This Christmas I got my mom a cheese making kit on Etsy from
Urban Cheesecraft. It was really awesome, and resonably priced. It came with everything you need to make cheese ten times, except the milk. Before I left for Germnay we had a mother-daughter day in the kitchen. It turned out to be a multi-day process. This was not because it actually takes that long to make ricotta cheese, but because we were absolute failures at making it the first time. The directions were simple and straight forward. I think we went wrong in being too uptight about the process. Does this make sense to you? It was like we tried too hard so it didn't work. We never stopped having fun though. So we thought it would be a fun idea to document some of the process.
In making cheese you heat the milk until the curds and whey seperate. This never happened for us. We weren't sure exactly what it was supposed to look like. This resulted in us moving along with the directions prematurely. Needless to say, it didn't turn out. What we were left with was something that resembled buttermilk. We didn't want to waste all the milk so we decided to bake with it.
Our decision was to use it to make rice pudding. Our famliy loves rice pudding and the recipe calls for a lot of milk. It was in baking the rice pudding that the curds finally seperated from the whey. Our rice pudding looked so weird.
We were practically on the floor with laughter. Again, we did not want to waste it so we ate it anyway. It was surprisingly good given its odd texture. Unfortunatley too, the look of it reminded me of fancy feast. Good thing it didn't smell like cat food. It smelled as good as it tasted.
In the future, when cooking starts to go wrong, I think I may just (remember this day) and cut my losses. And now that my mom has that episode under her belt I'm sure she's going to make perfect cheese next time.
I doubt I'll be making my own cheese here any time soon. I just couldn't imagine making my own when I am already surrounded by such gorgeous cheese already.
