After wasting my morning in the jury room at the Auckland District Court (not being drawn in the ballot, and having to hang around for three fucking hours while they clown-arsed around as if it was their first time ever running a jury) I decided the rest of the day would be well spent being creative, first on the list was something I’ve never done before – cheese making.
I decided to do a really simple one to begin with.
Ingredients are simple and easy to find, milk, vinegar, salt. That’s it. The recipe I found was a bit bigger than I wanted (eight litres of milk? no thanks), so here is the pared down version:
500ml milk.
3 teaspoons of white vinegar (normal malt vinegar might be okay as well).
1/4 teaspoon salt.
Heat the milk in a pot to about 90C (don’t let it boil, if it looks like it’s about to, pull it off the heat right away).
Add vinegar to the milk. Give it a gentle stir.
It’ll start to seperate right away.
Leave it to cool. Doesn’t take too long from that heat.
As you can see, the seperation is quite dramatic.
Pour the curds and whey through a sieve. Gently.
Mmmm, delicious whey. Ok, not delicious really. I tasted it, it’s a little bit sweet, quite weak flavoured. Nothing too scary, but I wouldn’t want to drink it every day.
Curds! Looks just like cottage cheese. There’s a reason for that. Add the salt to the curds, mix it in well. Add more salt if you feel like it. Do it to taste.
Time for the taste testing.
Claire said it was very good. I said it would do nicely piled into a couple of toated sandwiches with a bunch of chilli beans. I was right.
