Owly055
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 28, 2014
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I'm not a great success at cheese making as some others here seem to be. I think my cheese cave environment isn't good enough........ but I don't give up easily ;-)
Fortunately, like a wet dream, you really can't screw up feta.......... but I'm trying hard!! ;-) With each batch of feta, which as always been one of my favorites, I try a new variant. Some has for example been lightly pressed, and allowed to sit at temps in the 50's.... my room temp this time of year... for as long as 4 or 5 days, then stored in brine, or placed in olive oil with fresh spices and home dried tomatoes. Some goes into a saturated brine fairly soon. Some has been salted after preliminary draining, and later put in a storage brine... This tends to melt into the brine, I suspect because the balance isn't quite right. If it shows that tendency, it goes into olive oil, where it will shed white liquid whey. I've devised a way to draw this off, and often use it in my curries.... a little olive oil comes with it. My most recent of course is my failed mozzarella that I mentioned in the previous post. It will be dry stored. Perhaps the most interesting variant was "fetazola", in which I sprinkled a bit of P-Roquferti as I put it into a mold. Very briefly brined to keep the salt content down, it was allowed to sit at my low room temp for 5 days, during which time It was punctured and allowed time to heal, then stored under olive oil at room temp for a couple of weeks. It has the tiniest hints of blue cheese. If you crumble it, you can see tiny threads of blue here and there. It's so little, that when you hit some of it, the taste contrast is kind of shocking. Like "wow, where did that come from?". The distinctive sharp feta tang, with hints of gorgonzola. I crumbled some of it up and mixed it in with some cheap ranch dressing, some mayo, some olive oil, and some selected spices......... (tatziki spices), whisked it up nicely and put it back into the bottle..... like pushing toothpaste back into the tube. The result is a quite wonderful salad dressing.
H.W.
Fortunately, like a wet dream, you really can't screw up feta.......... but I'm trying hard!! ;-) With each batch of feta, which as always been one of my favorites, I try a new variant. Some has for example been lightly pressed, and allowed to sit at temps in the 50's.... my room temp this time of year... for as long as 4 or 5 days, then stored in brine, or placed in olive oil with fresh spices and home dried tomatoes. Some goes into a saturated brine fairly soon. Some has been salted after preliminary draining, and later put in a storage brine... This tends to melt into the brine, I suspect because the balance isn't quite right. If it shows that tendency, it goes into olive oil, where it will shed white liquid whey. I've devised a way to draw this off, and often use it in my curries.... a little olive oil comes with it. My most recent of course is my failed mozzarella that I mentioned in the previous post. It will be dry stored. Perhaps the most interesting variant was "fetazola", in which I sprinkled a bit of P-Roquferti as I put it into a mold. Very briefly brined to keep the salt content down, it was allowed to sit at my low room temp for 5 days, during which time It was punctured and allowed time to heal, then stored under olive oil at room temp for a couple of weeks. It has the tiniest hints of blue cheese. If you crumble it, you can see tiny threads of blue here and there. It's so little, that when you hit some of it, the taste contrast is kind of shocking. Like "wow, where did that come from?". The distinctive sharp feta tang, with hints of gorgonzola. I crumbled some of it up and mixed it in with some cheap ranch dressing, some mayo, some olive oil, and some selected spices......... (tatziki spices), whisked it up nicely and put it back into the bottle..... like pushing toothpaste back into the tube. The result is a quite wonderful salad dressing.
H.W.
