Oregon Cheese Festival

I we be making the trip down to Central Point, Oregon this weekend to attend the Sixth Annual Oregon Cheese Festival. I'm looking forward to meeting all of the cheesemakers and trying avoid the cheese overload I experienced at the Wedge last October by carefully rationing the amount I sample.

If you see a guy walking around with a fancy camera and microphone trying to make it to every booth, come up and say hi!

"Without getting super technical, can you tell me how you make cheese?"

Recently my wife and I took our two year old daughter to our local wine shop for a Friday night tasting. No, we did not give our daughter wine, but we did bring some of my homemade blue cheese, which she loves, to keep her content while we tasted a Portuguese wine flight. Our server was intrigued and asked for a sample of my cheese, which I was more than happy to show off. After at least saying she liked the cheese, she asked me, "So without going into all of the details, tell me how do you make cheese?"

I tried, but I did not really do a good job. I gave too many details of the process that I know too well, and I am sure it was too much information for someone who merely knows that cheese comes from milk and just wants to know a little bit more. I disappointed myself because answering a question like this in a simple manner is something I should be able to do. So I resolved to do better next time and decided to write a "how you make cheese" elevator pitch that I can spew in 2 minutes or less. Here it goes:

"Making cheese is the process of turning liquid milk into a solid (or semi-solid) by trapping the milk solids and extracting a large portion of the water. Although there are as many variations on the method as there are types of cheese, in general bacteria and rennet are added and cause some of the proteins to coagulate into something that resembles gelatin. In fact, the proteins in gelatin trap liquid just like the milk proteins do. The coagulated milk is cut into pieces which are called curds. The curds weep a clear liquid, called whey, similar to firm yogurt weeping liquid to fill in the hole left by a spoon. Curds and whey are exactly what Miss Muffet ate while sitting on her tuffet. When heated or stirred the curds release more whey, then they are separated by pouring through cheesecloth or some sort of sieve. The curds are formed into the final shape of the cheese. Often the curds are pressed so they mat together, and hard cheeses are aged to improve their flavor. Aging can last from one month to two years.

"The same four ingredients of milk, bacteria, rennet, and salt are used to make cottage cheese, feta, mozzarella, Montery Jack, colby, cheddar, and gouda. The only difference is how the cheesemaker treats the curds during cheesemaking."

How was that?

Sunset on Home Cheesemaking

In the February edition of Sunset Magazine I was delighted to see an article on making your own cheese at home. They obtained recipes from two established artisan cheesemakers and presented Cowgirl Creamery's Fromage Blanc and Bellwether Farms' Ricotta.

I was extremely excited to see a mainstream magazine touch on the home cheesemaking phenomenon. I was even more excited that they were hosting a contest for readers to create recipes using these cheeses, with a prize of tickets to California's Artisan Cheese Festival. I have discovered that I love to create recipes from scratch, it really gets the mad scientist in me going.

I entered a cheese desert, in the shape of a cocktail, turning the Cowgirl Creamery's Fromage Blanc into a "Sweet Cowgirl Cheesecake Cocktail."

You can download my Cheese Cocktail recipe here. If you make it let me know what you think. I thought it was a pretty good use of Fromage Blanc, which was one of the easiest cheeses I have attempted.

I also tried to make a savory dish with the ricotta by baking it whole. Sadly it unexpectedly burned in the oven. I will have to work a bit longer on getting that one right.

Rennet from a Thistle?

I met Jon Clark at a recent cheese class where he was a student. Jon is currently teaching English in Hungary. Though he is really interested in making cheese, he does not have the luxury of being able to order ingredients over the internet and have them arrive in a timely or economical fashion.

We discussed that it is possible to harvest your own rennet, and I forwarded him a link to another obsessed cheesemaker, David B. Fankhauser. Dr. Fankhauser shows his attempt to create his own rennet from the stomach of a suckling kid (the goat kind). I thought if Jon were really desperate, this was something that he could try. If seeing where your food comes from does not disturb you, check it out here.

Jon replied and told me he had coincidentally just seen that very page in a recent posting to the blog Serious Eats. In this entry Jake Lahne discusses the use of the Cardoon Thistle as a cheesemaking coagulant.

I have read in American Farmstead Cheese that thistle was used in historic cheesemaking when animal rennet was not available or not desired. Jewish cheesemakers used thistle to create a kosher cheese (avoiding mixing meat and milk). Some cheeses are still made today using this process: Torta la Serena, Torta del Casar, and Serra da Estrela are examples.

I am very curious about trying to use Cardoon as a coagulant. My favorite seed company carries it, so I will try planting some this year. Stay tuned for results this summer/fall.

Making Feta at Home

For my first live demonstration I chose to make Feta cheese since it was relatively easy and a perfect rennet coagulated cheese for the beginning cheesemaker to tackle. I wanted to discuss the results from using live starter culture instead of direct acidification, show what a clean break looks like, and walk through the process of cutting and cooking curds. I felt the demonstration went really well, and strangely no one complained about my long winded food science talk of enzymes and proteins. Blogger "Food and Books and Stuff" posted a lovely review on her blog.

I adapted a Feta recipe I received in the class "A Practical Introduction to Cheesemaking" which I took at Oregon State University. I added an introduction that covered home cheesemaking equipment and sanitation, edited it until it fit on the front and back of a single sheet of paper, and used the results as a handout. You can download it from the Joy of Home Cheesemaking site for your own first attempt at rennet coagulated cheese.

Due to the leftovers from the class and the trial makes I did in preparation, my family has a lot of Feta to consume. Weekends are my turn to make dinner, so I am making Spanakopita.

The Homebrew Exchange

The owners of The Homebrew Exchange let me know a little while back that they were having an open house today, and the thought never occurred to me that it would be worth re-posting the invite. Talk about late notice, I apologize.

Anyway, if you see this post today, and happen to be in the neighborhood, drop in and say hi. I will be there with some sample feta cheese that I made for my demonstration next Wednesday. The owners of The Homebrew Exchange are super nice and they are showing a real commitment to carrying cheesemaking supplies. I was really excited to have another place in town to send people who need supplies.

The Homebrew Exchange is located at 1907 N Kilpatrick St, Portland, OR 97217, and the open house starts at 4 p.m. Here is a direct link to the announcement on their web site.

DIY Cheesemakers in Portland

Portland has a great food community, including enough cheese enthusiasts to warrant a loosely formed organization of home cheesemakers called the DIY Cheesemakers. This group has been meeting at a great local cheese shop called Foster and Dobbs Authentic Foods.

I attended my first meeting last November and met Gayle Starbuck, who led a class on making fresh cheeses with direct set cultures. She and I talked after the class and I agreed to help set up an email list to help communicate between the meeting participants. That list now lives as a Google group, which can be found at diycheese.org.

I also talked to Luan Schooler after the same DIY meeting. Luan is one of the owners of Foster and Dobbs, and from what I can tell she started hosting the DIY meetings in 2008. I offered to do a cheesemaking demonstration. After an exchange of emails, I am now demonstrating making Feta on January 20th, 2010. I am very excited.

This weekend I have plans to visit a local goat farm to acquire some fresh raw milk and do a trial cheesemaking run at home. If the results are good, they will show up at the meeting on the 20th. I am also going to do a practice run with store bought cow milk to hopefully show the difference between the two milk sources. The demo will done with store bought milk, as that is what most people will be using in their own kitchens.

So if you are in the Portland area, come join the fun. See the details at diycheese.org.