Thursday 28 February 2013

Cheese Making

For all of our budding cheesemakers! this is a fab blog.

Cheddar

Ingredients:

10 litres Gold Top Jersey whole milk
5ml vegetarian rennet
DVI starter

Gold Top milk

Heating milk

Heat milk to 21C, add the DVI starter, and leave for 45 minutes.
Heat to 30C and add rennet diluted in plenty of boiled and cooled water.

Cutting the curd

Leave for around an hour until curd is ready, then cut into 1cm slices.

Scalded curd

Heat to 40C over the course of 45 minutes, stirring gently by hand.

Draining the curd

Drain the curd using cheesecloth or muslin, and leave to consolidate into a single mass.

Further draining

Once the majority of the whey has drained from the curd, place on a tray and leave to rest for half an hour.

Consolidated curd

Sliced consolidated curd

Curd stacking

Slice the consolidated curd into strips about a centimetre thick, and place on top of each other in cheesecloth and leave to drain for 15 minutes.
Re-stack the slices with the inner slices becoming the outer, and leave for another 15 minutes.

Gas holes after stacking

This stacking is to allow gas inside the curd to escape, as well as draining more whey from the curd.

Milling the curd

Slice the curd into small pieces and mix in some salt.

Packing the curd

Pack the curd into a cheesecloth-lined mould, and press lightly (around 7kg) for 1 hour.

After pressing

Increase pressure to around 14kg and leave for 24 hours.

After a hot bath

Dip in hot water at 66C for a minute to smooth the rind, then allow to dry at room temperature.
Wrap loosely in muslin and place in a cool (8-10C) dry place, and turn daily for 3+ months.
Still got over a month to wait to taste this one, but the smell is amazing already!

Source: http://handyface.wordpress.com/

How to make cotechino sausage

This is my friend Scott. He likes a good sausage. So does his partner Giovani.

Lucky for me, the two men are particularly fond of cotechino, a highly seasoned Italian variety most often served with lentils to celebrate the New Year. Since I had decided to manufacture my very own cotechino this past holiday, it was easy to put the arm on my very tasteful buds so as to secure at least one additional set of hands to complete the task.

The guy in the picture is the one whose helping hands were offered to me. The other one? He fled to the nearest hot yoga studio for nearly the entire morning that we were scheduled to work (though he did at least have the decency to treat us to a lovely lunch).

Men!

This, by the way, is your traditional presentation of cotechino. It is exactly what I served for New Year's day brunch last week and, according to Italian lore, should bring good luck to me and my guests through the coming year. Finding cotechino is not so easy in the United States, regardless of where you live, and so ask your local Italian specialty store about getting some in or search for it online.

You didn't really think that we'd made enough for everybody, did you?

This is the mixture of ground meat (6 pounds of it) and spices that we used. Cotechino is very different from other sausages; the meat mixture is about 40 percent pork, 30 percent pork fat, and 30 percent pork skin. The skin is very difficult to grind using non-commercial equipment and so Jarrod, butcher par excellence at Rosemont Market here in town, offered to custom grind a mix for us. The seasonings we then used are traditional, if haphazardly measured: 3 minced garlic cloves, 4 tablespoons kosher salt, 3 tablespoons cracked black pepper, 2 teaspoons nutmeg, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, 3 teaspoons cayenne, 2 teaspoons clove, and a scant quarter-teaspoon of pink salt for curing.

Scott was rather insistent that he work with the meat mixture, I don't know why, and it being his place where the sausage-manufactuting commenced I chose not to argue this point.

These being large sausage, roughly a pound each, we opted to make one at a time rather than attempt to link them all together. For a more traditional link sausage-making primer go to this link.

Using pink salt in the mix meant that we could allow the finished sausage to hang in a cool place and cure for 24 hours. My friends' basement was in the 55- to 60-degree range and so that's where the curing took place. With only two cotechino needed for New Year's (one for my friends, another for my guests and I) we froze the other four. (Yes, Fred, you may have one of them. But you'll need to get in the car and drive north.)

Fresh cotechino that has curing salt should soak in cool water before cooking; this helps to remove the salt. New Year's Day brunch was scheduled for around oneish and so I started soaking our sausage around 7 a.m., occasionally changing the water.

Cotechino is boiled at low- to moderate heat, and for varying degres of time, depending on the product you have. This one would take around 90 minutes, Jarrod the Wonder Butcher reasoned, and so at around 11 a.m. the sausage went into a pot of plain water.

