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Making cheese, day two

Nik — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:49:52 +0000

Rremarkably – because I really wan’t all that sure it would work – the cheese starter has been a success. We now have far, far more than we need. A litre, to be precise, which is 1000ml. And how much did we need? 7.5ml.

Taking 7.5ml from our litre of starter

We knew it was ready because of the way it looked. Shaking the jug in which we’d made it set it wobbling like a blancmange, and it had a slightly acrid sharp smell.

So today was day two, when the cheese making proper began.

First ingredient, more milk. We’re using full fat milk because I suspect that the fat content (4%) will give us firmer curds, although at the moment that is pure speculation on my part.

We poured a litre of it into a pan, heated it gently to take off the chill (to 30 degrees Celsius / 86 degrees Fahrenheit) and then stirred in the 7.5ml of starter. It then needs to sit for three quarters of an hour while the cultures grow.

Adding cheese starter to our pan

When the time is up we added 5ml of vegetarian rennet, which is what helps separate the curds (solid parts) and whey (liquid parts) so that the whey can be disposed of and the solids retained to make the cheese. With the rennet added we left it for a further 45 minutes during which it did its magic. Coming back to it at the end of that time we found that our thick milk had turned more or less solid – enough to be sliced with a knife.

We cut it up into small squares then put it back on the hob to heat to 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) while we stirred it, then took it off the heat and left it to settle for 10 minutes. It was at this point that the curds and whey properly separated, leaving a yellowy liquid floating on top of the solids.

The whey needs to be drained off, so we lined a sieve with the muslin bag we use to strain jelly and poured the contents of the pan through it. It was very effective, and much quicker than stacking and pressing, which is the accepted routine.

Straining the cheese mixture

With the curds fully drained and quite dry we put them back in the empty pan, mashed them up with a wooden spoon and added a gram of salt to stop the bacteria from multiplying any more. Why one gram? Because we were using a litre of milk.

Now all we need to do is harden it up. We’ve packed it into a cheese mould, wrapped in cheese cloth and set the whole thing in the fruit press with a fair amount of pressure.

Over the next four days we’ll have to remove it every evening and turn it over and reapply the pressure, at the end of which we should have something that looks more or less like a conventional cheese.

That’s when the waiting begins as it slowly matures.

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How to make cheese starter

Nik — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:37:05 +0000

Time to get serious. After the success of our yoghurt cheese, which turned out to be quite like a low-salt Philadelphia, we’re trying our hand at proper hard cheese – the sort you can grate onto a cottage pie, slice for a sandwich or grill on toast.

Needless to say it’s all a bit more involved and requires some more kit, so we’ve invested in a proper press (£50), which will squeeze the whey from the curds and form the cheese’s shape (and can also be used to press fruit for wine in the summer), some vegetarian rennet so solidify the milk, a cheese cloth to wrap it all in, and some cheese culture.

The whole process takes several days, after which we’ll have to leave the cheese for four to 10 weeks to mature before we eat it.

The first stage is to make up the starter, which is the bacterial liquid that will form the basis of all of our cheeses for the foreseeable future, as by the time this first task is done we’ll have a litre of the stuff, which is far (far far) more than we need. Fortunately what we don’t use can be frozen.

Because we bought our milk from the shops rather than taking it straight from a cow there was no need to boil it to kill off the bugs as it had already been pasteurised. Instead we raised the temperature to 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) and whisked in the cheese culture, bought online from a cheese-making supplies firm.

When we were sure this was properly combined, we poured the culture and milk into a large, sterilised jug, put film over the top to keep out the dust and capped it with a plate to keep in the heat. As we don’t have a warm airing cupboard, we then stood it on a very cool radiator where it will stay until tomorrow evening, by which time the starter should be ready to use and we can start making proper cheese.

I’ll let you know how we get on.

Heating milk to make cheese

January 2010 egg count shows how our chickens are declining

Nik — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 08:20:30 +0000

I‘ve counted up the eggs our chickens laid in January. All in, there were 29, which is an improvement on December when we got only 25. Here’s hoping for a better February.

29 eggs, bought in the shops, would have cost about £8.20 (at £1.70 for half a dozen free range) so the hens have paid for themselves, but still it’s not a great number.

