But Wait, There's More!

The title of this post sounds like an infomercial doesn't it?  In the last post we showed you how we made some fresh mozzarella from LuLu's milk.  Once you are done with that, you are left with a big pot of whey.  Normally with whey, we use it to lacto-ferment cabbage, cucumbers, carrots, and other vegetables.  Sometimes we feed it to the chickens.  They lay more eggs after drinking it.  But today, we'll show what else you can do with your whey.

You can make homemade ricotta cheese.  To your pot of ricotta, add some whole milk.  We added a pint.  You'll heat this up to 200 degrees F.  While stirring, you pour in 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar.  Turn off the heat.

We pour this into a colander that's been lined with muslin cloth:

What you'll notice floating in the whey is some tiny particles of protein.

We tie the muslin cloth in a knot and hang it over a bowl to catch the whey.  Tricia has rigged this apparatus with chopsticks.  Don't laugh, ha ha.  It works.

After several hours open the muslin cloth.  The cloth will contain ricotta cheese!

We put it into a bowl.  It is tasty.  You can add salt and herbs, if you'd like:

What can you do with ricotta?  Well the perfect thing to to after adding your herbs and salt is to make lasagna.  We've also grated the mozzarella into the lasagna as well.

We plate our lasagna beside some fresh picked snap beans that are still producing as the frosts have evaded us thus far.

Delicious!  And it's about a close to farm to table as you can get.  

Too Much Milk? Make Cheese!

A family that purchases milk from us went on vacation.  That meant we had a lot of milk on hand.  Normally when that happens, we make a bunch of ice cream and/or butter.  We can't let LuLu's good milk go to waste.  This time we figured, "Let's make cheese!"  Mozzarella is about the easiest to make.  Let's get started.  We pour 1 gallon of fresh milk into a pot and get it to 55 degrees.  This is whole milk.  None of the cream has been skimmed off.

1 1/2 teaspoons of citric acid dissolved in 1/2 cup cool water is prepared.  This is called inoculation.  It slightly acidifies the milk so that the rennet works.

This goes into the milk that is at 55 degrees, and it is stirred up.

Then 1/4 teaspoon of rennet is diluted in 1/2 cup cool water.  The rennet is the coagulation stage.  This causes the acidified milk protein to coagulate.

The rennet is added when the milk is 90 degrees.  We stir it up real good and then leave the pot alone for 5 minutes.

Next thing you know, you have curds!  It is the consistency of custard.  Once it is firm, you begin cutting all the way to the bottom.

Once the curds are cut, you put the pot back on the stove and heat the curds to 105 degrees F.  You'll want to gently stir the curds. Then remove the pot from the heat and stir for five minutes.  The liquid substance with the curds is whey.  Remember Little Miss Muffet?  She was eating her curds and whey.  

We then scoop out the curds with a sieve.

We work the curds, squeezing softly, to try to remove as much whey as possible.  We keep the whey.  We'll show you what we do with it in a later blog.  The curds are formed into three baseball-sized balls.

Then we heat the whey in the pot to 175 degrees and add 1/4 salt to the whey.  We put the balls of whey one by one into a ladle and dip into the heated whey for several seconds.  Each time we remove, we'll knead the curds.  The cheese gets smooth and shiny.  We do this for 3 or 4 iterations.

As you keep doing it the cheese gets elastic.

Did I say elastic?  I mean REALLY elastic!

The mozzarella cheese is done!  We roll them into balls.  One of the balls will be eaten warm, while the other two will be cooled in ice water and then stored in the refrigerator.

This is the one that is still warm.  I sliced it and dipped into some extra virgin olive oil with some sea salt and black pepper.

What a treat!  Homemade mozzarella is easy to make and easier to eat.  

Making and Eating Ricotta Cheese

We discussed making Simple Farm Cheese in our post Making Queso Fresco back in June.  Did you know that once you finish making cheese, you can still make another type of cheese from the whey that remains.  We've made a couple of batches of ricotta since then and wanted to show you how we did it.  Credit to the book, "Home Cheese Making" by Ricki Carroll.

Once you make cheese, you are left with whey.  We normally use kefir whey as a preservative to make lacto-fermented vegetables, pickles, etc.  With the whey we get after making cheese, we sometimes feed it to the chickens.  In this case we make ricotta.  Pour 1 gallon of whey into a pot and heat it to 200 degrees.

Keep stirring, turn off the heat and add 1/8 cup of apple cider vinegar. 

The acid makes things "break."  Tiny flecks of protein will appear in your spoon.  These are the curds that form your ricotta cheese.

Pour the entire contents of your pot into a muslin-cloth lined colander.  This acts as a strainer.

You can see that the whey flows right on through into a bowl we have positioned below the colander.

We added in 2 ounces of buttermilk to the curds.  This is a mesophilic starter that improves the flavor.

