Semi-dry pepperoni, Camembert, meat experiments

This week I've succumbed to impatience. I'm getting a bit sick of making salami that I can't taste for a couple of months, so I'm trying a semi-dry version of one.

To make a semi-dry salami you need to a) ferment it quickly, which requires the introduction of bacterial cultures, lots of glucose for them to metabolise, and high temperature fermentation; b) cook it after fermentation, optionally with smoke; c) not dry it for very long, if at all.

Here I have some minced pork with a little bit of minced beef beef, salt, nitrite (no nitrate because the cooking step kills any residual bacteria), plenty of glucose, a good dose of yoghurt, cayenne pepper, paprika, fennel seeds, and black pepper:


I mixed it all up and stuffed it into fibrous casings.

Here's the yoghurt I use:


Good thick silky smooth home-made stuff. I use a cup of milk powder per litre of milk and incubate it in my oven overnight. I have a great oven (two, actually) which can go as low as 30°C and as high as 260°C.

I used the low temperature of my oven to ferment the pepperoni for about 20 hours at ~40°C and put a bowl of water in the oven too, to keep the humidity up around 90% as per the instructions in my book.


After 20 hours I increased the temperature of the oven to 50°C for an hour or so, then to 60°C until the interior of the sausages was also 60°C. After that I dunked them in cold water and hung them up over the spare shower to dry. I'll leave them there for a couple of days, and have a taste on Monday.

The little bit of beef in the pepperoni was trimmings from this rump:


It was on special for $9.99/kg again this week, ridiculously cheap. I bought a fairly big bit and cut it into two neat hunks, one of which I rubbed with Heatwave and one with Oh! Zone. I then vacuum packed them and put them in the freezer ready to be cooked sous vide at some later date.

This lamb "drumstick" (a new name for what I think is the the bit just above the front knee) is in the waterbath as I type. It has a sprig of rosemary from the garden and a few slivers of garlic in with it.


I'll take it out in the morning and we'll see what it's like. I'm actually cooking it at a reasonably high temperature because of the rosemary and garlic - low temperature cooking is supposed to make them taste yukky.

I put four brined chicken drumsticks in for a couple of hours too:


They are now out and in the fridge:


I'm not 100% sure what to do with them. Their skin will need crisping up before they get eaten, but apart from that I'll just have to wait and see what occurs to me. They're nicely pasteurised anyway, so I have a week or so to think.

I brined eight drumsticks altogether. These ones …


… went in the smoker, and will become part of my lunches for next week.

Here's some Camembert draining:


My son and his family are visiting just after Easter so I started some today to be ready when they're here. Jonathan is rather fond of it, and I'd like him to try some of my non-factory made stuff. It actually ripens properly and goes all gooey inside. I took the other half of the curd and pressed it. Tomorrow I'll take it out of the press and treat it pretty much the same as I do the Camembert - trying to re-create this Farmhouse Brie.

Parmesan

Salami making was Friday night. Saturday morning I got back into the cheese. I've decided that I'll keep myself supplied as far as I'm able with Parmesan, Camembert, feta, and halloumi. Plain old cheddar is cheaper to buy from the shop.

I started with ten litres of milk this time, the most I've ever used, and the most that will fit in my big pot. I used ordinary pasteurised and homogenised milk from the petrol station at $5.99 for four litres, making this a $15 batch of cheese.

You use a thermophilic bacterium for Parmesan, before I have used yoghurt, but I have some proper culture now. You also need to add lipase to milk that's been pasteurised or you'll never get that sourness in the cheese.

Here are the curds half cut:


A closer look:


After the curds have been cut you slowly heat them up to ~52°C. This makes the protein in the curds contract, expelling a lot of whey. The hotter you cook it and the smaller the curds have been cut, the more whey is expelled and the harder the cheese will be.

This is the cheese after its first pressing:


I pressed it for 15 mins under 2.5kg, then turned it and pressed for 30 mins under 5kg, then 2 hours under 7.5kg, then overnight under 10kg.

Then it went into a saturated brine:


And will stay there for 24 hours. After that I dry it and leave it to mature for at least 8 months.

There's a bit of forethought necessary if you want to be self-sufficient with respect to cheese.

While the cheese was doing its thing I smoked some chicken thighs that had been curing in the fridge since Thursday:


I couldn't help myself, I had to eat one. The rest will be for lunches at work this week.

The Grand Cheese-Eating

Yesterday was the big cheese-eating day. I invited all of the people from work and bridge who had shown interest in my cheese-making experiments, along with my brother and his family and a couple of old family friends. Talk about nervous - I was terrified that none of the cheese would end up being edible, so I made large amounts of other things to eat for lunch, and then I was worried that I'd kill everyone with food poisoning or something. Much of the lunch food was also experimental!

