Caramel Sauce
Makes 3 cups.
2 quarts goat milk, whole or skimmed
2 cups sugar
½ teaspoon baking soda
Follow the directions for making caramel coffee creamer and continue to cook until the sauce is the consistency of a runny pudding. It will get thicker when it cools. This caramel sauce is perfect for serving over ice cream or for dipping apples. This can be stored for a few weeks in the refrigerator or longer in the freezer.
Because it takes no more effort to make this in larger batches, I often double this and start with a gallon of milk. When it is reduced by half, I pour off a quart to use as coffee creamer, and I continue to simmer the remainder until it becomes caramel sauce.
CHAPTER 15
ACID-RIPENED CHEESES
Many people begin their cheese making with acid-ripened cheeses because these don’t require special ingredients. They are ripened with the addition of an acid such as vinegar, citric acid, or lemon or lime juice. These cheeses don’t require a mold, and most are drained in cheesecloth.
Vinegar
Queso blanco or paneer is often the first cheese that a new cheese maker makes because they have all the ingredients and equipment on hand. The two cheeses are very similar to each other, except that queso blanco is made with vinegar and paneer is made with lemon or lime juice. Neither cheese melts.
Queso Blanco
Although queso blanco is the first cheese that many people make, most novice cheese makers don’t know what to do with it and don’t make it more than a time or two. My family has made queso blanco hundreds of times, and it was the cheese that I taught my children to make many years ago. We often cube it, stir-fry in sunflower oil until golden brown and crunchy, and then add it to a marinara sauce and serve it over pasta.
Makes 1 pound.
1 gallon goat milk
¼ cup white wine vinegar
Put the milk into a 5-quart pot and heat it until it reaches 190°F. Add the vinegar and stir until the curds and whey separate. The whey will be clear with a slight greenish tint. Pour the curds and whey into a cheesecloth-lined colander and drain over a pot to catch the whey. Tie up the cheesecloth and hang it to drain for a couple of hours. You can hang the cheesecloth on the kitchen faucet, from a cabinet knob, or from a skewer that spans the top of a large pot. This cheese can be eaten after draining, or it can be chilled for a few hours to make it easier to slice. This cheese should be used within a few days for the best flavor, but it can be stored in the refrigerator for about a week before it starts to mold and taste sour.
I like to put my cheesecloth-lined colander in a milk bucket to catch the whey.
I let my queso blanco or paneer drain in a bag made by tying up the four corners of a cheesecloth. I hang the bag over a milk bucket in my sink to drain, saving the whey to feed my pigs or to make bread or gjetost.
Gjetost
Gjetost (pronounced yay-toast) translates from Norwegian as “goat cheese,” but it is more like fudge or caramel than cheese in both flavor and the process for making it. It is not ripened. It is simply whey that has been boiled and reduced to about 20 percent of its original volume, which makes it incredibly rich.
My first attempt to make gjetost was an icky failure. I wound up with a salty, sweet, grainy goo in the bottom of a pan after 11 hours of simmering whey on the stove. It looked like sand that had sunk to the bottom of a watered-down caramel sauce. No one else would even taste it. In spite of its dreadful appearance, it tasted delicious, and I knew I had to find a better recipe and try again. Because it is extremely rich and you shouldn’t eat too much at one sitting, I make it only when we have company coming.
When the gjetost gets thick enough to stay on one side of the pot when scraped over there, I know it’s time to pour it into a pan for chilling in the refrigerator for a few hours before serving.
Whey is the only ingredient you need for making gjetost, and you can use whatever amount you have left over after making cheese. You should use fresh whey, however, or the final product is likely to be too salty. Put the whey on the stove in a heavy-bottomed pot and boil. And boil. And boil. This process will recall making maple syrup for those of you with experience boiling down sap. You will be boiling for a few hours. The more surface area in your pot, the faster the whey will boil down, so given a choice between a tall, skinny pot and a wider, more shallow pot, choose the wider pot to boil down the whey faster.