We tied the muslin cloth in a knot and allowed it to continue dripping for several hours.

Once you open the muslin cloth, you can see your ricotta cheese.  It is done!

We add a quarter teaspoon of salt.

Stir it all up...

The hens will be happy to drink up all this whey.  We always find that they lay more eggs the day after they drink it.  (Maybe it is just in our minds, though)

And now for the best part - eating it!  We like to spread it on water crackers.  The cheese is flavorful on its own.

Or ricotta cheese is perfect for adding herbs for hints of another flavor.  Here I've added tarragon. 

Tricia also has added garlic and dried basil mixed into it that we really like.  It is an easy, delicious cheese to make right in your own kitchen that requires no special equipment or aging. 

Making Queso Fresco (Fresh Cheese)

This past week we had some extra milk.  Our cows were eating some fresh green grass in the yard and we saw a sharp increase in production.  Tricia had an idea on what to do with some of the excess - she'd make some cheese.  We hadn't made any in a while and were excited to make some more.  Tricia uses The Home Cheese Making book by Ricki Carroll.

Queso Fresco is a Mexican farm cheese that is made from raw cow milk. Tricia found the recipe in the book and followed it.

Queso Fresco is a relatively easy cheese to make.  You don't have to age it.  You can eat it right away.  Tricia took a gallon of Clarabelle's milk and warmed it to 90 degrees.  The bacterial culture was added to acidify the milk.  Then the rennet (enzyme) was added to make a separation take place between the solid curds and liquid whey.  Let it set until the curds make a clean break.  Then cut the curd into cubes and bring the temperature up to 95 degrees gradually while stirring.  Let the curds sit undisturbed for 5 minutes and then drain off the whey.  Add salt and keep at 95 degrees for 35 minutes.  Put your curds in a mold lined with cheesecloth.  Press at 35 pounds pressure for 6 hours.

To do this, we pulled out our cheese press that our friend, Dale Smith made for us.  This is quite a fancy rig.  Essentially, this device presses the whey out of the cheese.  Varying weights are placed in the cradle to the right to achieve the correct pressure each cheese calls for.

By using different settings, specific pounds of pressure is applied.  There are different settings depending on the type of cheese you are making and whether the cheese is softer or harder.

The press pushes a disk downward and the resulting pressure pushes the whey out of the curds.  The whey is collected in a container beneath the press.

When done, we pull out a nice wheel of Queso Fresco...

Tricia cut a wedge out of the queso fresco.

Finally, for supper last night, Tricia made envueltos (enveloped or wrapped).  They are similar to a chicken enchilada with a tomato gravy and homemade Queso Fresco grated on top.

It was delicious!  We'll be trying making a different variety of cheese soon prior to drying off the cows.

Testing the Aged Cheese

Back in this blog post from December: Making Basic Cheese, we made some basic cheese, sealed it and have been aging it in our wine cooler for quite a while.  You can go back and read that post along with four others in the series to see how we did it if you missed it.  This week we decided that it was high time to pull it out and give it a try.  Here is a two pound wheel of cheese that we made almost eight months ago.

Pulling an aged wheel out of the cooler

When Tricia sealed this wheel of cheese with wax, she sealed a piece of paper in it with the date on it, so that we could track the amount of time that we aged the cheese.

Dated 11/14/2013

The cheese has been waxed to keep it from drying out.  Have you ever purchased a package of Kraft cheese at the grocery store and left it opened but unsealed in the refrigerator?  If you've done that, you know that the outer edges of the opened cheese will dry out and get hard and inedible.  That's why during the aging process, we wax it to keep that from happening.

Peeling off the wax

We'll save the wax and melt it to reuse the next time we make cheese.  Peeling the wax off is very simple and it comes off easily.

Now because of this next picture I almost titled this post "Tricia cut the cheese," but almost 24 years of marriage has taught me that that would not have been a wise decision and I would pay dearly for that momentary lapse in judgment.  So I resisted that temptation.  Tricia did, however, carve a slice of cheese out of the aged wheel to taste.  It was good.  Not great, but very good.  We're going to keep trying this and learning about it and getting better at it.  That's what it's all about.

Taking a slice out to try

One thing that we've learned is that while this cheese might not be the best cheese in the world for snacking on, it is fantastic for cooking with.  It is great in omelets, pasta, tacos. casseroles and other such dishes and we use it quite frequently for those type situations.  In fact, we haven't purchased cheese in quite a while.  I consider that a big plus.

Slice of homemade basic cheese from Our Maker's Acres

So we unwrapped the entire wheel and we have already put a big dent in it.  I'll show you one of the ways we used it in another post either tomorrow or the next day.

Basic cheese

While we certainly can't claim to be experts in the craft of artisan cheese makers, we're learning new things and finding new, exciting uses for the products that we make right here on our little homestead farm.