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Hmm, I accidentally made mozzarella today. I was trying to make ricotta. I usually add the vinegar to the milk right after I've turned on the heat. Then when it's hot if the proteins don't coagulate I add a little more vinegar. This time, I got the milk hot first. Then added vinegar until the proteins coagulated. When I strained the whey the resulting curd was in much larger pieces then normal. When I was going to remove the cheese from the dish towel, it was kinda stretchy and sticky. So I worked it in my hands for a few minutes and it stretched just like mozzarella. It tasted like unsalted mozz too. It's in the fridge in brine now.

This was 1/2 gallon of skim milk and 3/4 gallon of 1% milk. Usually I make cheese with whole milk.

That really screws with my understanding of the process for making mozzarella. I think next time I'll use skim milk and just add citric acid solution to the hot milk, and see what happens.
 
Leadgolem said:
Hmm, I accidentally made mozzarella today. I was trying to make ricotta. I usually add the vinegar to the milk right after I've turned on the heat. Then when it's hot if the proteins don't coagulate I add a little more vinegar. This time, I got the milk hot first. Then added vinegar until the proteins coagulated. When I strained the whey the resulting curd was in much larger pieces then normal. When I was going to remove the cheese from the dish towel, it was kinda stretchy and sticky. So I worked it in my hands for a few minutes and it stretched just like mozzarella. It tasted like unsalted mozz too. It's in the fridge in brine now.

This was 1/2 gallon of skim milk and 3/4 gallon of 1% milk. Usually I make cheese with whole milk.

That really screws with my understanding of the process for making mozzarella. I think next time I'll use skim milk and just add citric acid solution to the hot milk, and see what happens.
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What do you use as a brine?
 
Stauffbier said:
What do you use as a brine?
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A saturated salt solution. I mix sea salt and Himalayan salt 1:1, then stir that into warm water until it stops dissolving. I keep that in the fridge when I'm not using it. I've had my brine in there for about two months and it's still just fine. With all the salt in it, I'm not exactly shocked though. :)

I didn't have any cheese salt when I made my brine, and this seems to work very well. There is supposed to be something bad about using iodized salt when you are making cheese. Though I don't remember what right now. Hence the sea salt, plus I already had that when I needed to make the brine.
 
I haven't tried a brine with my mozz. I usually just add cheese salt (or popcorn salt) when I stretch it and then wrap it in plastic wrap. I'll have to give brining a try sometime.
 
Leadgolem said:
A saturated salt solution. I mix sea salt and Himalayan salt 1:1, then stir that into warm water until it stops dissolving. I keep that in the fridge when I'm not using it. I've had my brine in there for about two months and it's still just fine. With all the salt in it, I'm not exactly shocked though. :)

I didn't have any cheese salt when I made my brine, and this seems to work very well. There is supposed to be something bad about using iodized salt when you are making cheese. Though I don't remember what right now. Hence the sea salt, plus I already had that when I needed to make the brine.
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I wouldn't use iodized salt in any case. I don't even cook with it at all, and use it strictly as a table salt, which is more than enough to keep myself from looking like a bullfrog. I mainly just use kosher salt in cooking and imagine that's what I'll mainly use when I start making cheese (which I should probably just go ahead and do - I've had citric acid and an unopened bottle of calf rennet in my fridge for a year or two, now). The only other salts I use are various finishing salts - fleur de sel, sel gris, etc - in my better/more expensive meals (like on a good steak, truffle mac and cheese, etc).
 
Stauffbier said:
I haven't tried a brine with my mozz. I usually just add cheese salt (or popcorn salt) when I stretch it and then wrap it in plastic wrap. I'll have to give brining a try sometime.
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I like how the cheese turns out. Leave it in the brine for a couple days, then take it out and give it another couple days for the salt content to even out. It seems to work very well that way.

emjay said:
I wouldn't use iodized salt in any case. I don't even cook with it at all, and use it strictly as a table salt, which is more than enough to keep myself from looking like a bullfrog. I mainly just use kosher salt in cooking and imagine that's what I'll mainly use when I start making cheese (which I should probably just go ahead and do - I've had citric acid and an unopened bottle of calf rennet in my fridge for a year or two, now). The only other salts I use are various finishing salts - fleur de sel, sel gris, etc - in my better/more expensive meals (like on a good steak, truffle mac and cheese, etc).
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Just out of curiosity, why is that? Do you find the difference in flavor between kosher and iodized table salt to be that great?
 
