Cheese - Fine temperature control - double boiler

In my efforts to gain 120 new skills over the next 20 years, I have been so incredibly impressed, and utterly amazed at the generosity of everyone out there in internet land. It's as if all the world wants to do, is to help me on my quest to learn stuff.

Thanks internet.

Thanks all the world.

With some topics, I feel I've been able to contribute in some way to the body of knowledge. But in some, it's as if everything has been tried and tested, and then tried and tested again. It's as if the topic is sorted. Windmills spring to mind. No doubt there is still a lot to be done with windmills, but I suspect NASA might have more to do with it than someone like me.

I guess the age of the topic at hand has something to do with this. Aquaponics is probably always going to be easier to contribute to, than say, something like cheese making....

Cue dramatic music ........

I have something for cheese making.

There is this thing in the cooking world called a double boiler, and it's usefulness stems from the fact that water doesn't get hotter than 100c (boiling water) no matter what you do to it.

If you try to heat water hotter than it's boiling point, it cools itself by turning to steam and laughs right in your face.

"Ha ha!" It laughs.

What this means is you can stick a bowl over a pot of boiling or simmering water, and be sure you wont get temperatures any more extreme than 100c. In reality you are more likely to see temperatures in your bowl in the high 60c's.

But there are a few things you can do to get even more control.

And as usual if this isn't an original idea, I apologise, but as far as I know blah blah blah disclaimer etc etc etc ...

But it turns out, if you are trying to invent something completely unrelated, and take out everything from your kitchen cupboards, and spread it all out over the floor (again), sometimes you get some ideas. Some of them can even be good.

These ideas may not solve the problem you were hoping to solve, but may still be useful.

Cue dramatic music again........

Use a rice cooker. 

If you dont have one and you like to cook rice and are lucky enough to live the developed world, a rice cooker is a really good thing to have. 

It cooks rice.

Really well.

You should get one.

One of the cool things about a rice cooker is that it will cook your rice to perfection, then switch over to a "keep" mode, where it keeps it at a temperature hot enough to serve, but not so hot that it dries out. It can keep it at this nice temperature for 5 hours or something. Very convenient, as far as not needing to have good timing when feeding people.

Handy.

Even more handy if you want to control temperatures for making cheese or something.

The first thing you can do is put some water in a rice cooker, and set it on "keep", instead of cook. This will get you a device that holds a temperature of around 46c. Perhaps suitable for melting chocolate or something. I don't know. But it could be handy. After all I have another 110 or so things to learn, so I'm sure 46c will be something I need one day down the track. Yoghurt? mmm yogurt. What temperature do you need for yoghurt...   Stop distracting me yoghurt.

The next thing you can try is placing a bowl of something on top of the rice cooker on "keep". This will get you 43c or there abouts.

High temperature rice cooker double boiler

But then, and this is the bit I'm most proud of, you can add three tapered chopsticks in such a way as to make it so the bowl rests on them rather than the rim of the rice cooker. Just jam them in between the bowl and the rice cooker rim, one at a time, but spread out evenly around the bowl.

Low temperature rice cooker double boiler

You can then slide the chopstick in or out to adjust the gap between the rice cooker, and the bowl you are trying to gently heat. This allows for pretty much any temperature you desire. All you need is a thick enough chopstick for the gap/temperature you require and you get total control.

The bigger the gap, the cooler the bowl of stuff. Just force whatever you can find in there that gives you the correct gap, and thus the correct temperature.

You can also play around with the water depth.

If you don't have chopsticks, you can use the ones you buy tomorrow!

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)