As vegetarians we realize that we need to watch where we get our protein. For us, since we eat dairy and eggs, that's not too hard. What does make it tough is getting these items local. Fortunately, the Tucson CSA carries local eggs (some from backyard chickens right here in Tucson) from Josh's Foraging Fowls and during the summer and fall one can purchase shares of cheese from a goat farm (Black Mesa Ranch) up in snowflake. Both are excellent, far surpassing the eggs and cheese that you'll find in a typical grocery.
Once winter heads our way the cheese starts to taper off, so we have to revert back to ordinary (non-local) cheese from the store. That is until now.
First, let me talk about something that seems kind of unrelated, but trust me, it fits in. Several years ago we read Michael Pollans' book, The Omnivore's Dilemma and decided to start buying and eating local food; if you've read the book, especially the part about Polyface Farms you'll understand. Thanks to the Internet and the web site Local Harvest, we found the Tucson CSA and started getting most of our vegetables through our Farm Shares. Soon after we read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, where Barbara Kingsolver describe her families effort to eat local for a year. Part way through she talks about making cheese and visiting "Ricki, the cheese queen" to take a cheese-making course, blithely claiming it's easy to make cheese, and that anyone can do it. After a year or so, we make the plunge and order up a kit to make mozzarella and ricotta. Well, guess what, it is easy.
From start to finish it takes about 30 minutes to make fresh mozzarella cheese. It takes no special equipment other than a thermometer, and the only special ingredients are rennet, citric acid, and non-iodized salt, and all of that, including the thermometer is included in the kit. So now we have a source of very local cheese. Of course, we do need to work on the local milk. For the time being we are going with Shamrock Farms, which at least is nominally an Arizona dairy.
So how did it turn out? Just like mozzarella, only richer, less rubbery, and a bit milder that the stuff at the store. How much did we get? Well, a gallon of milk made about a pound of cheese. How can you get a kit? Order one from Ricki at www.cheesemaking.com or click the title of this post, or search for "cheese queen." Disclaimer: I get nothing if you click through, I offer the link up solely for your convenience.
4 comments:
Glad to hear you've had some success with the cheesemaking kit and Shamrock milk. I haven't been as successful (one success and 8 failures), but am kinda confused as I've received 3 different sets of directions-- one came with the kit, one is posted on cheesemaking.com, and one came from cheesemaking's tech support guru Jim. Any chance you could post what combination of temperatures/times, when you've added the citric acid and rennet, etc. works for you? Thanks, and cheers from the west side of Tucson--
Sorry to hear that you are having problems, but we just followed the instructions included in the kit. One thing we noted was that the curd did not solidify as much as we thought it would. It really remained as kind of a soupy mess, but you could definitely see that the curds and whey had separated. They were small curds, perhaps smaller than cottage cheese even, but once they were heated in the microwave it was obvious that everything was going to turn out.
I don't know if it mattered, but we did go with the organic shamrock farm milk.
The basic instructions we followed were add 1 tbs dissolved citric acid to milk. Heat to 90F. Add 1/4 tablet vegetable rennet. Let sit 5 minutes. Heat to 105F (we went to 110F). Separate curds from whey. Microwave curds 30sec. Knead/stretch until glossy.
The next time we make mozzarella, we are going to stir it much less with the hope that we don't break the curds up as much.
Thanks for the comment, and I hope this helps.
Thanks for the additional tips. The curds I've ended up with have been very small and so soft that any movement breaks them up into clouds. The one time I did have some success, I ended up letting them sit for about an hour (instead of the recommended 5 minutes). Even then they were soft. Anyway-- I'll give it another shot since now I *know* that success is possible with the milk out here. (I've heard some milks work and some just... don't.) Cheers.
Just yesterday we made another batch of mozzarella using the Shamrock Farms Organic whole milk (it was on sale at Fry's). I just barely stirred it while heating to 90F, and I used a 1/4 tablet of rennet even though it was only 3/4 gallon of milk. I don't know if it was reduced and very gentle stirring or what, but the curds turned out very well. We will be going with the minimal stirring technique from now on. It might also have to do with the freshness of the milk; we purchased it yesterday -- 19 Sept and it had an out date of 1 October, so it must have been recently placed in the coolers. You might want to try getting the freshest you can find.
After adding the rennet, we barely stirred while heating to 105F and that seemed to help the curds stay together.
Also, we have had some curds break up into the clouds of fine curds like you describe, but we were still able to make cheese from them. It was a bit harder to get them out of the whey, but once we started the microwave process, we could tell everything was going to turn out.
As you mention, some milk *won't* make cheese. Ricki says it can't be ultra pasteurized. We've talked with the people at Trader Joe's, they say their milk is NOT ultra pasteurized, and we know that Shamrock Farms organic works.
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