Making Sense of Things

Posts tagged with How to

• 17 February 2012 - How to make mozzarella at home

  You might remember this post from the New England Cheese Making Supply Company… they liked our ‘How to make brie cheese at home’ post so much they posted it on their site and sent us a Mozzarella & Ricotta kit.  We were so excited to try another type of cheese at home so this post is how we made it. The great thing about making mozzarella is that it’s quite simple, fairly quick and you can eat it straight away!

  

  The following instructions are essentially from the New England Cheese Making Supply Company, with our own notes and experiences added. They have an excellent website for trouble shooting, www.cheesemaking.com, and even have a cheese tech, who can be contacted through their ‘contact us’ page to answer your questions. Check out this page for extra information though. Their kit definitely makes things easy too as it comes with … Read the rest

• 12 February 2012 - How to make sauerkraut and cultured vegetables at home

  Recently we’ve tried making our own sauerkraut. It’s so incredibly easy and healthy that it seemed silly not to try and of course, share it with you! This post shares two methods – with salt and with whey. The kefir whey version is quicker to ferment and ready for eating.

  What is Sauerkraut?

  Sauerkraut literally means ‘sour cabbage’ in German – it is naturally fermented thinly sliced cabbage. It has a distinctive tangy flavour and is often used on hot dogs, as a condiment to meals but also much more… as an ingredient in soups, salads and sandwiches too, for example.

  Its flavour and preservation is a result of lactic acid that forms when the bacteria, the cabbage’s natural flora, ferment the sugars in the juice that is extracted from the cabbage by adding salt. You may remember the lactic acid explanation when we fermented butter too!

  There are many … Read the rest

• 3 February 2012 - How to make kefir cheese

  Since we’ve been loving our kefir nearly daily at the moment, I thought we should take a small step further to make something other than smoothies from it. When I started looking online I was amazed by the variety of recipes using kefir as an ingredient – cheese, ice-cream, sourdough bread, cookies, pancakes, pizza bases, soups and more. So, one step at a time! I decided to take a very small step indeed to make a very simple type of kefir cheese.

  Now, this cheese isn’t a hard cheese… but its not quite like cottage cheese either. I really like Dom’s description that the flavour and texture is similar to quark, or the condensed yoghurt-type curd, labneh. It’s very smooth and creamy. We ate loads of this delicious cheese when we were in Jordan and Palestine recently so it seemed perfect to make a kefir version.

  How do you make … Read the rest

• 29 January 2012 - How to make muesli, granola, cereal… or whatever you want to call it!

  When Jean eats a bowl of cereal from a standard pack of muesli, nearly half the pack is gone! He’s a hungry man! It’s expensive, contains hardly any of those cashews advertised so prominently on the label and often has a heap of sugar added too! So, a few years ago I decided to make our cereal weekly at home. Now, we really miss it when we are travelling and feel we don’t get a proper start to the day without it. More importantly, what Jean realised is that no matter how high-fiber/high-protein the store bought cereal was, it wouldn’t really keep him full for very long and he’d need a snack mid morning. With our own cereal he isn’t hungry until lunch time.

  

  This way we can get all the proportions of nuts, seeds and fruit we want (no skimping!!) without any added sugar. It’s just so easy, so delicious … Read the rest

• 23 January 2012 - How to make kefir at home

  When we were doing our cheese making course back in 2010, Elisabeth Fekonia gave us some kefir grains to take home.  So we’ve been using these friendly microorganisms and yeasts to help balance our inner ecosystem and supply complete protein, essential minerals and vitamins B12, B1 and C. It is also an excellent source of biotin, which helps the assimilation and absorption of other B vitamins from the body.

