Anna's Adventures in Cheesemaking - Mozzarella

I’m not going to lie, this cheese is slightly less easy. However, it is well worth the effort and special ingredients, as it is so delicious, and doesn’t take too much time. And it’s very versatile! Salads, pasta dishes/bakes, Melanzane Parmigiano, paninis, pizza, and “Suppli al telephono” arancini risotto balls (http://www.manusmenu.com/suppli-al-telefono my idea of heaven). The best part is that it tastes like lovely fresh high quality mozzarella, but at a fraction of the cost. Even better if you make it with unhomogenised milk, or particularly high fat milk. The cheapest kind of rennet is actually vegetarian rennet, so I use that.

Don't be put off by the citric acid or the rennet, you can get them on Amazon, in health food stores, and in Lakeland too I think. I'd like to note here that I have what my friends have affectionately termed 'asbestos hands' meaning they can take a lot of heat, so this recipe was fine for me. However it does involve handling very hot cheese, so I've included several precautions for the more heat sensitive of us to follow to help protect from burnt hands. Anyway, it's so much fun making mozzarella, so don't let me put you off!

Equipment:

• Medium/Large non reactive saucepan
• Sieve
• Cooking thermometer (necessary)
• Chopping board
• Large bowl for iced water + rubber or latex gloves (optional for those who don’t have heat proof hands like me)

Ingredients

• 2 litres full fat milk (use very high fat if you can get it)
• ½ tsp Rennet
• 2 tsp citric acid
• 2 ½ tbsp salt (This is not a typo, but don’t worry, it doesn’t all go in the cheese)
• Ice (optional, again for those without heat proof hands)

Method

1. Dissolve the citric acid in 60ml of cold water. Add to the milk. Heat the milk to 30 C, stirring continuously, it should begin to curdle slightly.
2. Dissolve the rennet in 1 tablespoon of water and add to the saucepan. Heat to 39 C, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and leave to separate from 15 minutes.
3. Scoop the curds out of the pan with a slotted spoon or spatula and place them in the sieve. They should be sort of gelatinous and clump together. Squeeze out a bit of moisture with your hands, but not too much.
4. Add the salt to the whey still in the pan, and heat to between 80 and 90 C.
5. Prepare a bowl of iced water.
6. Cut or break the curds into pieces about 3cm by 3cm or smaller. Gently lower the first ball into the hot water. Leave it in for about a minute, then remove with a slotted spoon and place onto the chopping board. You can now dip your gloved hands into the iced water whenever they get too hot. Work the cheese, folding it over on itself once or twice. On this first go it might fall apart a bit, but just gently squeeze it into a rough ball.
7. Place the curds back in the water to heat up again for about half a minute, then repeat, taking it out and folding over a few times, then squeezing into a ball and returning to the water. The water should be on the heat, staying roughly between 80 and 90 C throughout.
8.  Repeat this for a maximum of 5 times. If you over work it, the cheese will become hard and tear more, so be careful. It should be sort of smooth when you are done. Set aside and repeat with all the other lumps of cheese, to make small balls of mozzarella.
9. Store in salty water or wrapped in clingfilm until ready to use. 

I hope you give this a go, its surprisingly easy and very much worth it! Comment with any questions or to tell me how it went. The next cheese I'm hoping to make is brie, so look out for a post on that some time soon!

Have fun!

Anna's Adventures in Cheese-Making: Goats Cheese

Ok so this recipe is similar to the last one I posted but it produces an entirely different sort of cheese! This is a simple recipe for a soft goats cheese. It’s a bit of a cheat recipe really, since real goats cheese involves using a mould culture and maturing it, but this makes a delicious sort of goat-y cream cheese, and is ready to eat immediately so I think it’s earned it’s place in this column. 

You can change this recipe up as much as you want, mix the cheese with black pepper, any combination of herbs, or garlic. Those are just ideas I stole from Boursin cream cheese haha, I’m sure there’s loads of other things to do with it!

It tastes like a mixture between cream cheese and chèvre goats cheese, so use it where you would normally use those. It's great by itself on toast or crackers and lovely in creamy pasta dishes!

