Cambozola: Day 23 - First Taste - Dark Days Challenge

When I went to the storeroom yesterday to check on the cheeses, I noticed the Cambozola clone seemed to be pretty well ripened and was giving off a really delicious cheesy smell.



So we decided to try it, even though it really probably needed another couple of weeks to age. Here's what it looked like cut open.



The taste - how to describe it? It's a very interesting mixture of creamy and sharp. It's very close to Cambozola in taste, although as you can see, there is no blue mold in sight. We think the lack of air holes kept the blue mold from growing to maturity within the cheese, although it doesn't seem to have kept it from growing enough to provide some flavor. The outer edge is creamy and runny like Camembert, the inner is creamy and a little sharpish like a good dolce Gorgonzola. It was wonderful on hot bread fresh from the oven, and consensus is that even if it's not exactly a Cambozola clone, it's pretty darned good!

Cambozola: Day 13 - Piercing and Wrapping - Dark Days Challenge

Well, as you can see, the fuzz on the (hopefully) Cambozola cheese clone has totally taken over the outside of the cheeses and is covering them to a depth of about 1/8 inch or so.

This means it's time to wrap the little boogers in cheese wrap and then wait with baited breath for another couple of weeks to see how they turned out. But, because I just can't ever seem to leave well enough alone, I tried an experiment. The blue cheese recipes I've read generally tell you to pierce the cheese all over with a thick needle or ice pick to let the bleu mold "breathe" before it goes into aging mode. So I pierced one Cambozola clone cheese, and left the other unpierced. If the piercing is successful in helping the blue mold grow, then I should begin to see blue mold poking out of the holes I made in the side of the little cheese wheel in a week or so.



The good thing about piercing the one cheese is some of the inside oozed out over the needle while I was working. That means I got to try a tiny taste of what is going on with the cheese under all that fuzz - and it was already really creamy and tasty! So I can hardly wait to see how this all turns out. I wonder if making the cheeses small like this hastens their ripening - the larger surface area for the mold compared to the inside area may be having that effect. If so, I may actually be able to try these in about one month or so from start to finish, vs the two months suggested for ripening a larger size.

I'm going to start another batch of Cambozola clone this weekend, plus another cheddar or a gouda. This cheesemaking could get to be addictive!

Cambozola: Day 7 - We have fuzz!!! - Dark Days Challenge

When I opened up the cheese aging box this morning to check on the progress of the Cambozola I started last weekend, I caught a lovely whiff of "mushroom" - and if you look closely, within the red circle, along the edge of the cheese, you can see the beginnings of penicillin candidum fuzz! Looks like even if the "-ozola" part doesn't work out, the "camb" part should be fine. That's a relief, because it means I've probably managed, through sheer dumb beginner's luck, to avoid the worst of the mistakes I could have made with this cheese to this point. As long as I keep it in the proper temp and humidity range, I should end up with something at least edible - whether it's gonna be the Cambozola clone I was aiming for remains to be seen...

While we're on the subject of "fancy shmancy food" - I have something in the works for the Dark Days Challenge that may turn out to be very, very cool. It's still in the planning and research stages, but at this point I think I've learned enough and located all the raw local materials I need to succeed. However, there's always the chance the project will still fall through for some reason outside of my control, so I'll keep mum on what it is for now. But if it doesn't fall through, look for news on something very unexpected on the local Idaho foods front next weekend!

Cambozola: Day 2

How to make cambozola is apparently a bit of a trade secret, so while I did a fair bit of online research on the steps, all I was able to find were other home cheesemakers like myself trying to figure it out! So it will be interesting to see if this works or not. Even if it doesn't, I should still end up with an interesting cheese. (Btw, the dark stuff on the insides of my "high-tech empty #2.5 can cheese molds" is not rust, it's condensation and whey droplets.)

The curds basically have to drain for a couple of days under their own weight. This is Day 2 - I packed the curds into the molds yesterday (they were all the way to the top of the molds to start with) and they have been draining whey ever since. Way much more whey than I would have thought that little bit of curds could hold! Seems like cups and cups. Anyway, the curds have shrunken down to about 1/3 of their original height, and it is all starting to hold together when I turn the "mold sandwiches" every few hours. Later tonight, I'll test them to see if they are solid enough to go without being in the molds, and start gently sprinkling salt on the outside. Then I'll put everything into the "portable cheese cave" I've made from a clear plastic shoebox and a plastic shelf, schlep it down to the 45 degree storage room, and wait the next several days to make sure it starts growing the white fuzz it's supposed to grow. Crossing my fingers!

What's going on in the kitchen this weekend?

