Adventures with Sour Milk

Ricotta Cheese

My daughter doesn't drink her whole milk fast enough. I noticed the other day that it had gone sour. It didn't smell bad, so I set it in the back of the fridge trying to think of something to do with it.

When milk is old, it does one of two things from my experience: bad bacteria wins the battle inside the jug and makes the milk go rotten or the good bacteria wins out and makes the milk go sour - two very different things. When it goes sour you can use it like you would buttermilk or some recipes even call for sour milk. When it goes rotten, well you just have to throw it out.

I haven't had a lot of milk go sour, so my experience with it was pretty limited. I had been planning on making yogurt, so yesterday, feeling oh, so resourceful, I set out making yogurt in my crockpot. Everything was going well until the milk started hitting 120º. I took off the lid and noticed the milk was separating??? I didn't remember that from last time, so I did some research and realized that that should not be happening. I was pretty ticked. A whole half gallon of grass-fed cows milk was separated into curds and whey. Now what was I going to do with it? Well, since it looked and smelled an awful lot like cheese, I thought, what the heck? And strung it in a cheesecloth bag over the sink. An hour later, I pulled it down, salted it, stirred it around and, heck! It looked and tasted exactly like ricotta! All I can figure how that happened is that the sourness stood in for the lemon juice you usually add to the milk to make ricotta. Lesson Learned #1: Sour milk does not make yogurt.

I didn't have dinner plans yet, so I whipped up a batch of lasagna. When I told my husband what happened he looked suspiciously at the lasagna. "Is it safe to eat?" haha! Lesson Learned #2: Don't reveal mistakes until after dinner is over. In reality, it tasted great and that's what he's got for lunch at work today. :-)

Well, I still wanted yogurt, especially since we were running out. So, at 3 pm I started again with fresh milk. Once it had reached 180º and had cooled down to 116º I wrapped that ceramic baby up in a towel and stuck it in my oven still warm from baking lasagna with the oven light on and then I realized my mistake. I had to let the yogurt incubate for 6 hours which would calculate to be.... 1 in the morning!?! Oh, MAN! Lesson Learned #3: Don't start your yogurt in the afternoon unless you're a night owl.

So, yes, I set my alarm clock and got up at 1 am to check on my precious yogurt. It had set beautifully. (My first time trying last year, the yogurt had been runny, but good.) Happy with my success, I stuck it right in the fridge and went to bed. This morning my kids and I got up and I went to taste-test my yogurt in the fridge. It looked gorgeous and with a bumpy mound higher in the middle like something had grown in there - which it had. I took a spoon to it for a taste and it was sour! Still good, but one of the more sour yogurts I've had. We were going to need a lot of jam to counteract that sour flavor. Lesson Learned #4: Taste test along the way. The longer yogurt sits, the more sour it gets!

It's a little ironic, isn't it? I started off with sour milk and ended with sour yogurt. Ha! *sigh* Such is life! At least my son enjoyed his yogurt this morning - with plenty of blueberry lime jam. Can't get that flavor at the store, can ya? ;-)

Ricotta Cheese

I made ricotta cheese for the first time last week. I was amazed, AMAZED, at how easy it was. Why haven't I been doing this all along? I used the ricotta for some lasagna which I made using 7 noodles. It was awesome and so tasty. Why buy ricotta - which is really expensive - when you can make it in under an hour yourself?

How to make Fresh Ricotta Cheese:

(From chickens in the road)

1 gallon fresh whole milk
1 teaspoon citric acid
1 teaspoon cheese salt

Pour milk into a large stainless steel pot. Add the citric acid and cheese salt. Heat on medium-high until the milk reaches 195 degrees.

It will seem as if it takes a long time to achieve the proper temperature, but you’ll get there in under 30 minutes. (You can’t just stick your heat on high because you’ll scorch the milk–I set my burner right between medium and high). Stir infrequently, just enough to avoid scalding the milk on the bottom of the pan. (I just move the spoon around the bottom of the pot gently every few minutes.)

