Maître d’Hôtel Butter

Maître d’Hôtel Butter

Well, I blogged about how to make cheddar a couple of days ago. I realise not everyone may be up for that so I've decided to do something that's also relatively impressive but easy and not as time consuming. I'll explain how to make the butter yourself from cream, but if you're feeling lazy and just want some awesome compound butter then buy some unsalted butter, leave it out to get to room temperature and soften, and pick this up from where I added the seasonings.

So, making the butter. I didn't want loads of the stuff so I just started off with half a pint of double cream at room temperature.

Pour this into a nice large mason jar. It needs to have plenty of room to slosh about in there.

Now screw the lid on tight and shake up and down for all your worth. The cream will coat the inside of the jar as you'd expect and quite quickly you'll notice the consistency change. The cream will stop sloshing about, at this point you have made whipped cream. Keep going (it's a great workout) until you feel it change again and something is thudding about in the jar in a thin liquid. It took me 15 minutes solid shaking to get to this point. The solid mass is butter and the liquid is buttermilk. Another good indication is the cream that was coating the inside of the jar will be washed off by the butter and buttermilk.

Pour the buttermilk out and fill the jar with cold water. Wash this around a bit and pour it out again.

You need to do this over and over until the water runs clear.

It's important you get all the buttermilk out of the butter. If there's any left in there it'll go sour, so get the butter out and using a spoon or your hands press the butter and squeeze out all the buttermilk.

Join in here if you've just gone out and bought butter! We're going to add the other ingredients and transform this plain old ordinary butter into Maître d’Hôtel butter. The yield I got from my 1/2 pint of cream was 55g of butter.

Ingredients 1 generous pinch of salt
1 pinch of fresh ground pepper
1 tsp of flat leaf parsley
1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp lemon juice

Stir in the lemon juice first, then add all the rest of your ingredients.

Roll your butter up in greaseproof paper and twist the ends into a sort of bon bon shape.

Now just put it in the fridge to harden and in an hour or so you'll have a nice solid finished butter.

I warn you, this stuff is addictive. It's delicious melted over vegetables or fish, but I'm more than happy just spreading it on toast as a snack. 55 grams won't last long enough to go off in my fridge, but I recon it would keep for a week or so if I wasn't eating it.

Cheddar

I'm not going to lie, making cheddar is pretty hard work. I personally get a sense of self satisfaction at the end of it that makes it worth it but you should be pre-warned that you probably want to wait until you have a couple of days where you can afford to bum around the house and start it in the morning. I decided to make life a bit easier for myself and used some of my brewing kit this time, it certainly took a fair bit of effort out of the whole process.

I used 6 litres of whole fat cows milk at room temperature. Last time I made cheddar I used Jersey cow's milk, which was lovely, but not so convenient to source. After sterilising everything stir in 2 ounces of mesophyllic starter and leave it for about 45 minutes to an hour to sour. Then bring the milk up to 30degC in a water bath. This was where my mash tun came into play, the other way to do this is to hog the kitchen sink for the whole day and have to continually drain out the cold water and top up with hot to maintain the temperature.

Stir in about 1/4 teaspoon of mesophillic starter diluted in 2 teaspoons of water into the milk using a ladle. Rennet sinks so to evenly distribute it you need to stir in an up and down kinda motion.

After about an hour check on the milk. You're looking for what’s called the clean break - the point where the thermometer cuts through the milk rather than just submerging into it. It becomes a bit like a thin set jelly. At this point cut the curds into 1/4 inch cubes. This means cutting cross ways, lengthways, and then the same again but with the knife at a diagonal to cut across. For smaller cubes that you would cut for harder cheeses such as parmesan you can get away with using a balloon whisk, twisting the whisk as you lift it up and down in the milk.

Very soon, after about 5 minutes, the whey will drain from the curds and you'll see the curds floating in the whey. These need gentle stirring occasionally to prevent the curds from re-matting.

Over the next 30 minutes the temperature needs to be slowly brought up to 40degC, then maintained at this temperature for another 30 minutes. Remember to tend to your curds and stir them during this time. After this hour you can leave them at 40degC for 20 minutes before gently ladling into a colander lined with cheese cloth. I retain the whey at this point and make ricotta. The colander is then placed back in the pot and left to set for about 20 minutes.

When you turn it out onto a cutting board you'll have this sort of cake.

Then, using a sharp knife as the cake is very delicate, cut the cake in half and then across in about 2 inch slices. These then go back into the pot which is still being kept at a constant temperature of 40degF, the process is called cooking the curds. Every 15 minutes they need turning and the excess whey pouring out. Do this for 2 hours.