Man I am dead beat. Two days and I cut 20 cord of wood from the car lot. My hands are sore and I am just beat from my head to my toes.

Hehe though we drank a lot of beer doing it though. So much to the point he brought a keg out to us :ban:

Dang now I have to sell the wood though and that means one more time loading and unloading it....And more beer.

Dang it takes a lot of beer to cut wood the way I do :ban:
 
You're braver than I. I don't touch a chainsaw after drinking beer.

20 cord is a lot of wood. Full cord or face cord?

I'll bet you smell good now (pine, love it!)

Varmintman said:
Man I am dead beat. Two days and I cut 20 cord of wood from the car lot. My hands are sore and I am just beat from my head to my toes.

Hehe though we drank a lot of beer doing it though. So much to the point he brought a keg out to us :ban:

Dang now I have to sell the wood though and that means one more time loading and unloading it....And more beer.

Dang it takes a lot of beer to cut wood the way I do :ban:
Click to expand...
 
Sorry about the play by play earlier today, but it was a bad storm and I did get afraid I'd die before getting to try the oregano batch.
 
bottlebomber said:
No smoked salts, mj?
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Nope. Not yet, anyways. Other than bacon, ham, lox, and perhaps turkey legs (and MAYBE chipotle, which has become something of a fad here in recent years), Canada as a whole just doesn't do much smoked stuff. Definitely nothing like in the US... we just don't have a culture of BBQ like you guys do.

Which pretty much sucks. American BBQ is delicious, with Memphis-style pulled pork butt probably being my absolute favorite. Pulled pork has also been something of a fad in recent years, offered by restaurants and as prepared meals at grocery stores. But I don't think I've ever seen a place that actually smokes their pulled pork. And as if that wasn't bad enough, there's no bark or anything even in the way of a rub at all, and so it is virtually inevitably going to depend on the sauce, which is virtually inevitably going to be a "chipotle" sauce, in quotes because THAT virtually inevitably really means an adobo sauce (and it's not that I don't like adobo sauce, but rather that it just doesn't hold a candle to most regional styles in the US). So the pulled pork I make a good rub for (producing a delicious bark), a good sauce for (usually Memphis-style as I mentioned is my favorite, though the bark is so good that sauce isn't even necessary), and smoke with hickory and apple wood chips in foil packets on my gas grill, is really easily the best I've ever had in this ENTIRE country, by far.

So yeah... smoked salt :fro:. I might smoke my own salt when I finally get myself a WSM (probably this spring or summer).

I'm not even sure why I typed all this to you; the only thing you've ever smoked is pole.
 
emjay said:
Nope. Not yet, anyways. Other than bacon, ham, lox, and perhaps turkey legs (and MAYBE chipotle, which has become something of a fad here in recent years), Canada as a whole just doesn't do much smoked stuff. Definitely nothing like in the US... we just don't have a culture of BBQ like you guys do.

Which pretty much sucks. American BBQ is delicious, with Memphis-style pulled pork butt probably being my absolute favorite. Pulled pork has also been something of a fad in recent years, offered by restaurants and as prepared meals at grocery stores. But I don't think I've ever seen a place that actually smokes their pulled pork. And as if that wasn't bad enough, there's no bark or anything even in the way of a rub at all, and so it is virtually inevitably going to depend on the sauce, which is virtually inevitably going to be a "chipotle" sauce, in quotes because THAT virtually inevitably really means an adobo sauce (and it's not that I don't like adobo sauce, but rather that it just doesn't hold a candle to most regional styles in the US). So the pulled pork I make a good rub for (producing a delicious bark), a good sauce for (usually Memphis-style as I mentioned is my favorite, though the bark is so good that sauce isn't even necessary), and smoke with hickory and apple wood chips in foil packets on my gas grill, is really easily the best I've ever had in this ENTIRE country, by far.

