Adventures in Dairy

The four pillars of breakfast, as described by noted omeletologist Michael B. Hurwitz, are milk, butter, eggs and cheese. Take any one of these away, and your breakfast is likely to become unbalanced and fall down.

So it would seem that with a dairy cow and an egg hen, breakfast would always have four legs to stand on. But what does it take to make butter and cheese, I wondered.

Butter is pretty easy. Take some cream at around 60 degrees and beat it until you have a whole bunch of butter floating in buttermilk. You can use the buttermilk for biscuits or pancakes. The butter can be used immediately (hard to resist) or washed in cold water and salted to keep in the fridge. And that was yesterday's lunch.

Cheese, on the otherhand, is giving me some problems at the moment. I'm 24 hours into the process, and I've got a whole mess of collapsed curds and whey. I'm trying to drain them, but the curds are so fine that my cloth is clogging up terribly. I gave up on one of the strainers, put the curds in a bowl with a little salt, and I've got some pretty tasty cottage cheese for lunch.

The half gallon or so that wouldn't fit in my strainers I'm trying to salvage by going straight to ricotta with it. I heated it until near boiling, and in a few hours I should have some fine curds coming out of the mess.

The last strainer is looking pretty good, and the whey is dripping slowly, but clearly and cleanly. I might get a couple of ounces of cow's milk feta from it, which is what I aimed for with the whole gallon.

I might have cut the curd too soon, I might not have acidified the milk enough, it might be too cool in my apartment for yogurt to work as a starter. We'll see next time.

To be continued...