When we’ve had a few more months of this year I’ll go back to drawing up the graphs I did last year to show how their laying is progressing through the seasons, but with only one month to count there’s not much point just now. Instead, here’s a comparison between 2009’s egg count for January, when our birds were around six months old, and 2010’s January count, when they were about 18 months.

Number of eggs laid by three hens in January 2009 and January 2010

It isn’t great, is it. We got about a third the number of eggs this January just gone that we did in January last year.

Or, to put it into context, one hen last year could have laid about the same as all three combined managed in the same month this year.

I think we should expect a similar decrease month on month for every direct comparison we make between 2009 and 2010.

Easy-to-grow crops, the ultimate eco house and solar panel loans

Nik — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:15:21 +0000

A round-up of self-sufficiency news from this week’s papers.

Solar Panel Loans are set to make home-based electricity generation more affordable, says The Independent. Further:

…people who generate electricity via photovoltaic solar panels, wind turbines, hydro power or anaerobic digestion will receive up to 36p per kW/h of electricity, even if they use the power in their homes rather than feed it into the national grid. An extra 6p will be paid for every unit supplied to the grid.

So even if you don’t supply power to the grid you get paid. This could finally encourage mass adoption of solar and wind power.

The Telegraph reports from the house that costs £60 a year to heat yet still boasts ‘hot tubs, a sauna, a state of the art cooker’ and even a banana tree that’s kept warm enough to provide fruit, despite being built not on the equator but in the middle of the Cotswolds. Called Tranquility, the eco-house could be a blueprint for future sustainable design.

The Guardian, meanwhile, is tempting first-time growers with five easy crops for beginners, including potatoes, garlic and chard. The instructions are short and non-challenging, and ideal for the novice.

Re-thinking that scarf

Nik — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:28:54 +0000

So, a change of plan on the knitting. All was going well, but slowly, and by the time I’d got 12cm into my scarf I realised that it was actually far too wide to be of any comfortable use. This thing would keep a whale warm and need some serious lengthwise folding to fit under a coat.

So I thought I’d narrow it off. I double-knitted a couple of stitches together at the end of each row until I’d reduced it from 58 stitches wide to just 35. Much, much better. A better size and quicker to knit.

I kidded myself – for a day at least – that when I got to the end I’d flare it out again by the same amount and do another 12cm of the wider design. I knitted it up to 30cm, then looked at it again.

It looks terrible.

Who, really, would wear a scarf that looks like that? Not me, that’s for sure. So tough though the decision was I’ve slipped it off the needles and pulled it all apart, re-wrapping the yarn back onto the ball, and started again.

I’ve cast on 35 stitches and am now speeding away. It’s much better at this width: faster to knit, less cumbersome, more fulfilling and more likely to be comfortable to wear when it’s finished.

Scarf 2.0 is looking good so far.

Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps

Nik — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:15:11 +0000

Sometimes you need something straightforward, no-nonsense and down to earth. That’s exactly what you get with Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps. Written in 1941, when wartime rationing meant that every scrap of food had to be put to good use and throwing out your trimmings was an unforgivable waste, it’s a crash course in cutting down the amount of paid-for chicken food you use while at the same time making sure your hens don’t go hungry.

To keep them in optimum laying condition, your chickens need to get a large part of their daily nutrition from dedicated poultry feed – most often layers pellets or mash. Supplementing this with kitchen offcuts greatly enhances the quality of your eggs, giving you richer yolks and tastier cakes. This books switches that around, though, explaining how to massively cut your food bill by upping the scrap quantity without depriving your flock of its essential nutrients.

From a practical standpoint, it’s excellent. It isn’t sentimental (who could afford that during the war?), explaining how to identify and deal with chickens that aren’t producing an adequate supply of eggs in return for their food, and how to raise your own flock, either from eggs or from very young chicks.

It’s as relevant today as it was when it was first written, and massively under-sells itself with that title. We only knew how wide-ranging it was because we found a copy in a shop and had a flick through, or else we might have thought it was literally about managing your hens’ feed. In reality it covers housing, illness, injuries, how to humanely kill your birds and so on.

All of this is done without frill or fuss, explaining all you need to know in a slim 97 pages, with the rest of the book given over to keeping rabbits.

For the first time chicken keeper it’s essential reading, along with Henkeeping by Jane Eastoe (click the link for review).