Equipment:

Medium/Large non reactive saucepan

Colander

Cheesecloth/muslin

Large bowl

Cooking thermometer (optional)

Ingredients:

1 litre Unpasteurised goats milk (I got it from Exeter’s farmers market, from the goats cheese stall)

1 lemon

1 ½ tsp Salt

Herbs (I used thyme and sage)/garlic/black pepper/whatever flavourings you want

Method

• Start by heating the milk in the saucepan. Heat it to just below boiling (or around 90 C), stirring.
• Turn the heat way down and add lemon juice, 1 tsp at a time for about 4 tsps, stirring continuously.
• When the curds begin to separate from the whey, stop adding the lemon juice. The result will not look like anything you might recognise from making cheese with cows milk as the whey is less clear and the clumps of curd are smaller.
• Leave to sit for about 5 minutes to ensure the curds and whey are separated completely. Place 2 layers of cheesecloth over a colander, and the colander over a large bowl. Strain the contents of the saucepan into the muslin lined colander, then bring all the corners of the muslin together and tie the top, to form a “bag” for the cheese. Hang this either from the tap in your sink, or from a wooden spoon over the large bowl. Hang for 1 hour.
• Mix the cheese with chopped herbs or other flavourings, then shape into a sort of sausage for ease of cutting bits off. It is traditional to have leaves on soft goats cheese (I think?) so I pressed some sage leaves into the top.
• Refrigerate wrapped in clingfilm until use, and enjoy on crackers, toast, or pasta sauce. Beware, it goes off quite fast, and will start to taste a bit weird within about three days, so get eating!

Next on my list of recipes is mozzarella, so keep your eyes peeled for that! 

A Japanese New Year

Hi! I’m Shane and I’m the secretary of Slow Food Soc. I grew up in Japan so I decided to write about Christmas and New Year in Japan.

When I was little, my family celebrated Christmas in a traditional (or what I think is traditional) British way. Christmas tree, presents and of course, food; turkey, gravy, roasted potatoes and veggies, white sauce, stuffing, and to finish it off, Christmas pudding and custard. My mum (who is Japanese) cooks amazing dishes and the food is always delicious. We don’t put up the tree anymore and I asked them why last week when we were Skyping and my dad (who is British) said it was because I’d grown up and Christmas trees are for kids. That was rather upsetting to hear because I think Christmas is for all ages! I’m not going to go back to Japan this winter but I’m sure the feast will happen because my dad loves it.

I can understand why they don’t bother putting up the Christmas tree or decorate the house though. Christmas isn’t really a big thing in Japan. It’s just another working day and things are the same as usual. Most shops, however, do decorate and put us in the festive mood. But in general, Christmas isn’t celebrated very much. If people do celebrate, it’s usually opening gifts on Christmas eve and eat a Christmas cake, which is a strawberry shortcake.

What is more important during this time is New Year’s Day, or Oshogatsu. I’d say it’s the biggest holiday in Japanese culture. This is when all the family get together (whether they want to or not!) and have a huge feast called Osechi. Osechi comes in a big square box, usually two or three layers, and is filled with foods that have some kind of special meaning.

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Each component has some sort of meaning. For example, sweet black beans is so that you can work well this year. It comes from the phrase ‘mame ni hataraku’ where “mame” means beans. This is what those black beans look like:

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Another dish served in Osechi is Kobu-maki, which is thick seaweed (kombu) rolled into a cylindrical shape and tied with dried gourd shavings. This food is so that you have lots of joy this year. In Japanese, joy is “yorokobu” and it’s similar to the name of the seaweed, kombu. Am I making sense to you right now? Here’s what the Kobu-maki looks like:

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What I like more than Osechi is another New Year food called Ozoni. It’s a soup that has rice cakes and chicken and veggies in it. My grandmother who lives in Tokyo makes it and I like eating it before the huge Osechi gets delivered to their house. It’s a really lovely warming soup, but it’s not like miso soup.

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Other than food, there’s a tradition in Japan called Otoshi-dama. This is where kids receive money from their extended family. I can’t say whether that’s a better idea than a Christmas present or not, but I think it’s a pretty cool tradition!

Have a great Christmas and a New Year everyone! :D

Shane

P.S. None of the pictures I used in this post is mine. I got them all from google.