Le Grand Fromage!

While I'd like to think we'd come up with all these ideas for homesteady things to do on our own, I have to give credit where credit is due, and in most cases it's due at least in part to Mother Earth News magazine.  If anything  I write here interests you, I can pretty much guarantee you'll love Mother Earth News.  Maybe this shout out will even get back to their editors and they'll ask me to write for them?  Now wouldn't that be bonkers! ;)  They've featured several articles over the years on home cheesemaking, and it was on my list of things to try for a long time.  I've now made cheese three times, with varying results, but it's something I definitely want to work on and learn more about!  Especially since it is so crazily easy!!!

My first attempt at cheesemaking was a mozzarella recipe in their June/July 2008 issue.  While I thought I was doing things correctly, the end result was much more like ricotta or very small curd cottage cheese than anything shapeable like fresh mozzarella should be.  Tasty nonetheless, but not what I was hoping for.  Like anything new, one should never give up after a failed first attempt, so later that week I tried my hand again at the mozzarella and discovered my error the first time (didn't get the curds hot enough, and stirred too much!) and was successful!  I actually was a little too successful, and the result was much firmer and dryer than true fresh mozzarella, and more like regular mozzarella... (Not sure what to call it, since it usually is only found in grated or string cheese form...)  I ended up using it in a pasta dish, and it was incredibly stringy and delicious! It would have made perfect pizza cheese!  Now that I know I can make ricotta and pizza mozzarella, next time I'll try a third time and maybe I'll get the recipe right and get fresh mozzarella!

It's amazing how little cheese comes out of so much milk- this is the result from a whole gallon of milk!

My third and most recent cheesemaking adventure occurred this morning, when I tried my hand at making cream cheese!  Unlike the mozzarella (which required rennet and citric acid), the cream cheese didn't require any special ingredients- just milk, salt, and white vinegar.  I have yet to have some on a bagel, but I did taste it  on its own and the flavor beats the pants off of Philly!  The texture isn't quite as smooth as storebought cream cheese, but I have a feeling that the texture could be improved, possibly by draining it longer, using whole milk (I used 2%, cause it's what I had on hand) or even just giving it a good stir.  Next time, I think I'll substitute some buttermilk in place of some of the milk, and see how that turns out.

The only bummer to home cheesemaking (if you don't have a dairy cow or easy access to truly fresh milk) is that you can't use most organic storebought milk.  Most organic milk companies ultra-pasteurize their milk, pasteurizing at a higher heat than regular pasteurizing, which kills more of the natural bacterias in the milk.  It gives milk a much longer fridge life, which is great, but unfortunately in cheesemaking, you need that bacteria to help the curding process along.  Fresh, unpasteurized milk would be ideal, and I hope to find a supplier in the spring, but until then, regular ol' storebought milk is the answer.

Crazy Easy Cream Cheese

1 quart milk (I used 2% but whole would probably be better)

2 tsp salt (non-iodized, kosher is my preference)

2 tbsp white vinegar

In a saucepot, bring milk and salt just to a boil very slowly over low heat, stirring occasionally.  Remove from heat, and stir in the vinegar.  Let it sit undisturbed until cool.  Pour into a cheesecloth or muslin bag, or a very fine mesh sieve, and let drain until it looks like cream cheese.  Store in the fridge and enjoy!  (How easy is that?!?)

Homeground flour!

This fall, part of our filling the root cellar involved buying 100 pounds of wheat, and a hand crank grain mill.  We had been baking all our own bread for a couple months, and decided to give home ground flour a try.  Ever wonder why all store bought flour is enriched?  Because wheat berries (the whole wheat kernel), when crushed or cracked or ground, lose about 80% of their naturally occurring nutrients (vitamins, minerals) within about 72 hours.  Store bought flour would otherwise be virtually nutrientless if not enriched with shelf-stable vitamins and minerals.  Freezing cracked wheat or flour can retard this nutrient loss, but in order to be successful you'd have to buy flour directly from the flour mill on the day that it was ground.  The whole wheat berry, however, is so non-perishable you can store it for years!  The choice to go home-ground was a pretty easy one, though finding a good non-electric grain mill proved challenging.  Thankfully, customer reviews are often extremely helpful in finding out more information than the product's packaging will give you, and we decided on the Back to Basics hand crank grain mill.

We are fortunate enough to live within a reasonable distance of a pretty awesome flour mill, Cortez Milling.  You can buy their flours in supermarkets (under the brand Blue Bird Flour), but you can also buy wheat directly from the mill, for crazy cheap.  To start ourselves off on our home grinding adventures, we bought 50lbs of Hard Red Winter Wheat and 50lbs of Hard White Winter Wheat.  As we've learned through research and personal experience, the white wheat makes a much better flour than the red, and the red makes an excellent cereal grain and substitute for rice in any recipe.