Using Whey
Don’t toss that whey! Whey is a nutritious liquid containing protein and other minerals and vitamins. It can be used as the liquid in bread recipes. It gives a nice lift to whole grains as it is a natural dough conditioner. There are entire books written on lacto-fermentation, which utilizes whey. It is also an excellent source of nutrition for chickens, turkeys, and pigs. Chickens and turkeys drink it like they would water, and a pig will bury its mouth in it until it has slurped up every last drop. Even dogs and cats love it. If you have no other use for whey, you can use it as fertilizer in your garden or on your pasture.
When the whey starts to thicken and is as thick as a runny pudding, I use my stick blender to get rid of its graininess. When the whey is smooth, I place the pot in a sink of cold water to chill it rapidly while I whisk it.
After gjetost has been refrigerated, it will become a semi-solid piece of cheese, which can be sliced for serving.
Ricotta
Although ricotta can be made from whey, the yield is so low that it is hardly worth the effort. I’d rather use whole milk and get enough cheese to make lasagna, stuffed shells, or manicotti.
Makes ½ pound.
2 quarts goat milk
2–3 tablespoons wine vinegar (white or red)
Heat the milk to 190°F, add the vinegar, and stir until the curds and whey separate. Remove the milk from the heat and let it sit for 10 to 20 minutes so that it can begin to cool, and then put the pot in a sink filled with cold water to the same level as the curds and whey on the inside of the pot. Stir the curds until the temperature reduces to 90°F, and then drain the curds and whey in a cheesecloth-lined colander. Hang the tied cheesecloth for about 10 minutes. Remove the cheese from the cheesecloth and put into a bowl to use immediately in your favorite recipe, or place it in a covered container to store in the refrigerator for 5 or 6 days. If you won’t be using it within a few days, you can store it in the freezer.
Citric Acid
Citric acid in powder form or in a citrus juice, such as lemon or lime, can also be used to culture milk. Lemon or lime juice is used to make paneer, whereas powdered citric acid is used to make mozzarella. Although you may recall using a citric acid preparation in canning, it may have included other undesirable additives, so be sure to check the ingredient list before using it for cheese making. You can buy pure citric acid from the cheese-making supply companies. To make the purest paneer, use juice from real lemons or lime, rather than bottles, which may also contain preservatives and other ingredients.
Paneer
Palak paneer and saag paneer, which are spinach dishes, and mattar paneer, which uses peas, are popular dishes in Indian cuisine. Making your own paneer is just as easy as making queso blanco.
Makes ½ pound.
2 quarts goat milk
¼ cup lemon or lime juice
Many traditional paneer recipes suggest heating the milk until it boils and then adding the lemon or lime juice. This method will work well, but don’t leave the kitchen while heating the milk. If you’ve ever had milk boil over, you’ll know why I’m saying this. If you prefer to use a thermometer, gently heat the milk to 190°F and then add the juice. Stir the milk until the curds and whey separate. Drain the curds in a cheesecloth-lined colander. After hanging to drain for about 5 minutes, place the cheesecloth-wrapped curds in the colander again and put weight on it to force out a little more whey. A cast-iron skillet or a pot with 2 cups of water in it will work for the weight. Remove the cheese from the cheesecloth and store it in the refrigerator
. Like queso blanco, paneer has no culture to preserve it, so it must be eaten within a week.
Mozzarella
Mozzarella is traditionally made with culture, but you can make an acid-ripened version more quickly. Acid-ripened mozzarella is meant to be eaten within a few days of making it, while the culture-ripened cheese can be kept up to three or four weeks. Because we eat a pound or two of mozzarella every week, we don’t have time to make the culture-ripened version. We make this recipe so often that it takes us only about 20 minutes from start to finish. This is the most forgiving cheese I’ve ever made. Over the years, we have done just about everything “wrong” at one time or another, and it still turns into mozzarella in the end. In addition to teaching this cheese to hundreds of adults, I’ve also taught about two hundred children how to make it during our summer farm camp.