At the end of this the curds will feel a bit like cooked chicken breast. Break them up into about 1/2 inch cubes and cook for a further half an hour, stirring every 10 minutes with your fingers.

Now add 1 tablespoon of kosher salt and stir it in with your fingers. I just use good quality sea salt. Cram as many curds as you can into moulds lined with cheese cloths and it’s time to take them to be pressed. This is quite a milestone in the whole process, most of the hard work is done now and you can clean your equipment up.

Again my brewing kit made this so much easier. If you've read my post on making halloumi you'll have seen my Dutch style cheese press in action. It's a clumsy piece of kit and so I decided I needed to develop a safer method using my brewing bins. The cheese is in the bottom bin, the top bin sits inside the bottom bin and on top of the cheese. Then I just need to fill it with the volume of water required to press down with the desired force. Much safer!

The cheese is pressed at 4.5 kg (10lbs) of pressure for 15 minutes, then remove from the mould, re-bandage and press at 18kg (40lbs) for 12 hours. Finally remove it again, re-bandage and press one last time at 22.5kg (50lbs) for 24 hours. Finally, you have what resembles a cheese.

This now needs to be air dried, which is probably the most tense time in the whole process for me. The cheese needs turning regularly and drying evenly and thoroughly. I turn it whenever I walk past it or remember to, and keep them on a board, up high somewhere, covered loosely with some cloth. This can take a few days, but given that you've gone to so much effort to keep everything sterile up to now it's worrying to think that your hours of work are sitting exposed on a shelf in your kitchen. Once dried (as in dry to the touch on the outside) you can move onto waxing the cheese. Melt the wax in a bowl over some boiling water, brush the cheese all over in vinegar to kill off anything it may have picked up whilst drying and dip it in the wax to coat it.

I like to give it a good thick coat of wax and make sure it's well protected. It's now ready to be aged.

I like mature cheddar so I'll be leaving these 2 for about a year before coming back to them. For the first couple of weeks I'll monitor them closely and turn them daily, just to check that the waxing went OK and no nasty infection might have crept in there. It'll be well worth it in a year when I get to try them!

Ricotta Infornata

I always make Ricotta when I make a hard cheese now, there's not really a lot of point in throwing away perfectly good whey, so I thought I'd have a go at making ricotta infornata. There's various things can be done with ricotta, this seemed like a nice simple one to experiment with.

So firstly I needed to make some ricotta, here's a quick re-cap on that...

I started with my 6 pints of fresh whey

Which I heated to 200degF and added a little cider vinegar

Which causes albumin proteins to coagulate on the surface.

These are ladled into some cheese cloth

And left to drain a while

That's that done. I salted the drained ricotta, placed it into a lined mould and applied some light pressure for 24 hours to shape it into a block.

The block I baked in a covered oven dish for 20 minutes, then flipped it and baked for a further 20 minutes.

Which gave me this final result:

Texture and taste wise it was very much like tofu, obviously a bit nuttier and creamier though. Usually this is served up with figs and honey but I found that a light salad and some sweet onion relish went well with it, which gives me the idea that in fact this would be great for pressing into a patty shape and serving in a bun as a vegie burger??

Still, I recon theres better things you can do with this stuff. The ricotta infornata I made was quite bland and I think a bit more seasoning before moulding it, or like tofu, marinating a bit before cooking might be a good idea next time.

Soft Goats Cheese

This was a wonderfully easy cheese to make and actually yielded a reasonable amount as well. Had I used cows milk this would have worked out far cheaper than buying a spreadable cheese. As it was it worked out about the same, but with the added bonus of having that lovely goat sourness to it as well.

All I needed for this was 2 litres of goats milk brought up to 72degF (sort of room temperature).

I mixed a drop of liquid rennet in to 4-5 tablespoons of skimmed milk (I could have used water, or other milk).

Then I added this and an ounce of mesophilic starter culture to the milk and stirred it in an up and down motion for about a minute.

Then I simply covered this with cling film and left it in a cool room out the way for about 20 hours. After which time the cheese was curdled enough to ladle into some moulds lined with cheese cloth.

I left these to drain in a cool room for 2 days and they lost a lot of liquid in that time.

I tipped out the contents of the cloth into a bowl and stirred in a pinch of salt.

Next I spread out a sheet of cling film on the work surface and generously ground pepper all over it.

I spread the cheese out on the cling film...

... and carefully rolled it up into a log, trying to get as much pepper around the cheese as possible whilst also trying to avoid trapping air in.

Then I simply left this in the fridge for another day for the flavours to develop a bit and hey presto, done!