It's not difficult to grind flour or crack grain for cereal (trust me, there is nothing like freshly cracked oatmeal!!!), and Wyatt even likes to help!  It doesn't make a truly fine flour, unfortunately.  It doesn't get the bran as fine as the rest of the kernel, and bread made solely with the flour does tend to be a little bit denser, but it is delicious, and oh so nutritious!  We have found that when a finer flour is needed, a quick run through the food processor helps to break up the bran more, and you can sift out the bran (but then you lose a lot of fiber, and it's no longer whole wheat flour, which fairly defeats the purpose).  Eventually we plan on upgrading to the grain mill attachment for our Kitchenaid stand mixer, which reportedly does make a fine flour, but until then, we're pretty happy with our little grain mill!

Our root cellar!

This fall, we finally built our root cellar!  Well, not so much a cellar as a shed... We built it over the existing crawlspace access on the side of the house, so we can use the constant temperature of the crawlspace as a heating source in the winter and cooling source in the summer.  Go geothermal!  Since in Colorado you can't add directly onto a mobile (dumbest. law. ever.), we had to build it 'adjacent' to the house, but it's right up against it, which also helps in temperature regulation (in fact, the wall up against the side of the house isn't even insulated).  We do have to keep the crawlspace trap door open, and with the help of a single incandescent bulb, we're able to keep it a very constant temperature of 40 degrees, even when it's dipped down to 0 outside at night!  Without the light bulb on, it gets down to about 33, which is just a wee bit cold for our liking.  But 40 is perfect!  And it makes an awesome wine/beer cellar!!!  

It's not sided yet, but it's functional!

 That's looking under the house- Not too comfortable to get down under there, but it's great for critter-proof buckets of stuff we have multiples of.  Those buckets have wheat grain in them- the real deal!

 Great bucket storage for wheat berries, flour, sugar, beans, etc., and non-perishables that aren't in critterproof containers are in that big rubbermaid tub on the floor.  We've also got a good stash of household items!

 Home-canned goods look so pretty on the shelves!

The downside of having to leave the trapdoor open- Watch that first step, it's a doozy!

And there's the root cellar!  It's not quite as full as we'd like it to be, but it's a start!  Plus it frees up a TON of cabinet space in the house, which is a precious commodity as it is!  I hope it's as much of a success in the summer as it is in the winter- only time will tell!  

Back to the garden...

It's time for a revamp.  Considering I haven't posted in about 6 months (deplorable, I know...), I think it's time to expand my subject matter a bit.  Not to say I haven't been getting my craft on, I have.  But I think recent decisions in our lives have lead to many lifestyle changes that kind of fit into the crafty mold.  And so, without further ado, I give you the new and improved Made in the Mountains...

I've added a new wee quote to my page, one that I think is pretty befitting our life now and hence, this blog.  The inimitable Joni Mitchell said it quite well in her song "Woodstock"- "We are stardust, We are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden..."  I'm not about to go traipsing through an upstate NY field covered in mud and daisy chains, much fun as that might be, but that line rings pretty dang true to me these days.  The homesteaders had it right, and so did (do) the folks on 'hippydippy' communes (minus the cultishness).  Back in the day, growing your own food, building and making your own homes and tools and furnishings and toys, preserving food, and generally being self-sustaining wasn't just what Earth-conscious nature freaks did, it was what most everyone did.  It's in our racial memory, imprinted in our brains from thousands of years of being hunter-gatherers.  And yet, in just the past 60 years or so, our lives have become so accustomed to once-novel ideas like packaged foods, freezer meals, and drive thru fast food, that for so many, the thought of baking your own bread, or *gasp!* grinding your own flour is crazy!  'It's too time consuming!  Who really grinds their own flour anyways?'  How can it be that in such a relatively short amount of time we have made ourselves so utterly dependent on supermarkets?  On foods shipped in from all over the world?  There are children in our country who cannot identify whole fruits and vegetables, but know tater tots and chicken nuggets like their own two hands (For proof, watch Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution... it's frightening, to say the least).  This is so wrong on so many levels.

Ok, don't get me wrong, I shop at a grocery store, I love packaged foods, I appreciate their convenience, and I don't think poorly of anyone who only buys their food.  I know not everyone can have a garden, and for most people who do garden for food, they can't support their vegetable food needs completely.  We certainly can't!  And in our efforts to fill our new root cellar, we're filling it mostly with food we've bought.  There's nothing wrong with that!  But it is our dream to sell our house and buy a bigger piece of land, build our new home, and grow as much of our own food as we can, both crops and livestock.  In the meantime, we're trying to do as much of that as we can on our little half-acre in the mountains.  And that, my friends, is where this new blog is headed- getting back to basics!