Makes 1 to 1¼ pounds, depending on the butterfat content.
1 gallon goat milk
½ tablespoon citric acid
¼ teaspoon liquid rennet
1 teaspoon cheese salt (optional)
If the milk is refrigerated, bring it up to 55°F over low heat and then sprinkle the citric acid into the milk while stirring constantly but gently. If the milk is fresh from the goats, strain the milk into a pot, and when the milk has cooled off to below 90°F, add the citric acid. Heat the milk to 90°F, and add the rennet while stirring constantly. Without turning off the heat, continue to stir gently as the curds and whey separate. The temperature will continue to rise. Stop stirring when the whey is clear with a slight greenish tint, turn off the heat, and let the curds sit for 15 minutes to sink to the bottom of the pot and “knit,” which means the curds will stick together in one large mass.
Microwave Directions: Using a large slotted spoon, remove the curds and put them in a microwaveable bowl. Since this cheese is not aged, you don’t have to add the salt, but if you want to use it, now is the time to add it. Heat the curds for 1 minute on high. Wearing thick rubber gloves, remove the curd mass from the bowl and start to knead it like bread dough. As you squeeze the curds, whey will be pushed out. You’ll probably want to do this over your sink, or you’ll have a big mess to clean up. When it gets difficult to squeeze the curds, put the mass back in the bowl and microwave for another 30 seconds. Repeat the kneading. If the curd mass becomes difficult to knead but you are still squeezing out a lot of whey, you might need to microwave for another 30 seconds and knead again. When most of the whey is worked out of the curds, you will be able to stretch the curds for at least a foot without breaking. Removing the whey is important because the cheese won’t last more than a few days if excess whey is trapped in the curds, and it will be more difficult to shred if it is too moist.
When enough whey has been kneaded out of mozzarella, you should be able to easily stretch it a couple of feet. If it breaks rather than stretches, there is still too much whey in it, so continue kneading a bit longer.
Stovetop Directions: Rather than letting the curds sit immediately following the separating of curds and whey, continue slowly heating the curds to 140°F without stirring. Once the whey is at 140°F, turn off the heat and let the curds sit for 5 minutes to knit. Press the curds against the side of the pot to form a solid mass. Then scoop out the curds with a slotted spoon and put them into a bowl. Sprinkle in the salt, if you want. Follow the directions above for kneading. You can usually remove all of the whey without needing to reheat the curds.
Although this mozzarella cannot be aged, it can be frozen. We originally froze it in plastic bags, but eventually graduated to using a vacuum sealer. We make extra mozzarella through the summer when we have extra milk so that we’ll have plenty for our weekly pizzas during the winter when few of our goats are milking.
CHAPTER 16
CULTURE-RIPENED CHEESES
Culture-ripened cheese was one of the first preserved foods created by humans, and it evolved differently in response to the unique milk, environment, and cheese-making habits of different geographic areas. Even if you follow every recipe in this book exactly as written, your cheese will taste different from mine, perhaps subtly or maybe drastically different. Cheese making may be more chemistry than cooking, but farmstead cheese making is as much art as it is science. The big cheese factories took over cheese making in the United States in the nineteenth century and standardized cheeses to a level never before seen in the world. But variety is the spice of life, and those of us making our own cheese have the opportunity to make a product that is not only as good as a commercial cheese, but actually better. While you may want to start out making familiar cheeses, with experience you will probably find you want to experiment, changing the recipes to suit your own taste.
One of the most important things that any cheese maker needs to do is to keep a journal. I cannot overemphasize the importance of writing down everything that you do when making cheese. Although you might be able to connect the dots when you make a fresh cheese that turns out better or worse than expected, it is impossible to remember what you did six or nine months ago when you made that cheddar that won’t melt now or the Gouda that tastes like cheap store-bought cheese.