At around noon I got the lentil prep going. First I sauteed 2 garlic cloves, 2 finely diced carrots, a celery stalk, a large onion and a hot pepper in olive oil until softened.

Then came a quart of chicken stock, a bay leaf and lentils. (The night before I'd soaked 1 1/4 cups of Italian lentils, which turned into 4 cups after soaking overnight. Of that I used three cups in this recipe.)

When the sausage and lentils were pretty much done I added the cotechino to the pan so that everything could simmer together at low heat for around 15 minutes.

Some people pierce the sausage casing during cooking, but I don't. That means there is liquified fat inside the cooked sausage, which you can either add to the lentils or discard, which is what I did.

All that's left to do now is remove the sausage from the casing, slice, and arrange over the lentils in a serving dish.

If this doesn't bring you good luck I really do not know what will.

Source: mistermeatball.blogspot.co.uk/

Tuesday 26 February 2013

Homemade ricotta salata

So I'm in the middle of making a batch of fresh ricotta (that would be the same fresh ricotta that was scheduled to wind up being my famous cheese gnocchi) when the call comes in that scraps the entire evening's plans.

I am not a vengeful man. And so rather than driving to the caller's house after dark and plastering the front door with a good thick layer of formaggio, I decided to go in another direction and whip up a batch of ricotta salata, the salted and dried version of my beloved cheese. (I arrived at this decision after a long and painful discussion with an overly persistent frequent traveler friend of mine who tried to browbeat me into frying the ricotta as they do at Matricianella in Rome. It is a dish, he insists, "that makes life worth living.")

To make the ricotta, start out with a gallon of whole milk in a non-reactive pot, then gently stir in six tablespoons of distilled white vinegar. Turn the heat on very low; this means it will take a long time for the milk to heat, but it's better that way. Stir occasionally and gently until the temperature reaches around 190 degrees F.

Turn off the heat and start scooping.

A cheesecloth-lined colander does the trick.

At this point you're all set if all you want is fresh ricotta; the only thing left to do would be to salt it to taste and let it drain a little while.

To make the ricotta salata, though, the cheese must be drained further. I tied the cheesecloth with string and hung it from the kitchen faucet.

After about an hour the cheese had sufficiently dried.

At this point you add about a tablespoon of kosher salt and mix with a spoon.

Then it's time to pack the cheese into a mold with drainage. I used these tins that I saved from fresh store-bought ricotta.

Weight it down for another hour, occasionally applying pressure to get out as much moisture as possible.

After popping the cheese out of the mold, all that's left to do is apply more salt. Very lightly sprinkle kosher salt all over the cheese once a day for about a week, keeping it covered in the fridge the whole time. More moisture will seep out of the cheese during this time, so keep draining it off. After you're done salting, keep the cheese covered in the fridge for another week or two and that ought to do it.

Just one other thing. If the cheese winds up too salty (as this one did) I place it in a bowl filled with water and allow the salt to leech out for as long as it takes to suit my taste. This batch soaked for about 24 hours, and I changed the water three times.

Then my friend Gloede showed up and sprinkled some of the ricotta salata on a caramelized onion and prosciutto pizza he was making in my wood-fired oven.

And I forgot all about the guests who did not come for my gnocchi dinner.

Source: http://mistermeatball.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2010-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&updated-max=2011-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&max-results=50

Hay for Sale

Excellent quality barn stored hay for sale.

£4.50 a bale, collection from Fambridge.

Price negotiable on quantity

Contact Danni

07854595640 or Danielle.Perkins@yahoo.co.uk

Breaking News - Piglets Born

BRITIANS RAREST PIG INCREASES IN NUMBERS

British lops, Britians' rarest Native Breed of pig have increased in numbers in Stisted on a members smallholding. 2 Gilts ( First time Mums) have had significant litters just a week apart. The first to farrow Goosetree Sunshine is rearing 10 piglets born on Sunday February 17 and in the next door stable Stisted Pride, a home bred gilt, is rearing 11 born on Monday February 25.

Each litter was sired by a different boar to maintain as much genetic diversity as possible in this rarest of rare breed pigs. Each was mated 3 months 3 weeks and 3 days prior to farrowing.

It is too early to tell if any will go on to be used for breeding but any not used for breeding go on to produce high quality traceable pork for local specialist outlets. The piglets are allowed to suckle much longer than in more commercial herds and will gradually be introduced to feed produced by Essex millers Marriages. They are reared slowly on traditional rations before going a short distance to one of the few small local slaughter houses left in Essex at Ranks Green.