Robin, Author at Bumblebee Blog

Bzzzz October 21st, 2007

I have to admit that home cheese making feels a bit like conducting a chemistry experiment in my kitchen.

I mean, with bread baking, I can FEEL the dough. There is some effort behind the whole affair of mixing flour, water, yeast and other ingredients, watching it rise, kneading and watching it rise again before shaping it with your hands into a final, glorious loaf.

With home cheese making, you do quite a lot of waiting about. You mix in special ingredients that you must special order. Everything must be kept immaculately clean and sanitary. The guru of cheese making, Ricki Carroll, even recommends keeping meticulous notes in a cheese making journal.

Nevertheless, the results of home cheese making can’t be denied.

Take a look at this 30 Minute Mozzarella that I made last night with some of the last tomatoes and basil of the year. (In our Zone 7 garden we picked about 10 lovely tomatoes just yesterday!)

This salad LOOKS like art, doesn’t it?

The recipe is from, of course, Home Cheese Making, by Ricki Carroll. I have been slowly working my way through the book, starting with the soft, spreadable cheeses. Now that my fancy cheese press has arrived, I am venturing into the hard cheeses.

You can’t really count this 30 Minute Mozzarella as a hard cheese. And frankly, it’s a lot less work than even the soft cheeses. In fact, it’s ridiculously easy.

If you are even a little bit interested in cheese making, then place an order with the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company and give this recipe a whirl. I highly recommend that you buy the book because the introductory information is quite important, particularly information about sanitation, ingredients and heating of the milk.

Look how easy the whole process was. I used the recipe from Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making.

Ingredients I Used:

1 ½ level teaspoon citric acid dissolved in ¼ cup cool water

1 gallon pasteurized whole milk

¼ teaspoon liquid rennet diluted in ¼ cup cool, unchlorinated water

1 teaspoon cheese salt

How I Did It:

I added the citric acid/water solution to the milk when it was at 55 degrees and mixed it thoroughly but gently. I slowly heated the milk on the stove to 88 degrees. (It helps that I have a gas stove, I think, because it gives me a great deal of immediate control over heat.) I gently added the diluted rennet and mixed again and then heated the milk to 100 degrees.

I scooped the curds from the pot into a microwaveable bowl and pressed to remove the extra whey. (If you are very clever, apparently you can reserve the whey for other cheese making purposes.)

I microwaved the curds on high for 1 minute and again drained off all the excess whey. To distribute the heat evenly, I gently folded the cheese over and over like I was kneading bread. I microwaved the cheese twice again for 35 seconds each, kneading after each turn. Then I added the salt, kneading it to incorporate it into the cheese.

The recipe says cheese won’t stretch properly until it’s almost too hot to handle. I found it very hot, but if I moved quickly, it didn’t feel like it was burning at all. I kneaded until the cheese was smooth and elastic. It became nice and stretchy.

(Unfortunately, I can’t knead and take photos at the same time and the two men in my house were busy reading. It was difficult to entice one of them into the kitchen to play photographer.)

I rolled the cheese into small balls and placed them into the frig to cool.

The directions say to put them into a bowl of cold/ice water to bring down the heat if you don’t plan to eat them warm, but I forgot that part. Nevertheless, they were just dandy about 30 minutes later when I made the salad.

What do you think? Does this look like art? Craft? Chemistry experiment? Would you give it a try?

Posted In: Cheese Making

4 Comments

Bzzzz October 18th, 2007

Thanks to the happy twist of fate that I finally have some breathing room on my work calendar I was able to spend most of yesterday preparing for Harry’s birthday dinner. It’s yet another step toward my slow lifestyle.

And, as my friend Martha would say, “It’s a good thing.”

For his birthday cake, I made one of our family favorites, Italian Cream Cake. I first found this recipe years ago in Bon Appetite magazine. Since then, the recipe has morphed somewhat, but it essentially remains the magazine’s version. I tried valiantly to find the original in the Bon Appetite repository that is now at one of my favorite website, Epicurious, but I suppose this recipe was published before the invention of the Internet. (Don’t laugh. It’s entirely possible that I have recipes from the Stone Age.)

Italian%20Cream%20Cake.jpg

As an added bonus to being a superhero wife and all-around star party-maker for my hubbie, my house smells fabulous—better than those wanky candles you buy at the mall. And if you need to know what “wanky” is, visit Urban Dictionary where you can learn all sorts useful expressions such as “jackass o’clock” (time to be a jackass) or “e 40” (a Bay Area rapper).

This weekend, why not slow down and make a fabulous dessert—or how about make THIS fabulous dessert?

Italian Cream Cake

Ingredients:

¾ cup butter, softened

1 ¾ cups sugar

4 egg yolks

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 ¾ cups cake flower

1 ½ teaspoon baking powder

¼ teaspoon baking soda

¾ cup half and half

4 ounces flaked coconut

4 egg whites

1 recipe for cream cheese frosting (see below)

Additional coconut, as desired

Directions:

In a large mixer bowl beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg yolks and vanilla and beat well. In another bowl, combine flour, baking powder and baking soda. Gradually add this mixture to the egg/butter mixture, alternating with the half and half. Stir in coconut.

In a small mixer bowl, beat egg whites until they form stiff peaks. Stir in about a third of the whites into the cake batter. Then gently fold in the remaining whites.

Pour the batter evenly into three buttered and floured 8” cake pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes or until a toothpick or knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Do not overcook!

Cool for 10 minutes and then turn onto wire racks to finish cooling. When cooled, place the first layer on a cake plate and frost with the cream cheese frosting. Sprinkle on coconut and add the second layer and repeat, finishing the frosting all around. Pat coconut onto the crème cheese frosting for a decorative finish.

Store any leftover cake covered in the refrigerator for up to 3 or 4 days (if it lasts that long).