This is one of those lessons that I learned the hard way. I was terrible at maintaining a journal when I started making cheese, and my aged cheeses were reliably terrible. When my husband started making aged cheeses, he kept notes that reminded me of the lab reports we had to do in science classes. His first aged cheeses were not great, but he would write down tasting notes as we opened each one over the months. Through the years, his aged cheeses have improved dramatically as he has tweaked his recipes to work with our Nigerian Dwarf milk. Having milk that is much higher in butterfat and milk solids than the average goat or cow milk taught us early that it’s okay to stray from the recipe and that our cheese would be better for our experimentation.
One thing you should not do with recipes in this book is to halve them. They already use very small quantities of culture, so reducing them even more may yield disappointing results.
Choosing Cultures
There are a number of different mesophilic cultures with scientific names, and they vary slightly in the way they react with milk. However, home cheese makers don’t have to figure out everything on their own. Cheese-making supply companies have combined some of the most popular cultures into packets of freeze-dried starters and given them simple names like MA, MM, MD, and flora danica, and in the catalog or website description, they give recommendations for which culture to use when making specific cheeses.
When we started making culture-ripened cheeses, we purchased several types of cultures and used them to make the recommended cheese. Over time we began to experiment with using whatever culture was on hand to make our cheese recipes. Over the years, we’ve pretty much settled on using MM culture for all our cheeses that require a mesophilic starter, including chèvre, feta, Camembert, cheddar, Gouda, and Havarti. This is why my recipes don’t specify a culture beyond stating whether it needs to be mesophilic or thermophilic. Go ahead and try using the culture specified by the supplier, but don’t be afraid to try a different one. You may discover, as we have, that when combined with your unique milk, you can create a tastier cheese by using a culture that is different from what is recommended.
Chèvre
This is the cheese that is often referred to as “goat cheese” in stores and on restaurant menus. The word itself, which is French, translates as “goat.” In addition to serving chèvre with crackers or crusty bread, we love to have it on sandwiches with grilled Portobello mushrooms, use it as the stuffing in cheese blintzes, and even use it in cheesecake.
Although you can buy direct set cultures to make chèvre, it is incredibly simple to make it using mesophilic culture and rennet.
Makes 1 to 1¼ pounds, depending on butterfat content.
1 gallon goat milk
mesophilic culture
1 drop rennet in 2 tablespoons water
We make this cheese using milk that has been pasteurized b
ecause in our experience it creates a more spreadable cheese than when made with raw milk. We pasteurize the milk at the time we are going to make the cheese by heating it to 145°F and holding the temperature for 30 minutes. Then we put the pot of milk into a sink filled with cold water to reduce the temperature to 86°F.
When the temperature has reduced to 86°F, add the amount of mesophilic culture recommended by the supplier to ripen 1 gallon of milk, and stir gently for about 30 seconds to combine. Add the rennet and continue stirring for about another 30 seconds. Cover the pot and set it aside, where it will be undisturbed for 10 hours or until the curds have a clean break, which is when the curds form a solid white mass, the whey is almost clear, and the curd holds its shape when you cut into it. When you have a clean break, spoon the mass into plastic molds and let each one drain for 12 hours.
It took me years to make a good chèvre, partly because I kept no notes and changed my methods slightly from one batch to the next and partly because I had not learned enough about cheese to know what caused the variations. If your cheese turns out moister or drier than you want, you can usually fix the problem by adjusting the size of the curds or the amount of time you wait before putting the curds into the molds.
When chèvre is so moist that it continues to drain for days after you take it out of the molds and put it into a storage container, try reducing the size of the pieces of curd. Read the section on cutting the curds for an explanation of how curd size affects moisture. You may be waiting too long to put the curd into molds. A lot of chèvre recipes suggest the amount of time is not important, but if you let the curd continue to sit in the whey after it has reached the clean break stage, it will reabsorb the whey, making the curd weaker, and you’ll have a very mushy cheese that doesn’t hold its shape when removed from the mold.
Raising Goats Naturally Page 29