Making Soft Goat Cheese

Last week we made a couple of batches of Chèvre.  We ate all of it and decided to try another soft goat cheese.  The recipe says it is a basic goat cheese for beginners.  That's what we are in this endeavor.  We purchased the book shown in the photo below that is very simple to understand.

We followed the recipe below with the only change is that our goat milk is not pasteurized.

 We followed the directions and after a day the curds had formed in the pot.

Tricia scooped out the curds and set them in a strainer to allow the excess whey to drain out below.

We set it aside to allow the cheese to drain for 2 days.

After the cheese has drained for a while, it shrinks down a bit.

We picked some fresh dill we have growing on the back patio and cut it up.

The dill is folded into the fresh cheese along with coarse salt.

We put it into a strainer to allow for additional drainage.

The one pound round of soft goat cheese is done!  We ate it on matzos and toast.  It was delicious and we quickly ate the whole thing followed by another after that.

We like this even better than the Chèvre.  We currently have a gallon and a half of goat milk in the fridge.  We'll be making more and more of this.  Like I mentioned, we'll also make some cajeta (goat milk caramel) soon.  I can't wait for that.

Making Chèvre

Chèvre is French for "goat."  Bunny, one of our Nubian goats is in milk now.  We milk her twice a day - once at 6 am and another time at around 5 pm and get almost two quarts.  Here is Bunny all cleaned up in her stanchion.  It holds her head firmly in place while she eats and we milk.  While cows have four teats, goats only have two.  The milking goes very quickly.  Agnes is one of our other Nubian goats that is in milk, but her baby is strong and drinks every drop of her milk, so we don't have to milk her out.

For the past couple of decades, we've milked cows and goats through a muslin cloth filter placed over the bucket (for cows) and over a quart jar (for goats).  Tricia just purchased stainless steel funnels with a paper filter that fits in the bottom.  We find it works much better.  The muslin cloth filter is used day after day and had to be cleaned and disinfected, while the paper filters are disposable and a new one is used for each milking session.

Today we'll be making Chèvre cheese using a half gallon of Bunny's goat milk and a half packet of Chèvre starter.  Our starter was old, so we were unsure if it was going to work.  You'll find out at the end of the post if it works.  Here's the starter:

Here is the recipe that we're using.  Chèvre is a creamy, soft cheese similar to cream cheese.

Following the directions, we heat the milk to 86 degrees and add the starter and stir.

Then we cover the milk and let it sit at room temperature (not below 72 degrees) for 12 hours.  When we open the lid in 12 hours, we'll know if the starter was still active.

The proof is in the pudding - or curds, to change the saying up to fit.  We open the lid, tilt the pot and...  The cheese has set!  There are curds that have formed and the whey is on the bottom.  Remember Little Miss Muffet?  The nursery thyme says "She sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey."  I had to look up what a tuffet is.  It is a small foot stool.  Along came a spider that sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away...  Well, no footstools or spiders involved in our cheesemaking or eating adventure.

We pour the curds and whey into a cheesemaking strainer to separate them.  The whey flows to the bottom over time, leaving the curds in the basket.  We'll save the whey to use later in lacto-fermentation of vegetables.  Here are the curds in the basket, slowly draining the whey off.

You can add herbs or spices to this.  Tricia just eats it plain.  We also use it to make smoothies with by adding berries.  It came out really good!  It'll store in the fridge for about a week, but we've completely finished this batch already.  Perhaps in a post next week, we'll be making another type of soft goat cheese.  Bunny, unfortunately, lost both of her babies.  One was stillborn and the other was so weak that she died after about a week.  Bunny is still in milk and making lots of milk, so we'll continue milking her and making cheese.  We're also going to attempt to make goat milk cajeta.  Cajeta is a goat milk caramel.  Can't wait to make that.  

In the Back of the Refrigerator

Before I get to today's topic, I wanted to show you one thing that my wife reminded me about the honey harvest.  Obviously we got honey and lots of it.  We also got beeswax and honey water.  The one thing I neglected to tell you that we also got was fire starters.  When we strained the impurities out of the beeswax, it left us with muslin rags filled with a waxy-debris substance.  These make great fire starters for a campfire or fireplace and we've put them into a zip loc bag to save for cooler weather and fire building.

Back in April when the weather was nice and cool, we posted THIS POST that explained one thing that we were going to do with the last of our cabbage crop.  We made kimchi or Korean sauerkraut.  If you click on the link highlighted in blue in the first sentence of this paragraph, it will take you back to that post and show you just how we did it, using lacto-fermentation as a food preservation method of choice.

