Is it glue? is it a dog toy? no…it was cheddar

In the unlikely event that you’ve ever unwrapped a corpse that’s been left in a room slightly too warm, I can commiserate. About 6 months ago, I made some cheddar. Turns out, that after all this time, rather than being firm and strong, it more closely resembles a squishy, rubber dog toy that had been salivated on for too long and needs to be left outside. That might be fun for a hound, but not really something you want to eat. The rotting brown cloth, the claggy paste on the edges and the funky odour combined to a less than attractive sight.

You might ask if I wasn’t concerned by the appearance on the outside for the last few months. I optimistically thought this might be external only. Sadly not. Admittedly, I have been a bad carer for this block. It got left in the cupboard when I went to Australia (it was still quite cold then), hasn’t really had sufficient air and has experienced probably way too much heat – at least this is what I’m guessing. I’m off on a cheese course next weekend, so I might ask then.

Make cheese. Repeat.

There is a lot of waiting in cheese making, so it’s disappointing when it doesn’t work. I tried to make more fetta today but something went wrong. I’m mystified. Like a science experiment, I repeated all the steps from my notebook, but it failed to coagulate, so no curds, meaning no cheese. I’d even bought new oil for marinating. Oh well, next time.

Also on the subject of repeat experiments, camembert take two is underway. The last effort ended in a sad and smelly mess of inedible goo – so potent I open the packaging outdoors only.  It unfortunately ended its life in our bin. This lot will hopefully be more fruitful. See how pretty it looks under its drying shelter. It has to be better.

Cheese board games

I turned 31 a little while ago. My parents back in Australia sent me a cheese voucher – such a good present! The problem was, I ordered everything all in one go. So when our vegetable draws were overflowing with fragrant, paper-wrapped packages, and the mingling of odours were becoming all bit much, we decided we really needed to invite people around to help us get eat it all.

We started in near the Alps with comte and some extremely  ripe vacherin mont d’or. Comte is fast becoming one of my favourite cheeses. It is nutty, slightly springy, fresh. The vacherin was almost too ripe. Its prime season is October-April – so the last rounds at the end of May were always going to be potent. Almost overpowering, it  I would prefer to try it younger, maybe next February.

Back in England, we went for harder cheeses next. The cheddar is the Somerset made Keens Chedder – cloth bound, 14 months old, with a strong flavour and moist texture. We made our own interpretations  and then looked up various commentaries. The suggestion of onions did seem to fit, once it was mentioned. The other hard cheese was Old Winchester (or also known as Old Smales). This was more flaky and dry, described as a aged Gouda-pecorino style cheese. It’s also a bit nutty, but much drier than the comte.

Finally, there was the gooey Baby Wigmore. Made from unpasteurised ewes milk, it oozed over the board, and was quickly scooped up with bread.

There was also some really excellent Beenleigh blue but I forgot to take photos. Oh, and some broccoli salad, just to make sure we didn’t have coronaries.

Raw buffalo milk halloumi

It’s been ages. I’ve been distracted, on too many weekends away and neglecting the cheese, but I’m back again. I’ve made halloumi before but this time, thanks to Brixton farmers markets, I got to try with raw milk (half buffalo, half cow). The buffalo milk and the rawness were both new for me. What was particularly noticeable about using unpasteurised milk was that the milk  came together together much more – the curds were firmer, more tightly bound – or so it appeared. The other main thing I noticed was that the curds smelt much stronger, in much the same way that goat curds are distinctly pungent, the buffalo curds were as well. This translated into a much stronger tasting cheese.

If you’ve seen my earlier post, then the recipe is not very different, only this time I used 2 pints of raw organic buffalo milk and 2 pints of raw organic cows milk.

In case anyone wants it again (and I did make a few minor changes), these are the details of what I did. Heat the milk up in a water bath to 36C, add in 10 drops of rennet (diluted into a dessert spoon of purified water). Cover and keep around this temperature for 55 minutes. I do this by keeping the water bath at around 39-40C. Once the cheese has set, cut the curds into 1-2cm cubes – use a long knife (which goes to the bottom of the pot) to cut the curds into 1-2cm slices, then cut again into slices at a 90 degree rotation, then cut again but this time on a diagonal, so that you are cutting through each slice. Leave the curds to settle for 5 minutes, then slowly warm (by heating the water bath) to 37C. Stir gently, and rest for 20 minutes.