The cheese I was really curious about was the cloth-wrapped Cheddar. It had shown many changes in the four months since I made it, first growing mould on its bandage, then becoming quite soft, and most recently becoming rather concave on top. I was convinced I'd find a nasty rotten mess when I finally unveiled it.

No such thing though. With much trepidation on the morning of the cheese-eating, I unwrapped it:


Then I cut it open:


Then I sliced a little bit off and tasted it. It was delicious!

That gave me a little more confidence in the rest of my cheeses, which I laid out on boards on the coffee table thus:


There were two different seeded Goudas and the Cheddar …


… sage Leicester, provolone and smoked provolone …


… Stilton and a very ripe Camembert …


… a fresh-ish Camembert, white Stilton, and the rescued curds from my first attempt at provolone (the recipe is wrong and caused me to pasteurise the curds) …


There was also a bowl of what I christened "Goodness Knows" aka "cheese soup". It was a cheese that started off being a blue, then it picked up some white mould and started smelling like Camembert, then it started to collapse under its own weight so I wrapped it in foil and parked it in the fridge and crossed my fingers. When I unwrapped it on the morning of the cheese-eating it had also picked up some red bacterial culture typical of a washed-rind cheese and smelled appalling; it also burst its crust. Despite all of this it actually tasted lovely (how brave am I to taste something so disgusting-looking?) so I decided to serve it instead of throwing it away, but I had to serve it in a bowl.

The lunch consisted of Pâté Grandmère (from Charcuterie), jellied pigs' feet, mesclun salad and tomatoes …


… Pâté de Campagne (from Charcuterie), more lettuce and tomatoes …


… beef rump cooked sous vide for four hours at 55°C, with horseradish from the garden …


… several loaves of bread (I was baking bread the evening before and all morning) …


… and some Porchetta di testa (fancy-pants name for rolled pig's head).


I also cooked up some of the sausages I've been making and freezing over the last few weeks.

The half pig's head cost all of $1.75, the pigs' trotters cost $3 for six, the rump was about $10 (on special for $9.99/kg), the pork I used to make the pâtés and sausages was about $20 worth of shoulder (on special again), and there was around $5 worth of chicken livers as well.

All in all, a very economical carnivorous lunch.

I also made some Eccles cakes (I don't like Christmas mince pies, this is what I have instead) …


… some panforte …


… some Christmas Cake …


… and I grabbed some wine from the cellar and beer from the beer fridge:



The verdict

A success. It just couldn't have gone better. The favourite cheeses were the "Goodness Knows" (the smelly almost liquid mess which I did not photograph), the Stilton, and the ripe Camembert, in that order. Everyone took some cheese home with them, as I'm off to Australia in a week and the cheeses wouldn't last until I get back. I had to ration the Stilton, because everyone wanted some of it.

Everyone asked where I got my bread from and was astounded that I made it, so that was a success as well.

I got many complementary comments about the pâtés and other meaty things, although the teenagers asked what everything was before putting it in their mouths (or not putting it in their mouths, in the case of pigs' heads and feet).

Tonight I have my nephew and niece and their three cousins coming to stay so they can make gingerbread men for their Christmas trees. We're cooking pizza for dinner too, it's going to be great fun. There's nothing like a house full of kids at Christmas time.

Sausage update

Remember these sausages I prepared a week and a half ago?


This is what they looked like on Saturday:


They seem to be doing what they're supposed to be doing, they're shrivelling up nicely and the only mould growing on them is nice powdery white stuff. Looking good for being edible on Sunday.

And here are some week-old Camemberts:


Don't think they'll be ready to eat on Sunday, but that's fine. I'll have them when I get back from my holiday.

Spanish chorizo and the year's final cheeses

Christmas is approaching at a frightening speed. I have to actually start doing something about preparing food for my cheese-eating guests who are due for lunch on the 20th. I'm not sure I've made these sausages in time - we'll see if they're dry enough in two weeks, if not it won't be the end of the world and I'll have something yummy to eat the week after. I hope. It's a bit experimental.

Spanish chorizo is my first attempt at a fermented dry sausage. The live cultures the recipe says to use are not available (as far as I can find anyway) in New Zealand. But I figure that people were making this sort of sausage for centuries before the discovery of bacteria, so hopefully they will pick up something useful from the atmosphere. And I added a dollop of yoghurt and a bit of mesophilic cheese culture for good luck - it can't do any harm.

