Today was an incredibly monumental day for the JC project: it was the first time I’ve brought milk into the dairy… And bringing milk into the dairy means cheese is being made!
I did the milk run to Gorsehill Abbey at sunrise, arrived back at the dairy in record time and without a drop of milk…
Turkish artisan cheese shop in the eastern town of Edirne near the Bulgarian-Greek-Turkish border, which prides itself as the home of Turkey’s ”White cheese”.
soon to be blogging Turkish and Indian cheeses
As well as making burrata today (see below), we also created some lovely mozzarella. Thank you Italy
Burrata. Mozzarella for adults. Imitating leather medieval pouches of gold, these wonderful cheeses not only taste incredible but are also incredibly fun to make. Inside the mozzarella ball lies a pool of fresh cream and strips of stretched mozzarella. Once made, they are tied up, put in bags and either kept in ice cold water or eaten immediately with fresh tomato and basil. Traditionally they are tied up with the leaves of the asphodelus plant.
I can’t wait to get hold of some buffalo milk at my local farmers’ market in Stoke Newington and make some more. In my days as a cheesemonger, on the day that the Italian delivery arrived we had customers waiting impatiently to get hold of burrata as it has a limited shelf life and we could only buy in a certain amount.
Stomachs. Loads of em. Our booty from the Ludlow/Jongia Dairy symposium earlier this week. Never before have I been so excited about having a bag full of dried stomachs (abomasums) to take home. Actually never before have I had a bag full of stomachs. Now what to do with them?…..make cheese?
If this week has taught me anything it’s that you should not despair when things don’t quite seem to go as you would wish. Just hold tight and it’ll all be fine. Now back to the cheese
Week 2, top left - hairy as a beast (scared?)
Week 3, top right - hold on…starting to look surprisingly attractive
Week 4, bottom - drop dead gorgeous
What a funny world bacteria and mould can be. Just when you’re thinking that your bin’s not big enough for your latest failed experiments, the god of microflora waves his magic wand and lets the happy moulds win in the battle of good versus evil. We devoured a quarter of this whisky washed cheese this evening which I thought was quite reserved Since posting this blog, I took our cheese to be inspected by our tutor for the week, Ivan Larcher. Within a second of looking at it, he knew that we had used too much starter due to the open texture of the pate. The blue moulds were forming because the lower pH of the cheese (more acidification from LABs) had created the perfect environment for them to grow rather than a pH of closer to 5.5 which is what’s needed for B.linens to grow. The open texture had also allowed whey to precipitate through the cheese and created a damp underside every time the cheese was turned.
see below for some pictures of the ewes and cows milk lactic cheeses that were made under the expert guidance of Ivan, ‘the cheese ninja’.
Dalmatia saint pierre, et voila
Seeing as I’m being a bit lazy and, of course, wanted to promote the wonderful new blog on the bloc, I thought I’d let Ladleandknead do the talking. Here’s what we got up to last week at the school. An understatement to say how blown away we were by Ivan Larcher’s technical know-how and lactographic wizardry….
Three fantastic days of lactic cheesemaking with Ivan Larcher, learning from one of cheese’s modern day experts.
Working with sheep and cow’s milk we made some wonderful Chaource, creamy filled Nivernais, some petit Crottins and beautiful ash covered Pouligny Saint Pierres in the shape of pyramids.