Price £6.99 (£4.45 from Amazon)
Authors Claude Goodchild and Alan Thompson
ISBN 0141038624

What The Good Life can tell us about self-sufficiency

Nik — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:17:46 +0000

We’re re-watching The Good Life. It’s a lot gentler and rather more ’situation’ than ‘comedy’ than might you remember, but it’s still an easy wind-down at the end of the day (and three of the characters, of course, were the inspiration for the names of our chickens).

The Guardian today has imagined the discussions that went on at the BBC when they were pitching the story, and pretty much shows us why self-sufficiency might be considered a bit silly in this day and age.

Stupid non-hippy hippy gives up a perfectly respectable job in order to become a horny-handed son of toil. Instead of trotting out to nearest, lovely, convenient supermarket for the week’s food, he wants to ignore 800 years of human effort, innovation and ingenuity – bringing us agonisedly to a point in history where we are finally free of the necessity of constant labouring for survival – and go back to growing his own instead? (full text on The Guardian)

But then perhaps vegetarianism is a bit silly, too. Humankind didn’t fight its way to the top of the food chain to eat leaves. Not that I’m going to go back to meat now.

I’ve embedded this Good Life clip before, but it still makes me laugh

We’ve planted some rhubarb

Nik — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:08:18 +0000

Did you know rhubarb is actually a vegetable, not a fruit? I’m not sure why, but there you go. Perhaps because it looks so much like celery despite being great in a sweet pie or crumble.

Anyhow, I’ve wanted to grow some in the garden for the last couple of years and had a spot marked out along one side of the chicken enclosure, far enough away from the sides of their compound to stop them nibbling at the poisonous leaves. When we saw Wilkinson was selling rhubarb crowns at £1.98 a go, then, it was too good an offer to pass up. We bought two.

Rhubarb can be a bit temperamental. It likes rich soil, so benefits from compost and rotted manure. It likes a lot of moisture, and well-drained soil. It likes sun, but not too much heat. Picking the right spot isn’t exactly easy, and is complicated by the fact that when you’ve got rhubarb in the garden it’s pretty much there for life, so you don’t want to put it anywhere that’s going to encroach on your other crops.

All things considered, then, the patch of earth we’d originally earmarked still looked the best choice as it’s contained on three sides.

Empty rhubarb bed

Rhubarb crowns are small when you first get them, but they grow a lot, so you should allow for at least 90cm between each one. That meant we had room for just two, which should be enough for the two of us.

Tearing into our rhubarb packs we found a baking potato-sized crown in each one. They are like light lumps of wood with a small pink growth. Here’s one of ours, sitting in the bag of compost in which it was sold:

Rhubarb crown

They don’t need to be planted deep, so we dug a shallow hole for each one, lined it with some good quality compost and settled the crown on top of it. We filled it up with a mix of the original soil we had removed and some more compost, and watered them in well.

That’s all there is to it, really. One of our crowns – the one above – had a small piece of rhubarb growing out of it, so we planted it with that protruding from the ground like a little triffid. The other one’s first shoot was growing along its length, rather than upwards, so we have planted it to the same depth and will let it find its own way up.

Newly-planted rhubarb

All we need to do now is wait. It will take a year at least to get itself established, so we won’t be taking any fruit from it this summer. Next year, though, we have home-grown rhubarb crumbles to look forward to. The thought of it is making me want some right now.

Spring cleaning the greenhouse

Nik — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:15:04 +0000

It always takes us far too long to clean up the greenhouse after the growing season, and it turns into the first proper spring-clean job of the next year.

It’s not nice walking past all the dead tomato and pepper vines on the way to feed the chickens every day, and ultimately it’s always that that forces me out to get it done.

So today was the day, and what a difference it’s made. I always get a great sense of satisfaction from seeing the greenhouse cleaned up, swept out and ready for a new season of growing. The gravel-filled borders have been levelled off, the potting benches brushed down, the pots neatly stacked and all the fertilisers, slug killers and grass seed neatly arranged at one end of the bench. The compost from those empty pots, I’ve dug into the plot to enrich the soil.

I’ve salvaged the re-usable plant markers, re-wound what twine can be brought into use again this year and organised everything by size so that it’ll be easy to find just the right pot for each plant or seedling. I’ve also shaken out and neatly folded the potato bags, which I hate doing as they have a tendency to attract the slugs and snails.

All in all, though, a job well done and a sense of achievement. It’s good going into the new month with an organised greenhouse, as you can see from the pictures below.

The greenhouse as it was

The greenhouse as it is