Category: Uncategorized
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Paneer
Paneer is a cheese associated with the Indian continent. It is a fresh cheese, often not made, which is entirely vegetarian: it is not made with rennet, but with an acidic curdling agent. Often this is lemon juice or vinegar, but any acid will do, and in industrial preparations powedered citric acid is often used.…
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Bel Paese Italico
Bel Paese (Italian for “Beautiful Country”), or Italico, is a relatively recent cheese. It was invented by Egidio Galbani (founder of one of the biggest industrial cheese-making companies in Italy) in 1906, as a response to the overwhelming quantities of French cheeses found in the shops in Milan. That’s where the vaguely nationalistic name comes from.…
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Mozzarella (with cow milk)
When I decided to move to the UK, one of the first issues I thought was the lack of “proper” mozzarella. Coming from Puglia, a region known for an extensive production of cow-milk mozzarella, I was truly addicted. As a consequence, mozzarella was one of the first cheeses I researched into; and, as difficult as…
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Crescenza
Crescenza is a type of Stracchino (in my future plans). It differs from it because of a shorter maturation time: Crescenza doesn’t go through the 20-30 days of (cold) maturation prescribed for Stracchino, and it is ready to eat after about a week. It is quite creamy, but less creamy than Stracchino, which is generally…
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Halloumi
Halloumi has always been on one of my favourite cheeses for its versatility: you can eat it cold, you can warm it up in the microwave or, best than all, grill it. It grills as if it was meat: given its very low water contents, it’s basically a solid piece of lactose and casein.…
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Impatient eater
I didn’t have any patience this time, and decided, after just 3 weeks, to eat my simil-Cheddar cheese. One of the reasons of this is that I didn’t manage to mature it in a room cool enough, so certain ageing processes proceeded very quickly, turning the cheese hard enough to be ready for eating. Here…
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For starters… 2/2
In the previous post, I presented a procedure to make some cheese that we would mature as cheddar. The same procedure, cut shorter, can be used to make some very simple fresh cheese. In this blog post I will show you how to adapt the procedure explained in the previous blog post and make some…
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For starters… 1/2
I’m always in two minds about what to consider a good “for dummies” introduction to cheese-making. The problem with very simple recipes is that they don’t capture a full view of all the possible processes and phases of cheese-making, so I prefer to go through a slightly more complex procedure to give a general idea,…
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What about cheese?
Hello, lost readers. You might wonder what you’re doing on a blog about cheese-making. Well, as you probably know I’ve been making cheese for some time. Some friends have become quite curious about it, and someone has even asked me to do a talk at a conference. I’ve realised, in short, that cheese-making is something…