Daring Cooks: Let's Get Cheesy

Last months challenge was to make cured meat or sausages and it was kind of unique in that it we actually had "winners" of the challenge.  Well I am very excited that I won with my sausages and just received my prize - a copy of Salumi: The Craft of Italian Dry Curing by Michael Ruhlman.  It looks like a beautiful book and some day I will manage to try some of the cured meats in there.  If you want to check out the sausages I made you can see them here.

Now on to this month.  Sawsan from chef in disguise was our March 2013 Daring Cooks hostess! Sawsan challenges us to make our own homemade cheeses! She gave us a variety of choices to make, all of them easily accomplished and delicious!

Just a month or two ago Lis (Founder of The Daring Kitchen) asked me if I wanted to host a challenge.  Well I had just bought a book on cheese-making and wanted to try a bunch of them out so I told her I would do a challenge on cheese-making.  Well, surprise-surprise, someone was already doing cheese-making next month.  I was very excited.  You will just have to wait until later this year to see what I come up with for my challenge :)

There were so many cheeses I wanted to try from my book but I had to restrain myself some.  For one thing I was taking a 10 day vacation in March so I would have a short month.  Also, many of the cheeses I wanted to try were more difficult so I forced myself to start with some simple to intermediate cheeses.  I settled on a ricotta and a mozzarella.  The ricotta is considered an easy cheese and mozzarella would be an intermediate cheese.  

For some reason I decided to start with the harder of the two, the mozzarella.  I was going to make two batches.  I bought all my supplies at a local home-brewing supply store.  The quality of the milk can matter a lot for cheese but I decided to use just grocery store pasteurized / homogenized whole milk.  My first batch was kind of a disaster.  It didn't really clump together properly and then to make matters worse I managed to over-salt it.

Good thing I was planning to make two batches - at least I could get one.  For the second I watched some online videos to see what everything was supposed to look like so I would know what I was doing a little more.  Well the second batch was much better.  The mozzarella was not the easiest.     The recipes have two very exact temps to hit and maintain - not sure how exact it really has to be but I didn't want to test it too much.  The mozzarella also needs to be melted and stretched - this is a messy job.  In the end it looked and tasted like fresh mozzarella though so I was happy.

The ricotta was much easier.  You just add an acid to milk and heat it - ten drain in some cheese cloth.  Both cheeses gave me about a pound from a gallon of milk - I was kind of amazed you could get that much solid cheese from a gallon of liquid.

I ended up making some lasagna from the result.  I had never used fresh mozzarella in a lasagna but I just sliced the cheese instead of shredding it and it worked great.  Taste-wise the lasagna was much richer, mostly from the ricotta I think.  I am not really sure if it was because the ricotta was fresh or just that it was a very high fat ricotta where I would normally use a part-skim ricotta in my lasagna.

I really enjoyed the challenge and look forward to trying some of the more advanced cheeses in the book I bought.  If you are interested all the recipes I used were from that book - Artisan Cheese Making at Home: Techniques & Recipes for Mastering World-Class Cheeses.

Daring Bakers: Letting Nature Do The Work

Our Daring Bakers Host for December 2011 was Jessica of My Recipe Project and she showed us how fun it is to create Sour Dough bread in our own kitchens! She provided us with Sour Dough recipes from Bread Matters by AndrewWhitley as well as delicious recipes to use our Sour Dough bread in from Tonia George’s Things on Toast and Canteen’s Great British Food!

I was a little disappointed when I first saw this months challenge.  I think I was expecting something a little more in tune with the holidays like last years Christmas Stollen.  Well I shouldn't have been disappointed since I have really had enough Christmas snacks to last me a year and this challenge was a lot of fun.

I probably first got into making sour dough when I was in high school.  Probably mostly just because it was fun and interesting - kind of half cooking and half science project.  I don't think I have made it sense then.  I don't really ever really remember making a sour dough bread I liked but I do like good sourdough that others make. Well this was my chance to give it another shot.

I decided to follow Jessica's recipe for the French Country Bread using the wheat starter.  I didn't have a good warm spot for the starter - not easy to find anywhere warm in Minnesota in December.  Because of that I took a little extra time letting the starter grow but in the end it looked and smelled just as it should - lots of bubbles and yeasty smell.  For flour I used King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour.  Everything seemed to be going great with the bread until I needed to turn it out on the pan.  At this point it seemed to flatten out a lot - not sure if I did anything wrong but it wasn't as high as I wanted it.  I was worried that it was going to be a rock but it actually turned out great.  It was not nearly as dense as I was worried and it tasted fantastic.  It is definitely the best sour dough I have made.  I could have eaten the whole load but I needed some of the loaf for the second part of the challenge.  

Yes - this was a two part challenge.  Not only did we have to make a sourdough starter and bread - we also had to feature the bread in another recipe.  I had some different ideas for what to do but these were dashed when the loaf came out so flat.  I decided to try another of Jessica's provided recipes - Welsh Rarebit.  I have made this before but not well.  This time it was made with the excellent sourdough bread and I picked up some decent Tillamook Sharp Cheddar.  The cheese sauce was delicious.  All we needed for supper was the cheese sauce on toast and a small salad.  It was surprisingly satisfying.

Thanks to Jessica for allowing me to try out sourdough again - it was a lot of fun.  If you would like to try the sourdough or the Welsh Rarebit please check out the Daring Bakers recipe archive - you won't be disappointed.