Here's my 1.5 kg chopped pork plus a spoonful of glucose syrup and some yoghurt:


Here's the salt and spice mix; 35 g salt; a bit more than 1/2 tsp 6% sodium nitrite in salt; a bit more than 1/2 tsp 4% potassium nitrate in salt (curing salts are unavailable here too - I make my own); 1 tbsp smoked hot paprika; 1 tbsp powdered ancho chillies; 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper:


Here's the pork with the salts, spices, and garlic added:


And here are the finished sausages hanging up in the shower in my spare bathroom:


I put a bit of water into the tub under the shower and closed the door, hopefully that will keep the humidity high enough that the outsides won't dry too fast.

My last cheese of the year are three more Camemberts (shown here in their home-made drainpipe moulds):


And some feta:


The feta is now cut into four pieces, each of which is in a zip-lock bag of brine in the fridge.

That's it for cheese for the year; next weekend I'm visiting a friend to try out his new pizza oven, the weekend after that I have my cheese party, the weekend after that, well, I'll be recovering from eating too much at Christmas and then hopping on an aeroplane to go to Australia and the grandkids. I was talking to the elder one, Emily, yesterday on Skype. She had just been to see the Wiggles in concert and was sporting a very attractive, if somewhat bulky, Dorothy tail. She said, sounding very surprised, "I wanted to see Mickey Mouse, but he wasn't there"! She did tell me all about Murray, Jeff ("Wake up Jeff") , "Afony" and Sam though. And Wag the Dog and Henry the Octopus.

Recipe

Spanish Chorizo (from Charcuterie)

Ingredients:
2.25 kg pork shoulder
50 g kosher salt
1 tsp No 2 curing salt (that's the one with nitrite and nitrate in it)
2 tbsp smoked Spanish paprika
2 tbsp ancho chili powder
1 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
2 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp dextrose (that's glucose, and I used syrup rather than powder)
1/4 cup Bactoferm F-RM-52 live starter culture (this is where I used a couple of tablespoons of yoghurt and some mesophilic cheese culture and crossed my fingers)
1/4 cup distilled water (I used tap water because I'm not using it to hydrate bacteria)

10 feet of hog casings, soaked in tepid water for at least 30 mins and rinsed.

Method:
Combine pork with salt, curing salt, and dextrose. Grind through the large die on your mincer.
Dissolve Bactoferm in the distilled water and add it, along with the remaining ingredients, to the pork. With the paddle attachment, mix on low speed for about a minute to incorporate the ingredients.
Stuff the sausage into the hog casings and use string to tie into 12 inch/30 cm loops. Using a sterile needle, prick the casings all over to remove any air pockets and to facilitate drying.
Hang the sausage (ideally at 15°C with 60-70% humidity) until it feels completely stiff throughout and/or it's lost 30% of its weight, 18 to 20 days.

Yield: About 3 pounds/1.5 kg of sausage; 5 large rings.

Note: I started with 1.5 kg of pork, and scaled everything down accordingly. I made my sausages somewhat longer than 30 cm - more like 40 cm I think - and I still ended up with four of them. I'm hoping this means that NZ "hog casings" (we actually call pigs pigs, not hogs) are a bit skinnier than American ones, and hence will dry proportionately faster, making them edible by the 20th. Sausages in sheep casings are supposed to dry in a week, which gives me some hope.

Halloumi

This week's cheesemaking exercise was halloumi. I love halloumi, there's something about the way the insides go all soft and gooey when you fry it, with the outsides being crisp and crunchy and soaking up the lemon juice with which you slather it. It's a bit expensive though, so if this turns out well it may be a regular manufacturing job in my house.

It's an odd procedure, making halloumi. Firstly you add culture (not sure if that's actually necessary) and rennet and let the milk set. Then you cut the curd and cook it ever so slightly - it goes from 30°C to 40°C. Setting the whey aside, you mix a bit of mint with the curds and press them fairly hard for a couple of hours. Then you slice the curd block and return it to the whey, which is by this time heated to 88°C. You leave the curd in the whey for an hour or so - it all floats to the top - then fish it out and salt it, then you store it in brine.

This is what it looks like while it's cooling:


That cooking at 88°C is what makes me think there's no real reason to add culture to the milk. After an hour at 88°C any culture has been well and truly killed, and it's not really in there long enough to have done anything to the flavour of the milk before that step.

I cut off a little bit to try - it wasn't salted enough, but I needed to see if it would behave properly in the frypan.

It did:


Yum, crispy-gooey.

So that's 5 blocks of halloumi for $16, and they'd cost about $10 each in the shop. I could easily make this with cheap milk from the petrol station too, that'd halve the cost again. I will definitely be making this again.

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.

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.