We pushed the two quarts to the very back of the refrigerator.  The best thing to do is just forget it's there.  Then, on a hot, summer day, you reach back there and pull out a jar of kimchi that's been aging for months.

I guess ordinary folks would throw this out.  It looks kind of sketchy.  When you open the cap and sniff it, it smells very strong.

When you take a fork and dig into it, magic happens.  It's packed in there tight.  You have to work at it to get it unpacked and out of the jar and onto your plate.

Now for the taste test.  It's cool and tangy, effervescent and tart. It's also spicy.  In short, it's delicious and perfect for taking a few bites before your meal to get your digestion into gear.  We've been eating some for lunch each day and I suppose we'll be opening the second jar that's hiding in the back of the fridge.

Better Than Philadelphia

We buy a good bit of Philadelphia Cream Cheese as we enjoy homemade cheesecake.  Cream cheese is expensive, but what isn't?  I don't know why we've never thought of making it.  We make mozzarella and ricotta, so why not give cream cheese a try.  We got out our cheesemaking book and found the recipe.  Looks easy enough.  So we mixed cream and milk according to the recipe below and warmed it to 70 on the stovetop.  Then we added the starter and rennet and set it out for 24 hours.

The rennet causes curds to form.  We spooned the curds into our cheese colander and allowed the whey to drip through for about 12 hours.

Here is the curds when done.

We scooped it all out.  Yes, it has the consistency of cream cheese!

We deposited the cream cheese into a glass container where we'll store it in the fridge.

The glass container weighs one pound.  So the recipe was right on target.  It made 1 pound do cream cheese.

We snacked on some of it and determined it needed a little salt. Once that was added, we put some bagels in the toaster, pulled out some capers, and then I went out to the herb garden and harvested some fennel to put on top.

Sorry Philadelphia, homemade cream cheese is just better!  We'll be making this over and over and over again.

What To Do With All This Cabbage?

We had a bumper crop of cabbage this year, and we need to do something with it quickly.  We've had cole slaw, egg rolls, cabbage and sausage jambalaya, and sautéed cabbage.  This morning, we decided to make Kimchi.  We used the recipe from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon of the Weston A. Price Foundation.  We gathered the ingredients:

The recipe we used is shown below.  I think if you click on the photo, it will enlarge.

We shredded up the cabbage, chopped the green onions, grated the carrots, the radishes, the ginger, and the garlic.  Then we added the pepper flakes, sea salt and whey to the big bowl.  Tricia had whey left over from when she made mozzarella cheese the other day.

Then, with a wooden masher tool, we took turns banging and pounding on the contents of the bowl.  What we're attempting is to crush everything and release all the juices,  After Tricia had enough, she gave me the pounder and I worked on it for a good while.

We used a canning funnel and spooned the contents into each jar, packing it all tight while pressing down.  The juices should cover the vegetable mixture completely.  We have some glass weights the sit on top, pushing it down and keeping the liquid covering everything.

Here's an up-close look at the kimchi.  It has a nice color and aroma to it.

We put lids on top, dating the kimchi and set on the counter.  We'll leave it there for three days at room temperature.  They we'll put it in the fridge and let it ferment and age.

After a few months, we'll pull it out of the fridge and give it a try.  We do a lot of lacto-fermenting.  In fact we've been eating on lacto-fermtented banana peppers that we did last year and have 2 1/2 quarts left. They are still holding up well and taste great, like hopefully the kimchi will turn out.

Another Way to Preserve the Harvest

At certain times of the year, we have more vegetables coming in than we know what to do with.  We eat all we can, and it is fun to look for new recipes.  We've found some things that are fantastic, like zucchini bundt cake!  We give away a lot to our neighbors and our church family.  We blanch and freeze some.  We dehydrate some.  We pickle some.  Another way of preserving is lacto-fermentation.  

Lacto-fermentation uses whey and salt and the lacto-bacillus bacteria in the vegetables.  The bacteria converts the sugars in the vegetables to lactic acid and thus, preserves or ferments the vegetables, preserving their shelf life and giving you some healthy probiotics to populate your gut.  They are delicious, too!

When we milk LuLu, our Jersey in milk right now, or our goats, Tricia makes kefir.  She strains off the whey, and we use the whey for lacto-fermentation.  Below you see a gallon jar of fermented pickles and banana peppers.  The recipe is real simple.  You fill the container with vegetables and add 1/4 cup of whey to the quart jar.  Then add 1 Tablespoon of salt.  Finally, fill the rest of the jar with water, put a cap on it and sit at room temperature for two days.  At the end of two days, put in the fridge. (By the way, why does fridge have a "d" in it, but refrigerator doesn't?)  We find that if you leave it in the fridge for a month or two, the flavor gets better.

