Expectations

One of my current cooking goals is to make all my family's "convenience food". The snacks, the frozen dinners, the stuff you grab when you need something quick and easy. Making them myself is healthier, cheaper, and one more way for us to stop supporting the industrial food system that makes me cringe.

I figured I'd start with the easy stuff, like crackers and granola bars. Today I made multi-seed crackers from one of my favorite baking books.....

King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking

Finding the time and energy to make these delicious snacks has not been the hard part. Its surprising how much of the week's baking you can get done in one short afternoon. What has surprised me is how much my expectations of what food should look and taste like has been shaped by the boxed foods available at the market. I feel like if all my crackers are not a perfectly uniform shape, size, and color, I must have done something wrong.

This is not what crackers from a box look like....


Granted, appearances, taste, and texture will improve with more practice. But really, these crackers are delicious. More and more I am realizing that making your own food from scratch requires a rethinking of what exactly real food is.

PS. My new favorite thing to eat on crackers, toast, sandwiches, right out of the container, is homemade yogurt cheese. Its like a very tangy cream cheese. This is fool-proof.

Yogurt Cheese

1. Start with plain yogurt, either full or low fat works. I haven't tried non-fat, but it probably would work to.
   
2. Scoop the desired amount into a piece of butter muslin or very-fine weave cheese cloth. About 2 cups is usually enough for the week for my family.
3. Tie up the corners and hang the bag with the yogurt over the sink or a bowl for 12-24 hrs.
   
4. Remove from the cheese cloth and enjoy! Refrigerate.
5. Be creative, add any herb combination that strikes your fancy.
   

Try, Try Again

This week Tyler and I made our first attempt at cheese. A long time ago we made some yogurt cheese, which required no effort and was delicious. So how hard could more advanced cheeses be? My family eats LOTS of cheese, but I really hate the block cheese you typically find in the store. Its not even really cheese, its "cheese product", whatever that is. So homemade cheese sounds delicious and like a fun food endeavor. Well, I'm sure it will be. Once we figure out how to do it.

In our typical approach to many projects, we went straight for one of the more difficult cheeses to master, fresh mozzarella. There are endless u-tube videos, online blogs, and cookbook recipes that lead you to believe making fresh mozzarella is effortless. It apparently requires some practice. Lets just say, our first batch was just so-so and our second batch was a complete waste of milk.

It started off so well. I diligently got all the necessary equipment set-up....



The curds separated from the whey as promised...


At this point we began to suspect something might be wrong....


Here are the separated curds and whey. The curds are what get made into cheese.


Mozzarella curds are supposed to hold together as you heat them and mold them into a stretchy, shiny, smooth ball. Despite our best efforts, ours stayed the consistency of thick cottage cheese.

I blame the milk. Cheese is best made with raw milk. Very few states allow the sale of raw milk for human consumption, which is ridiculous. Pasteurization certainly makes milk safer when it is produced, bottled, and marketed in mass quantities. But you should still be able to opt for the more nutritious and tasty (and perfectly safe) raw milk if you choose. Ultra-pasteurization destroys milk and is only useful for extending shelf life. Pasteurized milk can be used in homemade cheese, but it makes it more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get the curds to set properly. I'm currently looking into finding some affordable raw milk from a local farm. Until then, we just have to experiment with different techniques and additives to make pasteurized milk work.

With no fresh mozzarella to show for all our efforts, I attempted something a little more fool-proof.

A gallon of milk and 1/4 apple cider vinegar quickly turns into a yummy queso blanco.

Queso blanco is a very mild, almost bland South American cheese. It has the unique property of not melting. I had every intention of taking pictures of the finished product, but after frying it up and tossing it on some sweet potato tacos, it was gone before I got the chance.


A byproduct of making cheese is the whey.

Whey itself can be made into cheese, the easiest being ricotta. We have had some success with this. Apparently people also feed it to their livestock and drink it themselves. Drinking whey really doesn't appeal to us. However, it is a tasty, nutritious substitute for water in cooking and baking. I now cook our morning oatmeal in whey, which gives it a subtle nutty flavor and very creamy texture. I also used it to make tortillas for last night's dinner with good results. These little success are keeping us going, so stayed tuned for future adventures in homemade cheese!



Just in case I have mislead you into thinking I work in a beautiful gourmet kitchen free from distractions....