A little dinner for Bastille Day

Just baked some no-knead bread. I had gone to the farmer's market yesterday for tomato and basil. So combine that with some nice spicy red wine and fresh mozzarella and that's a nice light summer dinner.

Lemon Cheese

Tonight a bunch of us got together for cheese-making fun at our friend's place. One friend made Irish soda bread while we hung out and watched from the bar stools on the other side (the kitchen space allows one person working at a time). Once that was in the oven we started tonight's recipe: "lemon cheese". It took a few hours, and the general process was to pour milk, lipase, and lemon juice into a huge pot, letting it come to temp and curdle, then strain it through cheesecloth for an hour. It comes out looking like ricotta or very soft cottage cheese. It went great with the warm soda bread!

Making Cheese

Today we went to a friend's place and made manchego cheese. It was SO much fun! It is a very precise artform, much more than I've experienced with baking. We brought the milk up to 86 degrees and had a thermometer to keep it hovering there while we added the starters, lipase and rennet. Then we had to raise the temperature 2 degrees every five minutes to another measure point. There was a lot of stirring, then we cut the curds, did more stirring, then strained the whey out through cheesecloth (my first actual application of CHEESE CLOTH) and put the curds into a press. After pressing at a certain amount of weight for the prescribed time, we flipped the curds (now in a tubular form) and pressed them again. At the end it gets an oil bath overnight. 

The whole process took about 6 hours with us having to do something every 5-30 minutes at first (during the pressing we had time to eat dinner and watch a movie). We didn't get to eat the one we made but instead (food show style) he popped a chunck of  homemeade colby out of the fridge and we tasted that. I was in HEAVEN. YUM! We boiled up the leftover whey and made ricotta and then gobbled that right up still warm out of the pan. 

This was a truly unique experience and I can't wait to do it again! There is another acquaintance who makes beer and bread. We're having a party very soon :)