Here is a quart of cut up yellow squash that we lacto-fermented.  There's no end to what type of vegetable you can try.  We tried beets several years and made beet kvass using the same recipe.

Now if you pound the shredded vegetables and they make their own juice, you can do this without using water.  Just add the whey and the salt and use a glass weight to keep the shredded vegetables beneath the liquid line.  Here is some sauerkraut that we made back in early spring when the cabbage came in.

And here is a quart of ginger carrots that we made back in February.

Any of the above is cool, tangy, tasty, and refreshing for lunch on a hot, summer day.

What To Do With a Bunch of Carrots

We harvested yet another row of carrots.  We had already pulled the Cosmic Purple variety, the Kyoto Red variety and now it was time for the Danvers variety.  These are the normal (boring) orange carrot that we're all familiar with.  Some of these carrots aren't so boring after all.  Like these for example.  I call them the love carrots.  They're snuggling.

I scrubbed them all up real good with a vegetable brush and washed them.  They were loaded into bowls and brought inside.

The tops were cut off, but we don't peel them.  There are a lot of nutrients in the skins.  As long as they are clean, we leave them on.

We shredded a number of them in the food processor.  This reminds me of the carrot salad with raisins that you used to see in cafeterias like Piccadilly or Luby's.  (But we're not making carrot salad.)

Today, we're making Ginger Carrots.  It's a favorite recipe of ours from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook.  This is made using lacto-fermentation.  Here is the recipe:

We grated up some ginger...

And we got out some whey that we had in the fridge from the last time we made kefir...

This was all combined in a large stainless steel bowl and now the fun part occurs.  We get out a meat tenderizer, which for all practical purposes is a stainless steel hammer. and we beat the carrots while stirring, this releases all the carrot juice that mixes with the whey, salt, shredded carrots and ginger.

We pack this very tightly into quart-sized mason jars, ensuring that the carrot mixture is submerged beneath the liquid.  We left this out on the counter for two days.  I opened the jars to check on them and they were fermenting.  The bubbles were coming up through the liquid in the jar and it overflowed on the counter.  After two days, we put the jars into the fridge.

We'll forget about them in the back of the fridge for a couple of months.  Then we'll pull them out and eat as a side dish.  It is tangy, refreshing, cool and tasty.  To top it off, Ginger Carrots are good for you!

What to do With All These Radishes?

We grow French Breakfast Radishes in the garden.  Radishes are one of those crops you grow that is one of the fastest maturing things I can think of.  We cut them up in salads and we also enjoy them in a radish dip we make.  I highly recommend it.  The recipe is from a blog post back in 2017 you can see by clicking HERE. 

We still have a bunch of radishes in the garden.  We'll make another dip or two, but wanted to try our hand at lacto-fermenting some.  We have used lacto-fermentation in making Sauer kraut, kimchi, pickles, and gingered carrots.  Now, we'll do radishes.  This afternoon we picked a colander full.

We washed them up and scrubbed the dirt off of them with a stiff-bristled vegetable brush.

We wanted to see how much we picked.  A hair over 2 pounds.

I cut the bottom root off as well as the top.  In probably an unneeded step, but I like to follow directions, I peeled the radishes with a potato peeler.  By the way, I want to give credit, we're using a recipe from Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon coupled with one from The Survival Gardener's Blog.

We cubed up the radishes and packed them in wide mouth quart sized jars.

The recipe calls for 1 Tablespoon of salt, 1/4 of whey and then fill with water.  A little backstory on the whey.  We make the whey as a byproduct of making kefir yogurt.  Whey is what drips off, leaving the curds behind.  Whey is a natural preservative.

The whey and salt and water are added and thoroughly mixed to ensure the salt dissolves.

Then the mixture is poured over the radishes in the jar until it fills.  You want to make sure the radishes are beneath the surface.  To accomplish this, you'll need a follower.  We don't have any followers, but we improvised.  In the jar on the left, we used a crystal napkin ring to weight down a pint size lid to hold all the radishes under the fermenting liquid.  A few cubes escaped.

For the jar on the right, I used a leaf of cabbage torn a little larger than the size of the jar to push all the radish cubes down.  This worked much better!

We'll allow to sit at room temperature for five days and will then place in the fridge where they'll last for months.  Anxious to try them!  They are supposed to be tart and tangy.  We'll report back if we were successful (if they are tasty).