So yeah... smoked salt :fro:. I might smoke my own salt when I finally get myself a WSM (probably this spring or summer).

I'm not even sure why I typed all this to you; the only thing you've ever smoked is pole.
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I do pulled pork all the time. No sauce here (altough I like it). My family likes to add their own sauce. I used to smoke over hickory (and applewood sometimes), but I don't anymore since I switched to a lump coal that adds a ton of smoked flavor.

Yep, bark is king. Love the bark. Now I'm hungry (again).
 
Leadgolem said:
I like how the cheese turns out. Leave it in the brine for a couple days, then take it out and give it another couple days for the salt content to even out. It seems to work very well that way.

Just out of curiosity, why is that? Do you find the difference in flavor between kosher and iodized table salt to be that great?
Click to expand...

Varmintman said:
Man I am dead beat. Two days and I cut 20 cord of wood from the car lot. My hands are sore and I am just beat from my head to my toes.

Hehe though we drank a lot of beer doing it though. So much to the point he brought a keg out to us :ban:

Dang now I have to sell the wood though and that means one more time loading and unloading it....And more beer.

Dang it takes a lot of beer to cut wood the way I do :ban:
Click to expand...

passedpawn said:
You're braver than I. I don't touch a chainsaw after drinking beer.

20 cord is a lot of wood. Full cord or face cord?

I'll bet you smell good now (pine, love it!)
Click to expand...

Full cord means the same thing as a face cord HERE the it might not be the same where you're at. There's a lot of different names I've seen to mean the exact same things, but here they're usually referring to one of two things: a "face cord (less often, a "full cord" or even simply a "cord"), and what the country folk call a "bush cord".
 
I don't have anywhere to put the wort I brewed today. Still wort because no yeast added yet. The IPA batch, came after the oregano batch. Hmmm. could pull out a glass carboy but don't think I can lift that anymore when full, hurts my back. It can stay in the kettle, covered up until tomorrow I guess.
 
emjay said:
I'm not even sure why I typed all this to you; the only thing you've ever smoked is pole.
Click to expand...

Ha, troo! But your post confirms my suspicions that Canada is at least 50 years behind. But possibly 3500. Even though you're a b!tch, if I ever send you a beer shipment I'll throw in a jar of smoked salt. I've got at least 4 or 5 different kinds. It's awesome on tomatoes with some cheese and baguette. You do have tomatoes, correct?
 
Here a cord is 4x4x8, however you want to stack it. I prefer to make on of the 4's be the height, but there's plenty of people with 8' high wood piles too. My parents had a massive oak come down about 3 years ago, took a smaller tree with it, and the tree guys left it in 18'' thick rounds. It took me most of a summer of weekends to chop it, but if I was smart I would have tried to handle it sooner. The green wood popped nicely, but after a month of baking in the California sun it got hard and stringy. I got just under 5 cords from that single tree, hand split, and I thought that was a lot. I can't imagine 20.
 
bottlebomber said:
Here a cord is 4x4x8, however you want to stack it. I prefer to make on of the 4's be the height, but there's plenty of people with 8' high wood piles too. My parents had a massive oak come down about 3 years ago, took a smaller tree with it, and the tree guys left it in 18'' thick rounds. It took me most of a summer of weekends to chop it, but if I was smart I would have tried to handle it sooner. The green wood popped nicely, but after a month of baking in the California sun it got hard and stringy. I got just under 5 cords from that single tree, hand split, and I thought that was a lot. I can't imagine 20.
Click to expand...

Just the opposite for me... I can't split new new wood. Needs to be 6 months and it snaps apart.
 
passedpawn said:
Just the opposite for me... I can't split new new wood. Needs to be 6 months and it snaps apart.
Click to expand...