You’ll notice curds beginning to form on the surface of the pot.

Keep checking the temperature using the dairy thermometer.

By the time it reaches 195 degrees, the milk will have separated into curds and whey.

Isn’t that awesome? You’ll feel as if you’ve performed a magic trick the first time you do it.

Turn off the heat and let the pot sit for about 10 minutes. Cross your fingers the cat doesn’t wake up and eat it when you’re not looking.

After 10 minutes, line your colander with the butter muslin.

Using a large slotted spoon, transfer the curds to the muslin-lined colander.

Look at that! Is that cool or what?

Once all the curds are transferred to the colander……

….tie the muslin together.

Then tie it onto your sink faucet.

Let drain for another 30 minutes, or to desired consistency. (There are numerous uses for all that leftover whey, but that’s a whole ‘nother post!)

When the cheese is finished draining, untie the muslin and transfer the ricotta to a container. In this case, I used two pint-size glass jars. Store in the fridge for up to two weeks, and use as you would with any ricotta–only this is better because you made it. I see Pepperoni Lasagna!

Behold! Cheese!!!

The recipe calls for cheese salt, but I just used non-iodized table salt.
I also used organic milk. The fresher the milk the better. You can use regular milk too. Just don't use ultra-pasteurized milk because it won't make cheese. If you use organic milk, check the container.Some of the big organic milk companies ultra-pasteurize their milk to make it last longer.

Give this cheese a try. You'll be amazed too!

TRIUMPHANT!!!

It's a success! I have made my first ever successful mozzarella cheese!! You have no idea the amount of relief I feel; and exhilaration! The cheese tastes so delicious and I made it all myself. I'd have to say the difference was the milk. This time I used a local dairy's milk sold at the grocery store (the dairy is in a city about 80 miles away) and I think that because it is so close the milk hasn't had that drastic of a past in heating and cooling as longer range milk has.

Another thing that led to my success was patience and heating the milk curds longer than the recipe said - like 4 times longer. I had to do it because the curds weren't separating from the whey, but eventually it turned out beautifully! I found great help from this website. The pictures are very enlightening. Also, that website doesn't say how much salt to add, but I found 1/2 tsp. added the right amount of saltiness.

I think I'm making pizza tonight...

Cheese and Milk Ramblings

So, I made some cheese for the first time. In fact I tried it twice. I was going for mozzarella, but both times the cheese would just not"glue" together, turning into the stringy, creamy, taffy-like mozzarella it's supposed to be. I followed two different recipes and both times I got ricotta; a very yummy ricotta, but still it wasn't mozz. I think it was the milk. I've read that dairies sometimes pasturize milk at the higher end temperatures which kills a lot of the proteins that make the cheese. I thought organic milk would be a good option, but it turns out that the big chain organic milk is ultra-pasturized which means it is pasturized extra long so that it can be shipped long distances without being refrigerated. In essence - it's shelf stable milk. No wonder it has that special taste...

The best milk to use for making cheese is raw milk which you can then, in turn, pasturize yourself at the lowest of the temperatures for pasturizing. Finding the raw milk is the hard part. It all boils down to bacteria. Because of Utah state laws, farmers who sell raw milk have to keep it hush-hush so they don't get in trouble. Does anyone else see the silliness in all this? If someone wants raw milk, why can't they be allowed to buy it from the farmer without anyone getting in trouble? People eat produce from the store that they don't wash. Think of the risk there, and yet there are no laws about that. (I guess they can't do everything for us, and that's a good thing.) Anyway, raw milk is not a dangerous chemical or addictive drug. Pasturization is good, I think, but if we don't want it pasturized, why can't we buy it the way we want? I'm sure there's more to this issue than I realize, but I just want to make cheese, darn it!

Man, where's that milk cow in my backyard when I need it?