I almost feel like I should post this under an assumed name, what with all my perky, healthy, Look! We Grow Vegetables! posts lately.
It’s…I don’t even know what to call it, other than one of the yummiest breakfasts I’ve ever had.
It’s a fried egg on top of warmed goat milk mozzarella on top of arugula on top of a piece of leftover pizza dough that was fried in bacon fat.
Yes. Bacon fat.
And yes. It was that good.
Here’s how it happened…
I’ve been making cheese for a few years now, but not as frequently as I’d like, and certainly not as many varieties as I’d like. I’m hoping to kick myself into a higher gear as this summer flies by, and maintain that gear through the rest of the year.
Yesterday I made a batch of goats’ milk mozzarella!
I also made a batch of the 30-minute mozzarella with cows’ milk, for comparison purposes.
Unfortunately I only have about fifteen minutes to type today, so the whole process post with lots of pictures will be delayed a day or so.
Hm.
It doesn’t look like I think it’s supposed to look.
For French Fridays with Dorie this week we were to make a Tourteau de chèvre.
Now, despite what you might think, that doesn’t mean Cake of Goat. I don’t think anyone’s invented that one. Maybe a Pie of Goat – you know, like a chicken pot pie, or a shepherd’s pie – exists somewhere…but not Cake of Goat.
No, the cake is made with, among other things, goat cheese. Pretty interesting, huh?
And a bit more appetizing than a cake made of goat.
At the beginning of this month I made a double batch of Feta. And I wrote about it here.
I was very excited. I love Feta. And making it was nice – it was similar, a bit, to making hard cheese like Cheddar, but shorter. Not so much pressing and air drying and all that.
Half of the curds were tossed with salt and left in the fridge to cure for about 5 days.
The other half went into a brine and would be soaking in that brine for a month….
Just about a week ago I made Feta for the first time. This weekend the short term batch was ready to sample.
At long last, after a summer-long painting-induced hiatus, I’m back to making cheese again. I missed it. I especially missed goat cheese.
Fortunately for me, I had close to 3 gallons of goats’ milk in the freezer from earlier trips to the Farmers’ Market this summer. I needed to get the milk out of there so I could organize all the soup stocks and bags of clams and conch before chaos took over, so the timing was perfect. I’d ordered direct set Chèvre and Mesophilic cultures from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company earlier in the week, and they had arrived within a couple of days, so this past Sunday was perfect for cheesemaking.
I made a batch of chèvre recently. Have I mentioned how much I love cheeses made with goats' milk? Something about that tang…yum. I wish we had more land. I'd raise goats.
I made this toward the end of July, back during my blueberry recipe frenzy. I was also going to the Farmers' Market every Friday morning and getting my weekly ration of goats' milk and making my own cheese from the milk.