Author: Steen

Steen is a nerdy biologist who spends a lot of time trying to cultivate Chloroflexi, who also likes to draw comics, play video games, and climb.

Peace Master! Duhn nuhn nuhn nuuuh!

Right up until just a few weeks ago, I was completely without any inspiration as to what to wear for Halloween this year. I had finally resigned myself to recycling a previous year’s costume, but then I saw the Adventure Time episode “Nemesis” whilst trying to catch up on Season 6.

Suddenly, I was inspired! There was this goofy character that was a riff on the old Witch-Hunter / The Hunter Trope, who has sworn to defeat evil, whilst also raising 3 children and driving around in a minivan.

Doc thinks that Peace Master leans a bit towards He Who Fights Monsters and/or Van Helsing Hate Crimes in that he believes Peace Master is struggling with evil within himself and this is what fuels his intense hatred of evil and the dark arts, but I disagree. I think he is more of the Mage Killer / Witch Hunter played straight.

Peace_Master_costume

Plus, he looks very “costumey.” So I pulled together a costume, and it worked out! Hooray!

An extra bonus about the Peace Master costume: it has a built-in purse. Most costumes don’t have a purse, and/or wearing your purse with them detracts. But the Peace Master costume requires a purse. That worked out really well.

Farmhouse Cheddar

Today, since Doc and I had already taken that cheese making class, I decided to make some farmhouse cheddar today!

Since we are still experimenting with all the factors, Doc and I decided to make four little cheeses instead of one big cheese:

  1. Pasteurized milk, aged 4 months
  2. Pasteurized milk, aged 8 months
  3. Raw milk, aged 4 months
  4. Raw milk, aged 8 months
Cheese making
Stirring the curds in a warm water bath (aka my sink). The pot on the right has the raw milk, the pot on the left has the pasteurized milk.

These were the only variables, though. All cheese permutations were made from non-homogenized Jersey cow’s milk. I’m hoping that the pasteurized milk cheese tastes just as good as the raw milk cheese, because raw milk is incredibly expensive (makes sense why it would be, having a much shorter shelf life, but still).

Cheese making
Breaking up the curds into little pieces and salting them, after the first draining step.

I could really tell the difference between the two milks, though. You need to add calcium chloride to pasteurized milk in order to use it for cheese, otherwise it won’t form a firm enough curd. So there’s that. But the pasteurized milk whey was a very bright brilliant yellow, whereas the raw milk curd was a much duller yellow, almost a greyish yellow in comparison. I do not know why this would be. You can see the color difference in the photos, but it seemed even more dramatic in person.

Cheese making
One of the cheeses after the first pressing.

When they’re done aging, we’ll taste them in side-by-side comparisons and decide if the raw milk is worth the extra cost. I wanted to age one of the test cheeses for over a year, but Doc suggested that since these are just tiny test cheeses, we should do a shorter aging process so we can start on the large-batch cheeses (to age over a year) sooner.

Cheese making
We made improvised cheese molds by cutting slits into old salsa containers for the whey to drain through while they got pressed.

The bacteria we used were lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis and lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris. I’ve read that Streptococcus thermophilus is being used more and more in industrial cheddar production, but it wasn’t present in the little culture packet we bought.

We’ll see how it turns out!

Cheese Class

Doc at the Farmcurious Cheese Class
Doc drinking wine and making his signature sultry face at the cheese making class

Today Doc and I took Farmcurious’ “Three Cheeses in Three Hours with Wine” class and had a lot of fun. We made mozzarella, burrata, and goat cheese. Originally the class made ricotta instead of burrata, but due to popular demand it got changed.

Doc wanted his cheese to be extra squeaky and rubbery, like the Wisconsin cheese curds often advertised as “The Squeakiest Cheese Curds Around!” and I think he got what he wanted.