Cheese Making Day 1

Well technically its day two. Yesterday I cultured the buttermilk. They say you can use buttermilk from the store to make cheese but its not as good. So I bought a little packet of powdered buttermilk culture to make my own from scratch. That process involves heating pasturized milk to 80 degrees, stirring in the packet, putting it in a thermos to keep the temp at about 80 and letting it sit on the counter for 24 hours. 80 degrees is apparently the best temp for growing bacteria. I never realized what cheese really is until I made it for the first time. Letting milk sit on the counter overnight and get all thick and chunky goes against everything I know. But that's what cheese is, bacteria. But its the right kinds of good bacteria, a chunky glass of expired milk is not on its way to becoming cheese! After 24 hours the cultured buttermilk goes into a labeled mason jar in the fridge. The nice thing about most of these cultures is that you don't have to create the whole process from scratch every time you run out of buttermilk. You just take one part buttermilk and add 4 parts whole milk. Give it some time and the bacteria repopulate the whole jar into buttermilk again.

So today I had to pasturize 5 quarts of milk since I hadn't done that yet. I cooled it to 80 degrees, added 1/3 cup buttermilk, 2 Tbs diluted rennet and now it sits on the counter for 8-12 hours. I really didn't plan this well because now I will have to get up at 6am and start draining it in the cheesecloth before I go to work. Luckily that's an easy process too. I'm still a newbie at this cheesemaking but it doesn't seem that hard. You do a few little things one day, let it sit for a while, do a few little things the next day then let it sit. Its a slow process but not all that hard. Other cheeses are more difficult so I may have something different to say when I start trying those. I'm anxious to try cheddar. I'm still waiting for Mike to make me a cheese press. Its much cheaper than buying one and it really is a pretty simple contraption. I'm also waiting for him to build me a milk stand and a chicken coop. The honey-do list is getting long.

Yesterday I planted my tomato seeds in little pots. I've never grown tomatos from seeds so this is new also. I usually just get the plants from the greenhouse and put them right into the garden. I'm also trying to grow sweet potato slips this year. That's not going so well. I bought a sweet potato at the grocery store and put in a glass jar half full of water and suspended with toothpicks. Its been sitting in the sun for about 2 weeks now and nothing is happening. I don't think this is going to work out. Last time I ordered sweet potato slips from a catalog and they arrived in the middle of June and practically dead. I planted them and they basically did nothing for a while then started grow late August, way too late in the summer for them to produce anything. I think I may just give up on sweet potatos.

Now I'm off to make some fresh buttermilk biscuits!