Remember the feta..

that I made a few weeks ago?
Well, it's finished its 2 weeks of brining in the fridge, so now I've put half of it in olive oil and half in nice new brine. I read that you can just keep it in brine for a few weeks so I thought I'd try, as then we've got some that has no flavour of oil, just feta.
It's worked incredibly well this time and it tasted absolutely lovely.

So, from 4 litres of milk you get this much cheese.  Which I think is not bad at all. I'll probably give the small one away to friends...

Also, Lloyd and I had a wee party. Last Christmas we had the best time.  This year we would have liked to do the same thing again, but people had family or visitors, so we didn't. However everyone said that they'd had such a great time could we maybe recreate it after christmas - so we did!
Dan and I went for a dive the day before and got some lovely crayfish, Lloyd got a huge eye fillet of beef which was barbequed, Danny made a banoffee pie, and there were various other goodies. The weather was glorious (we've been having the most amazing summer) so we stayed outside all day and into the night. A lovely time was had by all.

Here we all are, in the twilight. I love this!

Can I just thank all of you who sent kind thoughts for Truffle. She seems ok. She's doing everything she should, I think her hormones are still a bit all over the place, but she's eating and drinking and doing everything else properly, so I reckon she's going to be ok. I feel very sad for her though.

It's feta making time again!

I made some feta yesterday.
I've made this numerous times before, but hadn't for a while as the last batch I made was gigantic and lasted ages in oil. We've only just finished it.

Here's the links to the recipes and previous feta making

Feta recipe

Brining the feta

Bottling feta in oil

This time I didn't have any milk straight from the cow, so I had to make do with supermarket milk. I got 4 l of full fat milk. Then I just scaled the recipe down a smidge. It worked perfectly. I'm also doing the air drying again as it worked so well last time. At the moment the feta is sitting out on the worktop, under a food cover. I'll leave it there until at least tomorrow, maybe longer.

These pots are not specifically for cheese making but they are absolutely perfect for feta. They have a little hook on the side so you can hang  them on the pot for draining purposes. When it's time for brining I just take them out of the wee baskets, put them in the pot with some brine and then put the lid on. They might even all fit in one pot  - less room taken up in the fridge!

Obviously we won't have this for Christmas! But when it's ready I'm sure it'll be as lovely as ever.

Bottling the feta

My feta has been maturing in some brine for a few weeks, now. I tasted it and even though it's a week short of the recommended brining time, I think it tastes really good, so I decided to put it in oil today.

Here's a couple of reminders of what I did. Brining and Making. The making post was actually when we made it over at our friends house ( we've half eaten that batch!) I made it again - all by myself, terribly brave - a few days later.

It's been in the fridge, doing its stuff for three weeks. I checked on them daily to begin with then sort of forgot about them!

We like to add a bit of rosemary to the oil. So I nipped out to the garden and picked some, then chopped it up a wee bit.

Then I drained the brine from the feta and crumbled the feta into chunks. I find it's better to just break bits off rather than cut it with a knife.

Next the feta and rosemary goes into a sterilized jar and the extra virgin olive oil is added.

YUM YUM YUM!

 So, ok I slightly overestimated the size of jar I would need, but you could also put this into much smaller jars and give as pressies. We use a big jar cos it's all in one place and you just use a long handled spoon to get the feta out. I added some of our older stuff to the Jamie's lasagne I made the other night and it was lovely.

Brining the feta

On Friday, when Lloyd was at work, I decided to make some feta on my own. Now, this is no mean feat for me. I've said numerous times, I am not a natural in the kitchen!  But it worked. I followed the recipe we used before and just got on with it. I know the curds didn't set quite as solid as they should, but I got everything scooped out and put into the moulds.

At this stage I was rambling on facebook about how soft they were and Melanie from Frugal Kiwi suggested I leave them to air dry for a few days. They would harden up a bit and hopefully not go all soft in the brine. So I left them out on the worktop, draining and under a food cover for three days. They hardened up nicely and actually look really good! I brined them yesterday and now they're in the fridge. ( looking the best we've ever had!) Thank you Mel, I'll always do this now, it works a treat.

All we need to do now is wait 4 weeks then we should have lovely crumbly feta.

(these containers are the best we've found for making feta in. They have a basket in them and there's a wee hook so you can hook the basket to the edge of the container and the cheese drains beautifully. They're way better than even the ones you actually get for making cheese! For any Kiwis interested, New World has them reduced to just over $2.)

A spot of cheese making

We had a lovely day yesterday over at a friends house making cheese. We're very lucky as Phil is a dairy farmer, so has a lot of milk! There's something quite lovely about making cheese with milk straight from the cow.

We were making feta, ricotta and queso blanco.  The queso blanco and ricotta are ready to eat immediately, but the feta takes a while of brining ( between 4 and 6 weeks - this is our recipe, others are different)
After the 6 weeks we cut it up into wee blocks and put in lovely jars with olive oil and perhaps some herbs. Rosemary is lovely. This way it lasts for a long time.

How to make Feta

We started off with 10 litres of milk ( straight from cow) in a double boiler. Heat this to 37 degrees.
Now you need your starters -
Mesophile and thermophile. Add half a teaspoon of each. And a pinch of lipase. Wait 30 minutes to grow starter bacteria. In New Zealand you can get these from Binn Inns, trade me and various cheesemakers who have websites. You can then use UHT milk, mixed with starter to make more... and never have to buy again!

Add a teaspoon of rennet diluted in 30ml of cooled boiled water. Stir into milk for one minute and leave covered to set. ( check strength and dosage as rennet comes in different strengths)
Wait 60 minutes.

