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The Big Cheese


A huge day of cheese making to celebrate the last day of Level 4, who would have thought April 2020 would turn out like this, it will be one to remember. For me Level 3 will make bugger all difference but I hope I can get some more supplies from Bunnings for my projects, so I will try and keep posting for as long as I can. I teamed up with my mate Emma Sanford today as cheese requires some expertise and team work is a bonus. I picked up about twenty five litres of milk this morning, contra for a loaf, a bottle of Jude’s Tommy Sauce, a jar of pickles, and some cheese if it turns out OK. On the way I saw this, it is one of the sails for a wind farm being transported through Hawera, they  just managed to sneak it around the Waihi Rd/South Rd corner, the thing was massive.




Both Emma and I have made cheese before but it is a tricky thing, it is kinda easy if you are organised, got all the gear and can remember what you did last time, we had bugger all of that. The other thing was that we couldn’t just make one or two cheeses we had to make, Feta, Halloumi, Cottage Cheese, Gouda, Crottin and Ricotta. I overheated the first pot of milk, one wonders if one needs ones glasses for cooking, it is a thing the temperature when making cheese. Then as we juggled back and forward between pots and recipes, we realised we had better write the name of the cheese on each pot so we knew which was which. They all had slightly different techniques and were at different stages of preparation, but they all just look like pots of milk. By lunchtime we had Cottage Cheese, Ricotta and Halloumi ready, so we had a taste, pretty good we thought. To be fair the Ricotta made itself as we were straining each cheese into the same bucket of whey and one had lemon juice in it so it curdled the whey and made the Ricotta, but we were sharp enough to identify it as Ricotta! 
We had some pretty bloody classic moments, I saved some very special boiled, chilled water and then tipped it down the sink about five minutes before we needed it. The process involved two venues, three books, a drill, two trips to the supermarket, five pots, three buckets, a host of homemade molds, sieves, colanders and plenty of DIY creativity. Needless to say we have compiled a list of things we need to make cheese for future sessions. 
If you want to make cheese get the recipes from someone who knows what they are doing…. clearly not us, but we are pretty pleased with our efforts and look forward to tasting the ones that are still a work in progress in due course. We used Kefir grains to ferment the milk, they came from http://korukai.co.nz/index.php you can get a sourdough starter from them too.

Our resources were.

The Art of Natural Cheesemaking by David Asher. David appears to be a bloody tedious zealot, opining in a pretty fucking high and mighty fashion a bit too frequently on his view about other forms of cheesemaking, nevertheless he is obviously a master cheesemaker and the recipes using kefir I have found sound. He has a fairly ambivalent stance on sterilization which works for me. I think he is a yank, enough said.

We also used How to Make Cheese with Jean Mansfield, Jean is a New Zealander, just saying. Her recipes are based around cultured bacterial starters (hear Mr Asher nearly have his first heart attack), which I have never quite got around to purchasing, but there also some that require only rennet, lemon juice or vinegar. This book was given to me a couple of years ago by some super special workaways, Maxime & Jonas.

We also used Making Cheese at home by Katherine Mowbray this was to look up the technical terms that we were unfamiliar with, there were plenty of them.
Here are some pictures from the day.




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