So, I located a source of fresh raw cow's milk that seems clean and hygienic (the cow is a 4-H cow). Making cheese has been almost as aggravating as making ale and mead. When it's all working correctly, it is fantastic. When it goes awry, it is bad. Curds are very touchy, just like yeast. If you disturb them while they are forming, things do not go as planned. One of the ways to try to eliminate some of the frustration is to use raw milk. The homogenization and pasteurization process breaks down some of the proteins and makes it much more difficult for curds to form.
The best option would be to own your own dairy animal. That is not a good option for us, although dairy goats would do a great job of weed control around here, as well. But we take too many weekend or longer trips, and dairy animals have to be milked twice a day, so we didn't pursue that option. (IMO, the perfect thing for us would be bees, because we make mead and bees are awesome and necessary for pollination. But Miach is allergic to bee stings, and he won't let me put any hives anywhere on our property, even if it's an acre away from him. But I digress......)
Purchasng the milk was not simple. It called for a lovely detour from the Farmer's Market up to Nevada City, to purchase 1/2 gallon canning jars to put the milk in, then another detour to the home of the cow, which was off of a road that probably would have been best traversed by the Durango and not the Matrix. But we survived the adventure, and discovered a wonderful new hardware store in Nevada City!
Amazingly, raw milk smells exactly like pasteurized/homogenized milk. Of course, there is a thick layer of cream on top, which I poured off into other clean and sterilized jars of various sizes. There was about 2 quarts of cream, with enough cream still in the milk that it was probably about 2% strength. You can make cheese with both buttermilk and yogurt as starters to acidify and culture the milk. Yogurt likes it a little warmer and buttermilk likes room temperature. You can also make MORE buttermilk and yogurt. So I ended up with about a gallon of yogurt, a quart of buttermilk, a pint of clotted cream, a pint of sour cream, a cup of butter, a half-gallon of pasteurized milk for Miach to cook with and use on cereal, about 2 cups of ricotta cheese (which may have turned too sour during the draining process 'cause I completely forgot it was draining in the utility room for 2 days), and about 2 pounds of compacted curds that I hope will turn into a hard cheese. The process took an entire weekend, at the end of which I have never had such clean arms from so much cleaning and rinsing, nor such smooth and soft hands from all that butterfat. The yogurt didn't firm up much, but it seems much firmer now than a week ago. The buttermilk had the usual tart taste, but was also much sweeter than store buttermilk (late edit: it's now much less sweet and refreshingly tart and thick). I haven't used the cream or sour cream yet, and Miach hasn't touched the milk I "cooked" for him. All the products can last a long time except the milk.
Now we're down to sugar, flour, rice, coffee and tea being the staples we need to purchase at the mainstream grocery. While in the Flour Garden in Auburn, I noted a poster on their wall about locally-grown grains being used in their products, so it's possible I could even get flour at some point locally!
No comments:
Post a Comment