Enigmatic whey

I have fallen way behind reading blips again I’m afraid. I’ll catch up in the next few days I hope.

It is Sunday, so it must be Cheeseday.

This week’s adventure has been to make a ‘real’ Cheddar, instead of using the simplified recipe I’ve used to date. 

Accordingly I carefully cut the drained curd mass into strips and and allowed them to set at 39C for two hours. This is ‘to cheddar’ the curds.

It will be very interesting to taste the difference between the two different recipes in due course (about 9 months).

Having drained off 3 litres of whey - and because by then it was raining - I decided to have a go at Whey Ricotta, by heating it up, adding vinegar and draining the resulting curds through cheesecloth. I added some salt to the final cheese and then served a dollop on my pesto and spaghetti dinner. That’ll do nicely.

The photo? The extraordinarily regular bubbles that developed in the whey as it dripped out of the ricotta bag this evening.

The extra is the view from the top of the hill this morning when Bean and I scampered up there for a bit of heavy breathing exercise. You can see the village nestled into the valley at the bottom of the shot. 

I stood there and thanked my lucky stars and aligned ducks for bringing me here.