Scoop out the curds (but keep the whey!) into a cloth-lined straining container  – I used two, my cheddar mould and a strainer – and press with heavy weights. The actual amount varies in recipes and I don’t have any actual weights, so  I used my press and just pushed it down til it felt like there was reasonable pressure. Leave for 50 minutes.

After pressing, unwrap the cheese and cut into 1 cm slices (like above). Heat up the leftover whey (and any you’ve collected from pressing) to 90C, put in the slices, and cook for around 10-15 minutes until they float. Scoop them out, salt each side and fold in half with some fresh mint. Make up a brine solution from 50% water, 50% whey, with 10% salt, add the cheese and refrigerate.

One thing I am confused about it that some recipes call for a culture to be added and others don’t. I just used rennet here, without any mesophilic starter. If anyone knows which is best (or more traditional) and why there are both options, I’d love to know.

Homemade Feta

I made feta the other day. It’s an easier cheese, and it’s satisfying to get something you eat quickly (unlike my cheddar which is still ageing away in the cupboard and looking a bit manky). Feta seems pretty hard to get wrong.

 Get 2 litre of goats milk and warm it up to 30C. I used organic pasteurised milk because it was what I had. Raw milk would be better, especially for brining, but I’ll get to that later.

 

Add in your mesophilic culture (buttermilk or bought starter both work well) and keep the milk still, covered and warm for about an hour. I used a water bath in the kitchen sink – keeping the water outside 5-10C above the needed milk temperature. After saying to use mesophilic starter, I have to admit that I actually had none this time, so had to use 2 tablespoons of yoghurt instead – it’s not ideal (as it’s generally a thermophilic starter) but still worked fine. After about an hour, put about 10 drops of rennet into an small amount of purified, cold water (I used about 1/8 of a cup) and stir into the milk. Leave for another hour or so at the same temperature, until the curds are coming away from the sides of the pot.

 

 

 

Next, line a colander or something similar with enough cheesecloth that you will be able to tie around the curds into a ball (I did this in two lots rather than a single), gather up the curds and hang to drip for about 12 hours. It also helps if after about 6 hours, you open them up and flip over the ball, so that the draining is more even (this useful tip came from cookblog).

After the dripping is over, unwrap the balls and slice into ½ inch wedges. Place in a dish, salt on both sides and cover. I made two different sorts of fetta at this point.

 

Some of the salted feta I removed after about 8 hours, cut into 1-2cm cubes and marinated in a mix of olive oil, rosemary and garlic (chilli is also another good edition). With olive oil covering everything in the jar, I kept this in a cool, dark cupboard for a few weeks and then served it on fresh sourdough. It’s soft, smooth and luscious with oil.

The rest of the feta I tried to brine (if you use pasteurised milk like I did – don’t do this – it wasn’t a good move as it nearly fell apart). Instead, I removed it from the brine again and re-dry salted, and let it stay in the fridge for about a week. It turned out a bit too salty, so next time, if I’m using pasteusrised milk I’ll just dry salt from the beginning and let it become good in the fridge.

A match made in cheese

Back in the Sydney summertime, I missed the wedding of two very good friends. Not to be completely left out,  we got up at 2am in our cold south London flat, turned the heaters up high and dressed in a summery grass green, we listened to the ceremony on skype. It made me miss home.

But, when I went back to Sydney last month I found out they had kept some wedding cake for us. A vacuum packed wedge of Monta dei Pascoli, a semi hard Italian alpine cheese, was sitting patiently in the fridge. It was the bottom layer of the amazing vertical cheese board that they had as their wedding cake. Who needs fruit cake when you can have  of tiers of cheeses?

As you can see from the photo above, the layers included a mix of washed rind, white mould, and blue. The full collection was made up from:

• Munster
• Camembert
• Delice de Bourgogne
• Ocello brie
• Tarwin blue (we had a bit of this too when we were in Sydney, fresh rather than saved from the wedding cake)
• Monta dei Pascoli

Being quite numerically minded, I had an idea of trying to find some statistics on the number of weddings that have started having cheese wedding cakes.  I had no luck. I did find that the British Cheese Board offers tips for what to use and how much to get – the key thing I took away was that if you allocate around 100g /cheese per person, you should be set.

King Island Blues

If you head down south from the Australian mainland towards Tasmania (the southern island state), you need to cross the Bass Strait. Through this strip of water blows the roaring forties  –   strong westerly winds that  occur between the latitudes of 40 and 49 degrees – and in the middle lies King Island. A friend of mine once kayaked across this stretch of water…I have no idea why.

