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)