It really was a fantastically easy and tasty cheese and so inexpensive I’ll be making it a regular. I served it with some home made chutney and sourdough bread.

For future batches I’m going to try draining the cheese for an extra day to hopefully produce a slightly firmer cheese and maybe gently press a little after draining. Then try rolling in something different, such as herbs like chives, or perhaps some crushed dried chilli peppers. Or I may just leave it as it is and have it on toast with honey, one of my favourite ways to enjoy goats cheese.

Ricotta

I had about 6 pints of left over whey from making a hard cheese and it seemed a shame to waste it. Having done this recipe now I will never throw away any whey ever again!

I heated it to just over 90 deg C and stirred in 20ml of cider vinegar. Proteins quickly began forming.

I ladled the curds into a muslin lined sieve and let them drain a bit before folding in half a teaspoon of salt and some wet mesophilic starter to add a bit of bite.

I let the bag of curds hang over the sink to drain for a few hours.

Once they had drained it was ready!

The hardest part of ricotta is deciding what to do with the stuff!

Haloumi

We're in the process of moving house and our new one is still pretty much in the gutting and rebuilding stage at the moment. However, I'm desperate to get on with making some cheese. The conditions in the kitchen where we're staying at the moment serve up enough challenges as it is, without the added difficulty of attempting to find a suitable and clean environment to age a hard cheese in. So, the plan is to make haloumi which matures in a brine and won't object to the humidity or temperature of wherever I leave it to age.

I'm also limited to the amount I can make. My largest cooking vessel is 1 1/2 gallons and my cheese press probably can't handle a particularly high yield. So I'm halving the recipe to a modest 1 gallon of whole milk and 2 ounces of prepared mesophilic starter culture.

In preparation, the night before I took the milk out of the fridge and sterilised all the equipment for the morning. This will be an all day effort and I don't want to delay the start by waiting for the milk to get up to temperature and the Milton tablets to do their business.

The milk is heated to a delicate 30degC, this should not be done over direct heat. As I obviously don't have a vessel large enough to hold my largest vessel I've opted to do this in the sink, which presents me with the first problem of this kitchen in that the plug leaks and has to be packed around with cling film to keep the water in. Also doing this will mean you need to pay constant attention to the temperature and occasionally drain and replace the water in the sink which could lead to an infection issue as the thermometer will be constantly in and out of the milk.

Once at 30degC pitch in the starter culture and a few drops (1\4 a teaspoon) of liquid rennet. This needs to be stirred in an up and down motion (to evenly distribute the rennet) and left to set for 30-45 minutes until the milk gives a clean break with the thermometer. This should look something like this:

It took an extra hour for mine to get to this stage, and really I should probably have left it a little longer ideally, but I'm getting seriously behind on schedule so I moved on to the next stage. Cut the curds into half inch cubes with a sharp knife. That means cut across one way, turn 90 degrees and cut across the other way, then cut diagonals to slice across the curds below the surface.

Now bring the temperature up to 40degC over the course of 45 minutes. About 1 degree every 5 minutes. This involves constant attention, you have to gently stir the curds from time to time to keep them from matting. Mine are particularly fragile as I didn't leave them to set for very long. After 45 minutes they are very clearly visible against the whey.

Leave at this temperature for another 20 minutes and carefully ladle the curds into a colinder lined with cheese cloth.

The whey I'm retaining for a bit later so this goes back into the milk containers from this morning. On a side note, never throw whey away. You can make the best ricotta just by heating it on a stove and adding some lemon juice. But that's for another day...

Press the curds into moulds and press at 30lb of pressure for an hour, then re-bandage, turn over and press at 50lb of pressure for 30 minutes.

As you can see it's risky business, a bit like playing Buckaroo but with slightly more dire consequences as 22kg of weight goes crashing about in the kitchen. It's a relief to free the 2 moulds of curds and admire how well they turned out.

Cut them into 3 inch cubes, or in my case cut them in half as they're already quite small.

In a bit I'm going to need some cooled brine so I'd better get on with that. Add 500g of kosher salt to 1 gallon of nearly boiling water and leave to cool to make a saturated brine solution.

Bring that reserved whey up to between 80 and 90degC and cook the curds in the whey for 1 hour.

After an hour they should be firm with a texture a bit like chicken meat. Place them in a colinder and salt them with 25g of kosher salt. Now just leave them for 2-4 hours in the colinder.

Earlier I had prepared a saturated brine solution and this is what the cheese will age in. Leave it for 60 days to develop a true flavour.

I'll come back to these in March! :-)

If you like halloumi, consider holidays in Cyprus.