Homebrewing: I have two fruit wines and a simple sweet mead that need to be bottled. I have another bottle of concord grape wine in the storage room that may also be ready to bottle, but if I can get the three I have upstairs racked and into the little single serving size bottles I bought, then I'll be doing well! (Update: the plum wine apparently isn't ready to bottle yet, once I brought it up into the warmer house, it began to bubble again! So, I guess that one will wait for another couple or three weeks. The mead and raspberry wines are bottled, though, and I even "prettied up" a few bottles for a picture!)

Salad Table: I will have transplanted nearly all the salad starts by the end of this weekend. They are actually doing pretty well! The lettuce is about three inches or more tall. The shallots are sprouting like mad and should be ready to start cutting by next week some time. With luck, the lettuce will be ready for a first light picking in a couple of weeks. Maybe I can serve my sweetie a home grown salad for Valentine's Day. Keeping my fingers crossed...

Cheesemaking: I decided to go for broke and make a batch of Cambozola. It's a Gorgonzola/Camembert hybrid that we just love melted on fresh, hot bread. Since we have fresh hot bread nearly every day now, I figured I'd give that a try. It's also a cheese we can rarely find here in the grocery stores, and when we can find it, it's generally 12-14 dollars a pound. So economically, it's a very good candidate for home cheesemaking. If it works, I should be able to make a little over a pound of it for just a bit more than the cost of a gallon of milk.

Dark Days Challenge: I am still trying to settle on my DDC meal to document for this week. I'm leaning towards oriental food (something we eat a lot of and love) but I can't decide between chicken or pork based dishes. We have both local pork and chicken in the freezer right now, so I could do either. My sweetie is nursing a cold this weekend, though - so I think chicken would be a good idea. I can make him bunches of chicken soup (the roasting chicken we got from a local source here is about an 8 pounder, dressed, so there's plenty for several meals on that one!) and still have lots of meat left to make other dishes.

At any rate, I'll have pictures for all of this up at intervals over the weekend. I have some step by step on the Chicken Udon Soup I made tonight, but it's been a long day with the mead and wine bottling and nursing a sick husband, so it may have to wait till tomorrow!

Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese Update

Well, we opened it tonight, and about a third of the two pound wheel is already gone. I think that means it passed muster with the crew, so I'll be making some more in the next couple of days. Hooray for us, we actually made some pretty decent hard cheese!

The color was an almost startlingly bright white, the flavor was a nice semi-sharp with perhaps a little too much acid but not seriously out of character, and the texture was somewhat dry and flaky. (The book mentioned it would be dry-ish and flakey - that was fine by me.) We chose this cheese for our first hard cheese because it's ready in only 4 weeks, as opposed to at least three months for most of the other hard cheese recipes. I used the recipe for Farmhouse Cheddar in the cheese book listed at the bottom of the blog - so far it's been a winner! We're going to make another one or two cheddars in the next couple of weeks, plus a couple of camemberts and a couple of small bleus. I will probably need to make something pretty much every week in order to build up our "cheese cellar" to the point that we can have enough to use more often than once a month. I think it will be fun, though!

Here is a picture of the freshly opened cheese:

Major progress this week!

After taking on the "Dark Days Eat Local Challenge" I realized, too late, that we'd mostly eaten all the local meats I'd bought this fall. Ooops. So, yesterday and today I got on the phone to some of the folks I'd bought from earlier in the year and asked them if they still had any meats for sale. I also went to work online, trying to dig up some new suppliers. Long story short - I scored! We have one humongous roasting chicken and two nice pork roasts sitting in our freezer right now, plus some elk burger and elk stew meat on the way. What I managed to round up in the last 24 hours will be enough to make about 30 local meat meals!

As an added bonus, while searching I discovered some information that should help me track down some Idaho-grown wild rice, and perhaps even some more locally produced cheese! It turns out there is a large commercial cheese plant in Twin Falls that uses milk from local dairies to turn out all sorts of every day cheeses like cheddar, jack, and colby. I'm going to call their office tomorrow and see what brands their cheese is sold under so I can look for it in grocery stores here in town. This company is a subsidiary of a national cheese and dairy company, but the plant is here and they use all locally produced milk, so I'm counting it as local. We're making cheese here at home, too, but our first wheel of farmhouse cheddar won't be ready for another three weeks or so. (Yes, that red thing in the picture is it - lopsided and waxed rather awkwardly, but we hope tasty nonetheless!) It will definitely be nice to be able to get local ready-made cheeses to fill in the gaps between homemade batches.

The next major challenge is finding cooking oil...