Beer and Cheese

Our winter activities (while stuck at home in the rain) have include two new experiments: brewing beer and making cheese.

The beer process has been guided by the advice of our local homebrew store employees, and a great book (Joy of Homebrewing).

We have about five gallons of "Baller Brown" brown ale bottled and chilling in the basement. Might have to crack into in over the weekend and sample our first batch. (We did sneak some sips when bottling it, and it seemed like we were on the right track!)



The cheese experiment was a huge success-- probably thanks to the liquid rennet I found at the homebrew store. A friend and I made two batches, one with the readily available Junket rennet tablets (presumably vegetarian), and one with the "animal based rennet" that came in liquid form. The animal based one is sourced from veal, so definitely not vegetarian friendly.

The batch made with liquid rennet was amazingly easy- from start to finish about 20 minutes. The tablet batch didn't work out so well, after an hour and a half of waiting for it to thicken, we called it good enough and ate it in mushy ricotta-like form.

I experimented with using the leftover whey to cook pasta last night and it was delicious!

Chicks! Day One

The chicks are three days old, but it's our first day delighting in the hilarity of baby chickens!
(And Stella Dog is majorly curious, and can't stop reaching her head into their box to try and sniff their tiny heads!)

Yogurt Round 2

So after the overwhelming success of last week's yogurt making, I decided to try it again this week. The recipe I used last week called for one cup of dried milk. Which I was out of this week... so I gave it a go sans dried milk. And it sort of worked. It's mostly set, but definitely not the thick, greek yogurt of last week.

Stella Dog is psyched though, because while I don't like watery yogurt, she and her yeast-prone Lab ears love it.

Yogurt

During our Locavore Challenge this fall, we bought dairy products from a small farm outside of town. The yogurt came in big ball jars and in addition to being delicious, produced no extra trash at the end-- no plastic film cover to throw away, and no plastic tub to recycle. We re-use the yogurt containers for any number of things around the house, but go through at least one 32 ounce container a week and have piles of them in our cupboard. So I resolved to try to make yogurt, mostly to eliminate the packaging from our lives.

My first attempt was a time-consuming failure and the yogurt didn't set right or taste very good. So we fed it to Stella Dog. Who loved it.

Four months later I was ready to try again. Armed with a new recipe (from the Whole Foods for the Whole Family cookbook), and a new plan for keeping the yogurt at the right temperature I set out with low expectations.

First, you put 4C of milk in a pan and the recipe says to "scald them milk", unsure of what that meant I just heated it until it was near boiling. Once it cools back down to 95-115F, you add 1C of dry milk, which they didn't specify needed to be whisked in to dissolve, but I discovered quickly, and then add 2-4 tablespoons of yogurt with live active cultures. We had a giant tub of Nancy's Organic in the fridge so I used that. I was generous in the amount of yogurt I added.

Once everything is mixed together you put it in jars and then for the hard part... Keeping it between 95-115 degrees for 3-9 hours, or until it sets. Last time I tried preheating the oven and then turning it off. Even on the lowest setting it was too hot (and probably killed my yogurt cultures resulting in the failure to set). Other ways of maintaining the temperature including electric heating pads, using your food dehydrator, or setting the yogurt in a thermos wrapped in a towel. My food dehydrator is the type with trays, so that wasn't an option for me. So I settled on yet another option-- using a cooler and a hot water bottle to heat it up. The cooler maintains the temperature and once I played with the number of heat sources a bit I got it right and was able to leave the yogurt to setting without constantly checking the temperature. I used a digital thermometer to monitor the temperature and with one hot water bottle and one glass jar filled with boiling water and a few minutes for them to cool a bit, the temperature maintained at 111 degrees for long enough that I left for a few hours.

Six hours later we came back and the temperature was 89 and the yogurt was set! Success!

New Projects

We went to our local home brew supply store to stock up on the rest of the tools and ingredients for making beer! And I couldn't resist a small bottle of root beer extract, since we got a soda siphon for our wedding and I haven't used it for anything but club soda yet.

Today's Projects: Starting a Starter & Homemade Cheezits

Becoming a bread snob is not something I anticipated, given that I grew up on whatever was on sale and spongy enough for kid sandwiches... But, alas, bread snobbery has overtaken me and I can't even entertain the idea of a loaf that comes in a brown plastic bag with a twist tie. My first ventures into homemade bread took place in a great span of purposeful unemployment in the two months before our move to Portland. I made my own starter from scratch, using an LA Times recipe, and devoted many mornings to break making. Settling on the NY Times No Knead recipe as my ultimate favorite (who's going to argue with less work?!), I made endless loaves of bread that spring. When we moved, I couldn't bring my starter, and I promptly stopped baking bread.

Last winter I pulled out the LA Times article on starting a starter and was surprised, and saddened, when it didn't work. Maybe I'd forgotten to use spring water? Unsure of what went wrong, I quickly moved on to other projects and Mark started making bread with regular old yeast which was delicious enough to distract me from getting a starter going.

Since January is a good time to resolve to do everything on your list, I added "start making sourdough bread" to my list of resolutions. On New Year's day I got out the recipe and the flour, remembered to use spring water, and my starter is now at stage 4-- almost a "mother starter".



Starting a starter is a bit like having another pet-- because you have to pass close attention to it's livelihood, and feed and water it accordingly to schedule. But once you get it going it rewards you with fluffy, perfectly consistent loaves of homemade sourdough. Once you have an active starter you can store it in the fridge and feed it every few weeks, it's just getting to that point that takes a little patience and dedication.

Once the starter was fed and aerated I moved on to a more indulgent project-- homemade parmesean crackers, as featured on one of my favorite cooking blogs Smitten Kitchen. Cheezits are most definitely my very favorite junk food, and they have to be the "full fat" version-- none of this reduced fat or sodium business when I'm eating Cheezits! I was sure I would like these, but unsure if they'd be worth the trouble. The verdict is in, and they are worth the 30-40 minutes I spent from start to finish, and that includes washing the bowl.

I made a few modifications to the recipe- the main one being use of just a spoon since I don't have a food processor. I also used cold butter and a pastry blender to blend the flour and butter-- this resulted in the flaky pastry crust I was hoping for. The recipe made around 40 small crackers, and I promptly devoured about half of them. YUM.

Limoncello Love

I absolutely adore limoncello, and while I have yet to find one that I consider unpalatable, the most delicious limoncello I've was the first batch I made myself. After spending the holidays outside of San Francisco last year, we drove back to Portland with a trash bag full of lemons from my parents' yard. Destined to become limoncello, they also provided the impetus for plenty of other lemon projects, including lemon pudding, candied lemon rinds, lemonade, and frozen lemon juice (to be used over the months to come).

This year we have a slightly smaller batch of lemons to work with (thanks for bringing them to us Mom!), and round 2 of the homemade limoncello is underway. The lemon zest will sit in the alcohol for 42 days before we move on to adding the sugar.