illdothedisheslater

This is my most ambitious project to date.  My husband probably longs for the good old days when my weekend project would be Chicken Saltimbocca or homemade hot sauce.  But he did buy me a metal bit for our drill so I could make the molds.  He also told me to be VERY CAREFUL about six times.

Drilling holes in empty tin cans definitely means little poky bits are sticking out like crazy all over the inside.  More hammering – but it’s not easy to get a hammer inside a tin can and swing it with the force required to flatten out poky metal bits.

In the interest of science I leave two cans undrilled, and also improvise more plastic molds out of deli containers.  I heated a darning needle jammed into a pencil eraser over a candle and burned a bunch of little holes in them.

I’ve assembled my ingredients, milk (good milk from stinky health food store), rennet (one recipe calls for single-strength – I only have double.  Tough shit.) Flora Danica mesophilic starter culture, and penicillium candidum to foster mold growth.  If I end up with a yeast infection from this, I’m going back to eating Velveeta.

I’ve complained loudly and often about the difficulty of finding “real” milk in my home state.  Everything at the grocery is pasteurized, homogenized, and sometimes even ultrapasteurized.  None of this works out well for cheesemaking – pasteurization (heating to a set temperature then quickly cooling) flattens the casein enzymes that coagulate to produce well-formed curds, which is a sentence I never thought I would type.  Homogenization squooshes the fat molecules to prevent the natural separation of cream.  Ultra pasteurization heats to an even higher temperature.  All of this means it can sit on the shelf at the grocery longer, but your curds won’t curd right (scientific terminology).  I’m all for better living through science, but cheesemaking guides tend to assume you just head on out back with your milking stool and squeeze a few gallons out each morning.  What’s the home cook to do?

Also I assemble my tools:

I have two spanky-clean plastic tubs, a variety of homemade molds, and cheese mats.  Did I order cheese mats from a reputable company?  Hell nope.  I’m MacGyvering.  I bought thick plastic mesh from Michael’s Crafts – the kind kids learn needlepoint bookmarks on.  They even have perfect circle ones (for coasters?) that fit my molds perfectly.   The books recommend sushi rolling mats, and I found these bamboo placemats at the dollar store which I think will do nicely.  Now I just have to figure out how one might properly sanitize dollar store placemats.  They’re probably pretty clean already right?