  Kefir has all the great health benefits of yoghurt and more, because whilst yoghurt works through a bacterial conversion of the milk sugars, kefir uses both bacterial and yeast actions! Kefir is full of probiotics while the calcium, magnesium and phosphorous from the milk is maintained for proper growth of cells and for maintenance of the body and abundant energy. As mentioned above, it is easy to digest because the yeast in the grains feed on the lactose in the milk! … Read the rest

• 14 November 2011 - Talking rubbish – Turning trash into treasure

  Here at Bustan Qaraaqa they don’t simply sort their recycling, compost their vegetable scraps and put out the rubbish to be collected weekly – they take REDUCE, REUSE and RECYCLE to a whole new level. With no municipal waste management in Palestine, they have adopted a policy of ‘what comes on site, stays on site’, often collecting other peoples waste too! Using permaculture, creativity, knowledge and passion they educate and demonstrate by living sustainably themselves and maintaining a philosophy that there is no such thing as waste - just a failure of imagination. They hope to inspire Palestinians to stop throwing their rubbish down hillsides or burning it on the side of the road and for foreign guests to understand their role in the waste cycle too. What would you do if your council didn’t collect your waste? How would you consume differently? What would you do with your rubbish?

  This … Read the rest

• 24 January 2011 - How to make cottage cheese at home

  In addition to butter, yoghurt and brie, we’ve loved making cottage cheese at home too. It’s so easy we almost don’t want to tell people.  We normally use 2L of Cleopatra’s raw cow’s milk, removing the cream and putting it aside to make our butter.  To remove the cream simply leave your milk standing upright in the fridge so the cream can naturally separate from the milk – you will see a definite line.  Once separated, just make a small hole at the bottom of the bottle, take the lid off the top of the bottle and let the milk drain from the hole in to a separate jar.  When it has drained to the cream line, pour the cream into another container.

  We simply pour the skimmed milk in to our large glass jar and allow it to curdle at room temperature for a maximum of 5 … Read the rest

• 13 January 2011 - How to make yoghurt at home

  Yoghurt is our weekly must make product.  We usually use 2L of Cleopatra’s raw cow’s milk (including the cream on top), heat it to 85° C then let it cool to 43° C. Since raw milk is illegal to sell for consumption in Australia, Cleopatra’s raw milk is sold as Bath Milk, for cosmetic purposes only… but if you aren’t “brave” enough to use raw milk or can’t get a hold of it, just buy some organic pasteurised unhomogenised milk (see the UPDATE at the end of this post for more information).

  

  We then add 2 grains of the yoghurt culture… we got ours from cheeselinks.com and chose the type below but you can find other types elsewhere too… (you can also use a few tablespoons of a good quality store bought yoghurt instead, see the UPDATE at the end of this post).

  

  … and incubate it overnight at around … Read the rest

• 5 January 2011 - How to make butter at home

  We love our cultured butter!  And actually it’s really easy to make!

  We simply ferment some fresh raw cream (off the top of our raw milk) by leaving the cream on the kitchen bench until little bubbles start to form – around 24-48 hours. The lactobaccilis bulgaricus bacteria that’s naturally found in the cow will induce the ferment.  You can’t really see the bubbles in this picture because they are pin head size!

  

  Once the cream is fermented, we put it in the fridge as it’s easier to work with when cool.  Once cool we simply whiz it with a cake mixer (a food processor would be easier but we don’t have one) until the cream turns to butter and separates from the buttermilk.

  

  Then we strain the butter from the buttermilk…

  

  Then we wash it 3 times in bowls of cool water until the water runs clear, to remove … Read the rest

• 21 December 2010 - How to make brie cheese at home

  Recently we’ve been making a fair bit of brie cheese.  We’ve been using the Cleopatra’s raw cow’s milk (including the cream on top!).   4L makes 3 good size brie cheese wheels. We simply heat the milk up to 32°C in a big sterilised pot, add in a mesophilic starter (the culture), the penicillum candidum (this is the white mould that grows on the outside) and the rennet, stirring in an 8 shape for around 2 minutes.  Then we leave it, off the heat, for around 45 minutes.

  When we have returned to the pot the milk has set so we cut it with a knife in to cubes which are then ladled in to our cheese moulds (basically food grade plastic tubes with holes in them).  We put the moulds on top of upside down plates, in a tray so that the whey can drip out of the holes and … Read the rest