hate to throw away anything with so much vitamins in it, but I could not bring myself to make anything with it today. Whey cheeses, like ricotta, have to be made with fresh whey, and by the time I'm up to cheesemaking again, it would be way too old.

Little Miss Muffet's Curds 'n' Whey, or my equivalent thereof. Doesn't look terribly appetizing, but it sure tastes good! I had to sample at each step. The recipe I was using said the whey would look greenish. Mine was yellow! Tells you how much butterfat there was in that milk.


Here's how the curds looked after draining the whey. I see that I'm going to need a different colander. This one is large enough, but it doesn't have enough holes. I had to tip and turn the colander for several minutes to drain off most of the whey, and even then, a lot ended up back in the pot with the curds.


It took hours, but we've finally made it to the final step, pressing. Or the final step for today, at least. The round of cheese still has to air dry for a couple of days after it finishes pressing, and will then be waxed and aged for a couple of months.

More pictures tomorrow after it comes out of the press.

Oh--almost forgot! While the cheese was in one of its resting periods, I started a batch of yoghurt. So I've been through eleven quarts of milk today. I think that's a record.

Saturday, April 05, 2008

Stitchin' with the Dogs

Many years ago I coordinated a large event for a volunteer group. I asked the secretary of the sponsoring association for the street address of the location, and she gave me the wrong number. The location didn't even exist, in fact. Dozens of people turned up for the event, and many of them were unable to find it. The whole thing was a disaster, and although the error had not been my fault, I was so upset by it that I swore I would never take on something like that again.

Today's gathering at the Chateau Morrisette Winery in Meadows of Dan, Virginia, was not quite on the same scale as that ill-fated event of a couple of decades ago, but I was still apprehensive that I would forget something. To my huge relief, it turned out just fine. Twelve of us met to knit or crochet, eat, stitch some more, have dessert, knit some more, take the winery tour and wine tasting (and some of us opted out of the tasting and knitted some more!). Is there a common theme here?

By all accounts it went very well, enough that there is some interest in doing it again next year. So here are some pictures:

I expected that we'd eat and then get out the knitting. Nope, almost every single person had a project in her hands almost as soon as we sat down.


We were seated next to a long wall of sliding glass doors facing out onto a chilly day, but the staff had lit the fireplace, and the room was cozy.


After lunch and a leisurely extended period of knitting, coffee and dessert, we walked over to the winery building to take the tour. The weather report was full of gloomy warnings, and I'd had visions of everyone running across the parking lot under umbrellas, with thunder crashing overhead, but we lucked out.

These are the huge crushers that turn grapes into grape juice. A couple of the vineyards that supply the winery are just down the road from me, so this is where their crop ends up.


After crushing and various stages of filtering, the juice ends up in these huge stainless steel fermenting tanks.


The varietal wines go into these oak kegs to age. The kegs are used for four years, and then sold and replaced with new ones. The tour guide said approximately 34,000 gallons of wine are aging here.


The winery's original four-spout bottler, from when David Morrisette made wine in his basement.


And the new state-of-the-art bottling machine.


And then we all convoyed down to Greenberry House in Meadows of Dan, and fondled yarn and fiber! I bought some lucious hand-dyed Blue-faced Leicester roving in shades of purple, that will get spun as soon as I finish spinning up Katy's green Corriedale. (The only problem with having multiple fiber skills is that you end up with multiple UFO's in each one!) But I nearly finished my grandson's sock during the day, so I got in a lot of knitting too.

By the way, the title of this post (and the name of our event) comes from the winery's iconic black Labrador dogs. The story is that David Morrisette's pet Lab Hans would lap up any wine that was spilled in the original basement winery. He had a distinct preference for one blend, which was labeled "Trilogy" for the three wines included in it. When the name was changed to "Black Dog," and Hans was featured on the label, sales of the wine took off. A similar name change from "Virginia Riesling" to "Our Dog Blue," to celebrate a later dog owned by a partner, resulted in a similar increase in sales. Now all the winery's advertising and all their wine labels feature their dogs. So when Kristen suggested "Stitchin' with the Dogs" as the name for our event, it seemed like a perfect choice.

It was a great day, and worth doing again, though I may not be ready yet for one woman's suggestion to take over the whole winery for a day and have vendors and bands! On the other hand, we could probably get a hundred people or so into one of the large dining rooms . . .

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