Cut curd into 20mm cubes. Cut left to right, top to bottom, then sort of sideways through the cheese to form cubes. Stir once gently every 30 minutes for next hour and a half. ( 3 times)

Lift curds carefully into sanitised moulds. Leave in moulds on draining mat overnight. ( we left them for a few hours as we were having to take them home) Turn them 2 or three times.

 

 Make up brine - 1/2 cup salt to 2 lt water.

Remove the cheese from the moulds and place in brine solution.

Store at 10c. Ripens in 4 - 6 weeks

Here it is in brine. If it looks like the feta is going soft (like this does) you add a teaspoon vinegar to the brine solution.

We've done this recipe several times and it never fails to give us the most delicious feta.

I know it all sounds a bit tricky and very time consuming, but once you get the hang of it, it's great.

Now for some Queso Blanco

We used 5 litres of milk. 

Heat the milk in a non aluminum pan until just before it boils.

Then add 1/4 cup of white vinegar.

The curds will separate from the whey.

Let simmer for a couple of minutes.

Then put curds into a muslin lined collander, drain for a bit, then gather up the muslin and hang to drain for a few hours. If you want to add herbs do it before you gather up the muslin. You can also add salt here if you want.

We added basil to one half.

It's also known as Paneer. We put some in our dahl last night for dinner and it was lovely!

If you look on the internet you'll find many recipes, some are a little different, these work well for us!

 

Basil, tomato and mozzarella salad

Dinner last night!

Yum

I just toast some crusty bread, put the salad on top of it and add olive oil and balsamic. The basil is from the garden, the tomatoes are from New World ( ours are only flowering) and the mozzarella is from Mahoe Cheese. We're lucky enough to have them just a few minutes from the house. If you ask them nicely they will make up a bucket of mozzarella ( and just put it in brine) especially for you when they're making a batch and it is simply delicious. It's a real summer staple of ours, and to be honest we couldn't make it for what they charge us - we love the folk at Mahoe!

Oh and just to say, thinking of all my lovely family and friends in the Uk who are presently under about 4 feet of snow - poor mum got a terrible shock when she arrived back from 2 weeks of glorious hot, sunny weather, with a lovely tan, to minus whatever and a country covered in snow. Mad as it would seem, I would actually rather like to be there. I love snow. It's our Christmas Parade this evening in town and its incredibly humid and hot - and I think it should be snowy and white at Christmas!

Anyway, I'm of to mow the lawns - smothered in factor 30!

more cheesy goodness

We spent the day yesterday making more cheese. We have a lovely friend up the road who is a dairy farmer so Phil and Dyrene came down laden with milk, home made salami and oysters! And we set to work.

We made more feta, to the recipe we were taught last weekend and it worked perfectly.

Lloyd also wanted to try something we'd not done before and by luck friends of ours had given him a cheese making book before we left Glasgow. Turned out it was the book recommended by Jean ( the cheesemaker!)

They decided on Queso Blanco - a very easy soft cheese that you can eat right away.

All in all a very successful day!

And the best day to be in making cheese, as the weather was shocking, howling gale with squally hail showers! Hail! We never get hail!!

Cheese Making course

We've just spent the day learning how to make cheese!

Mozzarella, ricotta and feta. The course was held at the Culinary Institute and it was taught by Jean Mansfield who was just wonderful. It was the absolute best day and we also met some lovely people.

I was really pleased that I actually managed to make decent mozzarella, I knew Lloyd would be good, but I had doubts about me!

Jean taught us lots of wee tricks and we used her tried and tested recipes. If anyone in NZ ever gets a chance to go on one of her courses, you really should. It's fantastic.

this is the culinary institute in Kerikeri.

 The feta going into moulds

 Yeah! stretchy mozzarella

 The feta being brined. This needs to sit out tonight, then put in brine tomorrow for 21 days. After that it's ready to eat, or we can put it in oil and flavour it. It'll last for quite a while.

lovely mozzarella.

This is ready to eat right now.

In fact we're having it for dinner with a tomato and basil salad.

 cheese anyone?

Lloyd and Phil  made more mozzarella cheese this morning. Phil brought round 10lt of fresh from the cow milk and it was gorgeous!

They made a fair amount of cheese each and we had a wee taste and it was excellent.  Phil let us keep the rest of the milk.

One of my favourite things.......





MMMMmmmmmmm blue cheese.

Cheese Making

Lloyd made some cheese yesterday afternoon. This is something he's always wanted to try his hand at but just never got round to, till now.
We are going to go on a cheese making course but not till October when Ness is back. Anyway, I found this recipe on lifestyle block and let Lloyd see it.
We had to buy a thermometer and some rennet but apart from that we had everything you need.
It was a recipe for a mozzarella type of cheese.
It only took about 40 minutes to make.
And it was fun!

Lloyd is a bit critical of it, it's not as glossy as he wanted it to be and also it wasn't as stretchy as he'd have liked - he thinks he needs to heat it up more. I, however, think it tastes lovely! It'll make a fantastic mozzarella, basil and tomato salad, or go on our home made pizzas.

Recipe
2 litres of milk ad 1/2 tsp salt and 1/2 citric acid.
Heat to 32 deg C then add 1/2 tsp rennet.
Stir into the milk using a slotted spoon.
Leave to set for 10 minutes.
Once the curd has set, cut the curd with a knife then heat to 41 deg C. leave to stand for 5 minutes.
Drain off some of the whey retrn the pot to the heat - continue heating slowly - not hotter than 45 deg C. Continue to form the curd into a ball with the slotted spoon, Gradually it becomes soft and very stretchy.
Shape into a ball with care and place into a bowl of cold water to cool.
( with thanks to eelcat)