The powerful winds have made King Island the location of  more than 60 shipwrecks, but the island’s fertile soil has also made it home to the King Island Dairy and its many cheeses.

(source: Tasmania Online)

King Island Dairy makes a number of farmhouse and specialty cheeses ( I’m not sure if they are too big a dairy to be called artisinal), including a number of blues. The strongest is the ‘Roaring Forties’ -a  creamy rather than crumbly blue which is not quite spreadable. It has slightly sweet and salty veins that bite just a little in your mouth. It is aged for 10-12 weeks and wrapped in blue wax.

They also make a softer, blue-laced white mould cheese – the blue brie. A milder sister to the roaring forties, it was almost too creamy for me. It needs to be left out of the fridge for quite a while – we left it overnight in Autumn Blue Mountains weather (so maybe around 14-16C) which was good but it really got better once it softened up even more.

Australian cheese – Binnorie Dairy ‘Valencay’

I’ve been away in Australia and suddenly it has been a whole mouth since I posted. I had ambitious plans to write whilst I was on holidays but I spent my time catching up with family and friends instead. This involved  lots of eating and drinking and definitely not enough exercise to balance it out.

There was particularly lots of cheese eaten. On our second day in Sydney, my partner in cheese-loving, Naomi,  introduced me to a strong and amazing Hunter Valley goats cheese. Made by Binnorie Dairy in the Pokolbin wine district, their Valencay is an ash-coated white mould goats cheese, made in the similar style and appearance to traditional French Valencay cheeses.

As an aside, when I looked up Valencay on google, the bulk of information relates to its shape. Apparently, it was once a full pyramid in shape, but an angry Napoleon chopped off the top on his way through the town after terrible fighting in Egypt, leaving the cheese in its truncated pyramid form ever since.

Aged for up to 2 months, a couple of hours outside of the fridge lets the outer part of the cheese become all dirty white and gooey, with an almost translucent appearance. This is next to the firm, but still crumbly, white centre, that was more distinctively goaty. It was one of the most delicious cheese I had tried in ages. It really doesn’t need anything else on the cheeseboard with it.

Wondering if jetlag may have made me overly enthusiastic,  Naomi and I went to the the Binnorie stall at the Eveleigh Farmers Markets  a couple of weeks later.  It was just as good.

cheese…labels

It’s funny where blog reading will take you. In addition to cheese, I am really fascinated by the geographies of food and how it links to place, how people see their environment and how this can be used in design and art. One blog I regularly read is Edible Geography. Recent posts included mapping linkages between cupcakes and gangs, as well as  fascinating post on the meaning and information that can be imparted by wine labels. This got me thinking about cheese and the different approach to information-sharing that occurs here.

Looking online, I found an interesting collection of vintage cheese labels that was originally published in Culture magazine and reproduced in the Design Observer . I’ve included one below, which I hope they don’t mind.

 

Picture: Culture Magazine/Design Observer

What is interesting is that most of these labels are for processed and single size cheeses. They are really a form of advertising, for attracting buyers on the supermarket shelves. There is nothing wrong with this, but it contrasts  significantly with many artisan cheeses, which tend to have much more limited labelling. Given cheese, just like wine, is in many ways shaped by the area where is comes from and that labelling/controlled title can be hotly debated, the minimalist approach makes cheese quite unique.  

Most cheeses I buy have no labels or at least none that you can take home with you. Much of this probably practical, given lots of  cheese is purchased as parts of the whole, as well as the desire by to see the cheese in its naked state – there are few things more lovely that a full display of different cheeses. But in some ways, the removal of labelling creates a central need for someone who can then share the cheeses with you. Cheese buying, especially for those of us with limited knowledge, can be exciting but overwhelming.  Just a name can mean nothing, so a good cheese monger is essential to explain what it is, where it’s from, and how old it is. An unhelpful cheese monger can mean that questions are not asked and good cheeses are missed.

Australian cheeses beckon

It has all been very hectic lately. I’m heading back to Australia tonight for a holiday – the first time I’ve been back in over two years. I hoping Sydney can produce some sunny, warm weather as I really want to go surfing without a wetsuit!

And I have lots of cheese plans. There is a whole world of local cheese that I barely know and hope to share. So I’ll try and keep you posted.