Maybe the difference between pine and oak? I know pine is kind of spongy when it's green, and come to think of it I've had the mallet bounce off of green pine like rubber, but I haven't split much pine. Actually I remember the madrone splitting a lot easier when it was seasoned too.. Maybe it was just this cursed oak. It was kind of funny actually, the tree had 4 very large terminal trunks. That evening by some freakish intuition my father parked his truck at the top of the bend instead of in front of the house, and my mom was out of town. Also they had some custom made patio cover pieces that had just been powder coated and delivered, and those were in the driveway as well. When the tree came down the pieces all seemed to fall exactly where they should, missing vehicles and custom patio covers. Only the power line was snagged. The bizarre thing was that the inside of the tree was rotted down to 6 feet undergoing, and in the trunk there was luminescent fungus that glowed for the first two nights. Weirdest thing.
 
bottlebomber said:
Maybe the difference between pine and oak? I know pine is kind of spongy when it's green, and come to think of it I've had the mallet bounce off of green pine like rubber, but I haven't split much pine. Actually I remember the madrone splitting a lot easier when it was seasoned too.. Maybe it was just this cursed oak. It was kind of funny actually, the tree had 4 very large terminal trunks. That evening by some freakish intuition my father parked his truck at the top of the bend instead of in front of the house, and my mom was out of town. Also they had some custom made patio cover pieces that had just been powder coated and delivered, and those were in the driveway as well. When the tree came down the pieces all seemed to fall exactly where they should, missing vehicles and custom patio covers. Only the power line was snagged. The bizarre thing was that the inside of the tree was rotted down to 6 feet undergoing, and in the trunk there was luminescent fungus that glowed for the first two nights. Weirdest thing.
Click to expand...


Hah, I would like some of that fungus.

I have all oaks on my property, so that is what I was referring to. My last house had pines and I'm glad to be rid of that. The sap and needles made a mess.
 
passedpawn said:
Hah, I would like some of that fungus.

I have all oaks on my property, so that is what I was referring to. My last house had pines and I'm glad to be rid of that. The sap and needles made a mess.
Click to expand...

According to the oracle hardwood is easier to split when it is colder, regardless of green or seasoned. So maybe that was why it got harder to split as the year went on.
 
passedpawn said:
Anyone watch the Masters golf tournament. Wow, what an exciting finish.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry, this comment makes no sense. Golf and exciting cannot exist in the same paragraph unless you are referring to the VW Golf GTI.:D

bottlebomber said:
Maybe the difference between pine and oak? I know pine is kind of spongy when it's green, and come to think of it I've had the mallet bounce off of green pine like rubber, but I haven't split much pine. Actually I remember the madrone splitting a lot easier when it was seasoned too.. Maybe it was just this cursed oak. It was kind of funny actually, the tree had 4 very large terminal trunks. That evening by some freakish intuition my father parked his truck at the top of the bend instead of in front of the house, and my mom was out of town. Also they had some custom made patio cover pieces that had just been powder coated and delivered, and those were in the driveway as well. When the tree came down the pieces all seemed to fall exactly where they should, missing vehicles and custom patio covers. Only the power line was snagged. The bizarre thing was that the inside of the tree was rotted down to 6 feet undergoing, and in the trunk there was luminescent fungus that glowed for the first two nights. Weirdest thing.
Click to expand...
images
 
passedpawn said:
Anyone watch the Masters golf tournament. Wow, what an exciting finish.
Click to expand...

Not only watched it but watched it twice, some parts 3 times. One for the ages. I usually have it on the Masters website live, I like Amen corner, and 15 16 feeds, I watch the network feed and Directv feeds. Masters week, I get nothing done. Oh, and I watched the Tiger game at the same time.
 
Wow that is incredibly dangerous unless you really know what you are doing. It would be safer to taste gas to see which grade it is before you put it in your car.
Are the colors screaming at you or are you doubled over in pain?
 

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