I spent part of the day cutting cabbage for sauerkraut. I'm not real crazy about the canned stuff, but fresh sauerkraut is good stuff. And canned kraut is decent enough in a pinch and a good way to store excess cabbage from the garden.
I cut into a block of Leah's homemade raw milk chedder cheese today. The first couple of blocks we tried didn't taste good. I had blamed the failure on inconsistent curing room temperatures. But I wasn't sure.
We rigged up a freezer with a probe and an external thermostat. The block we cut today wasn't cured the whole time in the freezer, but it came out pretty good nonetheless. It had cured 70 days and was alreay what I would call semi-sharp. I'm a sharp chesse man myself, so it can't do anything but get better with time.
Both Leah and I breathed a sigh of relief. We have about a hundred pounds made and curing. It takes a minimum of sixty days for raw milk cheese to properly cure so if this hadn't worked we would have had a pile of worthless shit into which we had invested plenty of hours of time and effort, she more than I.
Halleluiah.
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I've had extra sharp raw milk cheddar and I loved it. I'm a cheese fanatic--this was some of the best I've ever had. Grill up a nice steak and make a cheese sauce out of it to drizzle on top, with some grilled portabello mushrooms...not much better than that.
ReplyDeleteYou got it...60 days is *minimum*...the cheese-heads say it should be good to go at 4 mos.
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