Panforte

It's nearly Christmas, so time to make some more goodies so I can weigh a great deal more in January than I do now - not to mention my brother and his family are coming to visit and will need feeding.

Last week's effort was panforte. I use this recipe and this one as references for the basics, then throw in whatever fruit and nuts I have in the cupboard. I made two batches, one of a double recipe, and one a triple - I want to give a couple away as presents, and I need one for the bridge club Christmas party.

I start off lining my tins with edible rice paper …


… I do wish they'd make it in bigger sheets.

I use this chocolate - it's gorgeous, and I nibble away at what doesn't get used in the recipe:


Good New Zealand chocolate.

This first batch I made using toasted almonds and hazelnuts, candied peel, and raisins:


This is what they look like coming out of the oven - that little one was for me to taste.


You have to make sure they taste good if you are giving them away, don't you?

I didn't take photos of the second batch; really, when you've seen one panforte you've seen them all. For them I added some pine nuts, a fair bit of crystallised ginger, some glace cherries, chopped figs, and dates to the ingredients I used for the first lot. All panforte are now in tins in cupboard awaiting either postage to distant friends or the descent of ravening hordes.

Pink shoes

I have finally got around to making a cream skirt, so I can now wear these pink shoes:


I bought them ages ago from No1 Shoes for about $12 I think. Super cheap anyway. But then I had nothing pink or cream to wear them with so I had to buy a pink cardigan and make a cream skirt. Not so cheap after all, were they?

Anyway, I'm all pink and cream today, which is most unlike me - I'm usually a black and red sort of person.

A sous vide experiment

It occurred to me the other day, somewhat belatedly, that I could use my waterbath (rescued from the rubbish at work and fixed up for cheesemaking) to try cooking sous vide. A good hunt around the internet resulted in this wonderful document, which I have duly clipped into Evernote for future reference.

For my first experiment I bought various bits of pork (which was on special at the supermarket). I got a couple of loin chops (I always have difficulty cooking these, they dry out too quickly), and some strips of pork belly. I rubbed the belly strips with salt, cumin and some chipotle rub from a packet before sealing them in a bag using my FoodSaver; the pork chops I left au natural and sealed in individual bags.

Here is the bag of belly strips just after I put them in the waterbath, which I set at ~55°C:


I need to get a piece of polystyrene to fit on top of the water to a) keep the heat in and b) stop the water from evaporating, but in the mean time I covered it with an oven tray and put this weekend's cheese curds (white Stilton with brandied raisins in it) on top while they were pressing. An efficient use of escaping heat, I thought - the cheese needed to be kept at ~20°C overnight.


I tried one of the pork chops after it'd been sitting in the waterbath for about 8 hours. I removed it from its bag, salted it, then fried it very quickly in very hot oil to get a bit of colour on its outsides:


It was gorgeous! The centre of the meat was moist and tender and this is how I am going to cook pork chops from now on.

I left the other chop and the strips in the waterbath until this morning, a total of about 18 hours. After I took them out I cooled them and put them in the fridge.

Four hours later I decided to try out the belly strips and removed them from their bag - the three strips had gelled into one slab:


It was actually quite difficult to tell where one strip stopped and the next started, but I ripped them apart any old how and sliced them into chunks which I quickly fried:


Again, they were delicious. Soft and meltingly tender - the texture of the meat was almost as soft as the fat was.

The other chop is sitting in the fridge in its bag. It's nicely pasteurised from sitting at ~55°C for 18 hours, so I don't need to eat it for a while - it'll stay perfectly good for at least a week in the fridge.

Dairy update

Merrill, from whom I get my raw milk for cheese, has started selling cream. They bought a separator a month or so ago and their first efforts were extraordinarily thick - the texture of butter. I thought I'd buy some of the more recent product and see whether it would be economical to make butter from it.


At $4/pint (600ml) this is a little more expensive than cream from the shop, which is about $5.50 for a litre.

It is, however, far thicker:


I was wondering how I was going to get it all out of the bottle. I ended up washing the last bit out with a bit of water.

It whipped up beautifully, and was quite dry - I was wondering if it was so rich that there would be no buttermilk …


… but eventually it did come together and exude a little - about 200 ml I think.


I ended up with 330 g of butter from 600 ml cream. This is a better result than the 430 g I got from 1 litre of bought cream, but still not economical. Butter in the shops is $4-something for 500 g, and I can get it at the moment for less than $4.

