There's a recipe for 30-minute mozzarella in Barbara Kingslover's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle". And then I found a man selling rennet at the Farming Small Areas expo, and I sourced four litres of milk ...
... and have failed to make mozzarella yet, because I failed to source a cooking thermometer, and temperature's sort of vital (at least, until one has a good feel for what happens when, I suspect).
But I do appear to have made a perfectly OK ricotta ... and on the plus side, I have an excellent insight into how all these different cheeses came to be! Basically, once you've heated the milk and added the rennet, what results is curds and whey ... and when you remove curds from whey, you have cheese. The kind of cheese completely depends on what you added when and at what temperature, and what you do to it from this point onwards ... but it's still cheese.
Either that, or I have excellent beginner's luck. Because while it didn't make the nice solid curds I was expecting, the little grainy lumps, when drained of whey and hung in cloth for an hour or so, are perfectly edible. No nasty flavour (*phew* for all that cleaning and scalding I did of everything beforehand!). Dry, bland, nothing I'd spread on a cracker right now - but it tastes like cheese.
My sister recommended a large infusion of chopped herbs and salt and turning into spanokopita (Greek cheese and spinach pie, essentially). This shall occur this evening, with some substitutes - warrigal greens for the spinach (there's my bushtucker component!), and a lot more herbs and salt than the usual recipes call for, because it really IS bland.
And as I only need half of what turned up, I'll do the other half of the mozzarella recipe ANYway and see what occurrs. At worst, I'll end up with a ... well ... cheesy sticky mess. And if I won't eat it, the chooks will, so it becomes dinner in some way or another anyway :)
Note: cooking cheese is the limit of my food inspiration right now. I've got all these seedlings and forestry tubes awaiting transplanting, and I appear to have run out of energy to put them in the ground, dammit. Maybe when I finally get the last part of the irrigation equation together, I'll be motivated.
In the meantime, the greenhouse beans are producing lovely flat green and purple pods, which we're eating raw and by the handful. One of these days I'll produce enough to actually _cook_ ... until then, it's a snack or salad veggie!
And the reducrrants are fruiting already - we've netted just in time!! I don't think we'll get bucketsful from these either, but handsful will do me ...
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