An Adventure in My Kitchen

Today I did something I’ve always wanted to do: I made cheese! Yes, it was fun, but before going any further, I must say there were some surprises. I proved the old adage that says things never quite turn out the way you expect. The cheese was great, but making it was an eye-opening experience.

30 some years ago, Sam and I used to have a flock of dairy goats and made cheese—that is, Sam made cheese. I milked goats and cleaned up the mess. The cheese was really good, and we had a bunch of folks back then encouraging us to go into the goat cheese business, but they were largely unaware of the many challenges involved. None of them had any money to invest in our business. We were both busy working full-time jobs and going broke, so we didn’t have any money for the venture, so to make a long story short, we sold the farm, the goats, moved to Seattle and completely did a 180.

Now we are a year away from retirement, looking at how we want to live the rest of our lives, and have bought a small acreage back in Oregon. Unless we want to be totally dependent on Social Security for our income, we need to be able to provide for our own needs and/or find a way to make a living, ergo the interest in making cheese, among other things. I, for one, do not intend to bag groceries at Safeway or end up a Wal-Mart greeter.

I don’t envision a return to the ways we used to do things. For instance, I am not going to return to milking 15-20 goats twice daily for the rest of my life! I have osteoarthritis, so that won’t be happening. I do want to have a couple of decent milkers, however, and my experience tells me that will translate to 2-4 gallons of milk a day. Hmm, what to do with it? Well, we will drink some of it (we LOVE goat milk, admittedly an acquired taste, but other milk tastes so boring in comparison), we can make butter and buttermilk (Yum!), or we can make cheese. Fortunately, goat milk makes great cheese, and you can make all different kinds and age some of it.

For today’s effort, I decided on a simple fresh cheese. As I usually do when embarking on a new project, I researched several books and consulted a few on-line recipes before deciding what to make. I finally chose to make one from Martha Stewart‘s Website: Herbed Fresh Buttermilk Cheese. I pretty much followed her recipe, though I made it from a gallon of whole milk and a quart of lowfat buttermilk, adding dried oregano from my garden and fresh ground black pepper. It’s still draining in the kitchen sink, but I plan on serving it over fresh-sliced sourdough bread for dinner.

The cheese was easy to make, but there was more of a mess than I anticipated—and lots of whey. Yikes, what to do with that? I don’t have any chickens to feed it to these days (they love it), and I ended up with three quarts of whey after making cheese from one gallon of milk! Not a problem, Martha Stewart to the rescue: a video on her Website recommends using it for poaching fish, for example (not that I poach fish often, but I guess I will now) or in soups, so I poured it back into the gallon milk jug to cool off and then froze it in ice cube trays, later putting the cubes into a plastic bag to store in the freezer.

There was also the problem of milk scorched on the bottom of my stainless steel soup pot, but I easily removed that by re-heating the pot and pouring in about ¼ cup of water, so the scorched milk lifted right off (I learned that trick from caring for my cast iron pans for many years). That left only a little bit that I had to scrub off, and then everything but the big pot went into the dishwasher.

So, if you want to try this for yourself, you’ll probably want to follow Martha’s recipe, which calls for only one quart of milk and makes about six ounces of cheese. You might even want to go to her Website, watch the instruction video, and try one of the other variations. What could be nicer on a summer evening than some fresh herb cheese on sourdough French bread with a glass of chilled Chardonnay?


Herbed Fresh Buttermilk Cheese

Yield Makes one 6-ounce round
Serves 4 as a snack with crackers

Ingredients

• 1 quart whole milk
• 1 1/2 cups whole or low-fat buttermilk
• 2 teaspoons coarse salt
• 1 teaspoon dried herbs, such as tarragon, oregano, or basil

Directions

1. Cut out three pieces of cheesecloth into 12-inch squares. Line a colander or medium strainer with all three layers of cheesecloth. Set colander in sink.

2. Combine milk, buttermilk, salt, and herbs in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan, and heat over medium-high heat until mixture has separated into white curds and translucent whey, about 8 minutes. If using lowfat buttermilk, separation occurs at about 180 degrees and the curds will clump together readily. If using whole buttermilk, separation occurs closer to the boiling point, about 212 degrees, and the curds are finer-grained. When using whole buttermilk, let curds and whey stand off heat for about 3 minutes after separation, so the curds cling together and facilitate the straining step.

3. Ladle the contents of the saucepan into the prepared colander. Let the whey drain, 1 to 2 minutes. Lift the four corners of the cheesecloth and gather them together. Gently twist the gathered cloth over the cheese and press out any excess whey.

4. Cheese can be unwrapped immediately and served warm or let stand until cooled to room temperature, about 10 minutes more. To serve a firmer cheese, transfer cheese, in its cloth, to a small flat-bottomed dish or pie plate; refrigerate until cool, about 10 minutes. Unwrap cheese and gently invert onto plate; discard cloth. Tent cheese with plastic wrap and keep refrigerated up to 2 days. Remove from refrigerator and let stand for 10 minutes at room temperature before serving.