With my milk this week I made two different cheeses: some Camembert …


… and an experimental washed rind cheese. I started off with one big pot of milk, and used Flora Danica starter culture, allowing it to ripen for an hour and a half before adding the rennet. Once it was set I scooped out sufficient curds to fill my three Camembert moulds, then I cut the remaining curd and heated it to ~38˚C. After removing most of the whey I washed the curds in a cup or so of port then poured them into a couple of rectangular moulds (cheap plastic from the $2 shop) and let them set under their own weight. I turned them a couple of times, then soaked them in brine for a two hours.


I'll wash them in port every couple of days for the next two weeks and hope they pick up enough Brevibacterium linens from my hands to develop a nice smelly smear. It's a bit of an experiment, and I hope they reach the stage that I can leave them for a few days by the end of November. I'm going to Invercargill (famously described by one of the Rolling Stones back in the 60s or 70s as "the arsehole of the world") to the Burt Munro Challenge, a sort of race week memorial to Burt Munro.

I couldn't resist the temptation to try one of my "provolone" cheeses - inverted commas because until they've ripened a good deal more, they are really mozzarella - check it out …


… it's mild still, but getting a bit of a tang to it. Quite delicious really.

And more of my tamarillos are ripe:


I'm very proud of them; I've not seen them growing any further south than Auckland, but I planted a tree in my glasshouse and crossed my fingers and voila. It sort of prunes itself, as any bits that touch the glass in the winter die from the cold. Just as well, because they grow to six metres outside in the warm.

Labour Weekend

Last weekend was New Zealand's Labour Weekend, and this was me during part of it:


Some motorcycling friends of mine came down from the North Island to a party weekend in Timaru, a couple of hours drive north of where I live, so I drove up after work on the Friday to meet them. On the Saturday we went for a ride to the Levels (Timaru's motor racing track) where the South Canterbury Post Vintage Motorcycle club was having a race day and bike show to mark its centenary. I'm imagining it can't really have started off 100 years ago as a "post vintage" bike club, there not being a great deal in the way of vintage motorcycles around at the time, but that's what it has become over the years.

This little Rickman Metisse is what people used to ride while scrambling back in the 1950s; a friend of mine owns one, although in nowhere near as good nick as this:


This one has a Triumph motor in it I'm pretty sure; there were about three others on show, one of which had a Norton motor, the others were Triumphs.

This 1974 Triumph Trident was absolutely mint:


These speedway bikes were raced back in the day by Ivan Mauger, who was attending the centenary:


I was rather taken by the wicker sidechair on this one:


I can just see myself in a big flowery hat sitting in it being driven around at ~30kph.

But this one was my favourite:


No-one knew exactly what motor it had in it but it was a Triumph single cylinder, around 350cc. Lovely wee thing it was too.

This is us parked at the track (well, not me, I'm behind the camera) totally surrounding that cute wee mini; I wouldn't have minded it either. They stick to the road like glue.


It was a gorgeous day for a ride, and after we left the Levels we rode out to the pub at a rather picturesque little place called Cave …


… where we had a couple of drinks outside in the sun before riding back to Timaru to party all night. Not very successfully on my part - I crashed at about 5am. Getting old.

Next day we lazed around in front of the television, then my best friend of "the boys" and I went out and got sandwiches from Subway for dinner and ate them at Caroline Bay:


I hadn't been there since a family holiday about 45 years ago, although I've driven past it a number of times.

It's really rather lovely; this is the edge of the bay …


… and around a wee bit further is the port of Timaru and this memorial to fishermen who have lost their lives at sea.


On a more cheerful note, look at these eggs I was in the process of overcooking:


I couldn't believe it; out of three eggs, two were double yolkers. The next day was the same! One pack of six had four double yolked eggs. Some sort of mutant chooks, we decided.

Two cheeses

Today my friend Heather came to visit for a cheesemaking lesson. I was making provolone (after adapting the non-functioning recipe from my book and only cooking the curds to 118˚F rather than 144˚F) and Heather made Camembert.

Here are my successful provolones soaking in brine:


Aren't they cute? It was so much fun to make. I experimentally smoked one of them - I used my hot-smoker turned as low as I could, and placed a tray of ice between the hot part and my cheese. I took the cheese out when the ice had about half melted.

Here the cheeses are hanging up in the guest shower to age:


The middle one is the smoked one, as you can no doubt tell.

These are Heather's Camemberts just after she removed them from their moulds:


She has salted them and applied P. candidum and taken them home to do their thing. That's $10 worth of raw milk there by the way. Not bad for three good sized Camembert cheeses.