Our favorite witch stirs up a powerful pot of Feta!
I first interviewed Jayne in April, 2010, when she was just starting to make cheese. (Interview #4 with a New Cheese Maker) Then, in July, I posted her great article about Making Farmhouse Cheddar.
You can find more of her cheesemaking adventures at her popular blog called The Barefoot Kitchen Witch. I love her articles, so I asked if I could publish her Feta post, and, as usual, she agreed:
Making Feta
By Jayne Maker
August 31, 2010
http://www.barefootkitchenwitch.com/the_barefoot_kitchen_witc/2010/08/making-feta.html#more
At long last, after a summer-long painting-induced hiatus, I’m back to making cheese again. I missed it. I especially missed goat cheese.
Fortunately for me, I had close to 3 gallons of goats’ milk in the freezer from earlier trips to the Farmers’ Market this summer. I needed to get the milk out of there so I could organize all the soup stocks and bags of clams and conch before chaos took over, so the timing was perfect. I’d ordered direct set Chèvre and Mesophilic cultures from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company earlier in the week, and they had arrived within a couple of days, so this past Sunday was perfect for cheesemaking.
I figured I’d make a gallon’s worth of Chèvre and two gallons’ worth of Feta, so I divided the milk between pots to thaw and then pasteurize it. Why not do all that in one pot? Apart from the fact that I don’t have a pot big enough to hold 3 gallons of milk, I also figured the one gallon of milk would heat up first, and after holding it at 145F for half an hour, I could drop it down quickly to 86F, add the Chèvre culture, put the lid on and forget about it til the next morning. By then the milk for the Feta would (should) be ready to go.
And it pretty much worked out that way.
The only glitch was that one of the gallon jugs only contained somewhere between half and three quarters of a gallon – not a full gallon. So I figured I could just add whole milk to bring it up to a full gallon once I’d pasteurized the goat milk.
And that’s what I did.
So I’ll skip the heating of the milk and the cooling down of the milk part and the making of the Chèvre and start things off when the other 2 gallons of milk are at 86 F.
I added 2 packets of direct-set Mesophilic starter, stirred, and let the whole thing sit with the lid on for an hour – to ripen.
After an hour the milk temp was still at 86F, which is just where I wanted it. (I’m sure it helped that the air temp was hovering in the same vicinity.) Now it was time to add the rennet. One teaspoon of liquid rennet diluted in half a cup of cool water. I poured that in, stirred it gently “with an up-and-down motion” per the book’s instructions (Home Cheese Making), put the lid back on, and let it sit for another hour.
And then the lid went back on the pot and the little curd cubes rested for ten minutes. During this time the curds are setting and releasing some more whey. So don’t just think they’re lying around doing nothing!
They’re passively busy.
When my sister and I were little, my mother got interested in Chinese cooking. She bought a wok – which Bill and I have now – and started creating dishes with what was available at the time – things like LaChoy canned bean sprouts and water chestnuts…and those crunchy Chinese noodles – those were my favorite part of the meal back then. Mom would stir-fry broccoli florets (ugh!) and onion and thinly sliced carrot with the canned stuff…and strips of chicken or beef maybe, and then sometimes she would add cubes of wobbly, watery, anemic bean curd.
Ohhh, my sister and I thought that was the height of grossness. We’d say it tasted yucky, and mom would tell us “It has no taste!” And while I admit to telling my kids the same thing when necessary (why I would think they’re going to believe me is a mystery…I think it’s just some odd mothering reflex), it DID have a taste. Not an overpowering taste, like chicken livers (which, oddly enough, I LOVED), but just a very faint, vegetive (I know, it’s not a word), blah, ever-so-slightly metallic flavorless taste. If that makes any sense. So I rebelled against tofu for many years, until I was an adult, living on my own, and a (temporary) vegan. I went back to meat, but I also brought along a new appreciation for tofu. As long as it’s cooked.
Sujatha Gopal says
not sure if you remember now – it has been 3 years – but did the feta finally become crumbly? i made some yesterday and it looked as plasticky and stretchy as yours did – and i kind of dried them overnight after sprinkling salt all over it – not sure if i like rubbery feta – isnt it supposed to be crumbly?
Thanks for tutorial. It was great and I can't wait to try this. I love Feta cheese 🙂