Home made cheese - Haloumi and zucchini fritters

Here's an excellent thing you can do with your home made haloumi.

Grate 300g of zucchini, and squish out as much liquid as you can.

Drop it into a bowl with a grated onion, 250g of grated home made haloumi, 1/2 cup of plain flour, 2 teaspoons of grated lemon rind, 2 eggs, and a tablespoon of fresh dill.

Add salt and pepper to taste, and roll into balls.

It's a good idea to chill them in the fridge for an hour to make them hold together, but that's optional.

Shallow fry them in some olive oil pressing them flat once they hit the pan, flipping to get even golden-ness.

Let them sit for a bit on some paper towels, and serve them with aioli for a truly awesome taste that will be very popular with young and old.

They're great hot or cold, and originally the recipe came from taste.com.au

Totally worthwhile.







120 Things in 20 years - Representing an excellent reason to get into making some home made haloumi.

Cheese - Temperature control 33c

Is it just me, or does everyone constantly place thermometers all over the house, probing for suitable places to make cheese?

Last year, a good friend and bee whisperer, took pity on the quality of the coffee served at our house, and gifted Mrs 120ThingsIn20Years an espresso machine.

This was an unfortunate development, because now, no matter what, we always have to have one.

But I discovered, aside from making perfect coffee,  it also makes for the perfect place to keep a small cheese making venture at 33c.

The only difficult thing about making my totally successful bovine variety of haloumi, was keeping the temperature at around 30c.

Not that it was all that difficult to do, but it was the most difficult bit among a stack of easy things.

Our (see me claim ownership) little espresso machine has a plate on top that is warm whenever it's switched on. I'm guessing its to keep cups warm. You would have to drink a lot of coffee to leave the thing switched on, and because we try to maintain sanity, we don't use it.

As a result, it's always available for cheese making.

Thanks espresso machine.

Thanks Buzzy.

Cheese - So far

So far, I get the feeling its relatively easy to make cheese, it's just difficult to make a particular cheese.

I also get the feeling my cheese making will be seen to have failed two months down the track when I taste it. So it's important to take my cheese making history into account when reading everything I have to offer on cheese. That bit's worth reading twice.

Almost all the research I have done points to really only a few steps to making cheese. Almost all the cheeses have these steps. Sometimes not all the steps, and occasionally in a slightly different order.

• starting a culture 
• acidification
• setting the curd
• heat treating the curds
• separating the curds from the whey
• pressing the curds
• aging the cheese
• eating the cheese

There some obvious exceptions to these, say, in the case of the fresh cheeses that are eaten before aging, and might not be pressed. Or even in the case of haloumi where the final process might be to fry it. Mozzarella is another exception where there is a cooking and pulling stage. I might have to make mozzerella, it looks like fun. Then there are cheeses that are dosed with mold as in the case of the blue vein cheeses. But even those cheeses are made with many of the basic steps shown in the bullet list.  

Each different variety of cheese may be only due to a tiny change in the temperature, or a small difference in the amount of pressure used to press it. Some cheese even has two faces, in that it can be eaten as a table cheese in its first few months of aging, and then goes on to be a hard cheese suitable for grating and cooking with as it ages a year or more. 

Making cheese to be aged takes a lot of preparation, a lot of time, and, if you are anything like me, every dish, pan, and kitchen surface you have in your home. It also requires some specialist equipment. Making cheese to be aged for a few months has so far been an extremely interesting, and fun thing do, and I'll definitely do it again once I equip myself better. Then there is also the issue of storage. Where does one store one's cheese for up to a year at 12 deg C and 85% humidity?

My recomendation to the novice would be to make my fabulously successful haloumi.

• It worked well.
• It tasted better than anything I've ever eaten in the whole wide world.
• It was easy to make.
• It was easy to make the second time (although quite different)
• It was good value for money.
• It was relatively child friendly in that it, for the most part, it needed low temperatures.
• It could be eaten within hours or starting the project, meaning you get to see if it worked right away, and you don't need a storage facility to protect it through it's aging process, and any children involved will not have grown up and moved out before its tasting time. 

If you try it, you will make it again, and again, and it will become an heirloom dish for your family. I promise!

Cheese - Fired haloumi

An unqualified success! I did make cheese. In fact I made a cow's milk version of haloumi.

Fresh (cow's milk) haloumi looks like this...

After running it through a menu that went something like this...

Pan fried bovine haloumi in garlic and fennel seed infused Italian olive oil with pistachio nuts, shallot, mushroom and tomato, on a bed of baby spinach with fresh cracked black pepper and a drizzle of lemon juice.

and it looked something like this...

And it was good. I would have been quite happy had I been served it in a restaurant. The only thing that could have made it better was to share it.

And I did...

I throughly recommend you give homemade haloumi a go. For the most part, the temperatures are all child friendly, so get some kids involved. It was much easier than I expected and I can't see much that could go wrong.

Total cost to make the cheese in Australian dollars was $4.39 in un-homogenized milk and a few cents worth of rennet.

Total time was around 3 hours. But with only a few minutes actual work. It's also worth noting that a larger batch would take no longer to prepare. I can see no problem with freezing this cheese.

I will definitely be making this cheese again and again.

Lastly I think I read somewhere that traditionally its stored in mint leaves. True or not, I put some mint into the container of cheese and it successfully imparts a subtle mint flavour that compliments the cheese nicely. I've also had it cooked with fennel leaves to excellent effect.

Cheese - Haloumi and ricotta

I think I just made cheese!                                                                  [see the full haloumi story]

Haloumi is made with goat or sheep milk, but not in my house. All I have is cow's milk. It's also interesting in that you can fry it. I think you can even deep fry it.

After reading a stack of different recipes I've settled on a cross between an average of them all, and the limitations of my abilities and equipment.

First I made a double boiler to make the heating process gentle. I started by putting a cake cooling rack into a large fryingpan. Next I drowned a large saucepan about half filled with two litres of pasteurized, but not homogenized milk. I brought the milk to around 30 °C (the water in the frying pan was sitting at around 55 °C). Then I added around 7 drops of my vegetarian rennet.

After sitting at mostly 28-30 °C (fluctuating between 32 °C and 27 °C) for one hour, I was utterly surprised to find I had set the curd.

I cut the curd (lumpy stuff) into 1 cm cubes 

I then stirred it for around 25 minutes at around 40 °C.

I collected it into a sieve.

Then placed it onto a piece of cotton cloth in a colander

I added a weight to press it (5 litres of water in milk bottles), and left for a half hour or so to squish out much of the remaining whey.

Leaving that aside, squishing, I brought the whey up to the boil (around 88 °C) and added a teaspoon of salt and about 3 table spoons of vinegar.

This curdles the whey into ricotta!

I poured it through a sieve lined with a cotton cloth to collect the cheese.

Ricotta can be eaten right away and it tastes great, but I'm going to take it to a dinner party I've been invited to tonight and see what less biased people think. In fact I think I'll take some haloumi as well.

That being done and my ricotta put in a tub and refrigerated, the next step is to unwrap the haloumi ...

and cut it into smaller sections...

then add it back to the simmering whey to cook for a half hour or so.

I see my haloumi has floated to the top of the whey. I'm not sure what that means so I'm frantically researching.


CONCLUSION: I don't think it means anything.

the end result from my 2 litres of milk was...


90 g ricotta (tastes like ricotta!)

280 g haloumi (no idea yet)