Feeling Feta

Not a perfect attempt, but pretty tasty, all the same.

In journalism school, we were taught rules for writing headlines. Among them were no alliterations and absolutely no puns. I obviously took the advice to heart.

I started this post a couple of weeks ago. On that mid-July morning, the air had a touch of fall, and there was a faint autumnal note from my front-porch windchime.

At least, I thought so.

Not so today. We’re in the middle of a heat wave, and the forecast for today is a balmy 106 degrees. Like every day this week, it’s a perfect day to stay inside. It’s not a perfect day to bake. I’m baking anyway, of course, because I need more biscotti for the farmers market this afternoon.

It’s been a rough few weeks. I had a busy week helping with Vacation Bible School, followed by a frustrating week of yet another bad summer cold. That was followed by a span of depression and apathy. To be honest, I haven’t quite snapped out of that last one. I know it’s compounded by the fact that we gave away four of our litter of kittens, only to have their mother disappear and the remaining kitten fall ill and die. In only a few days, we went from seven cats back down to one. Our faithful Jello remains, as does our dog, Teeny (aka “Mousebreath”).

Enough depressing news, though. I said I’ve been dabbling. While many of my dabbling plans were sidelined by recent events, I did carry one project through to something of a success.

Feta.

I’ve never attempted cheese before. The process has always intimidated the heck out of me. Rising prices have put me on self-suffiency kick, though, and cheese seems like one of those things a self-sufficient homesteader would know how to make. I looked up several completely from-scratch recipes, some of which I may be brave enough to try some day. In the end, I chickened out and bought a feta cheese starter from Cultures for Health.

Caveat here—I used cow’s milk. According to purists like the European Union, this apparently means I didn’t make feta at all, since real feta is made of sheep’s milk with no more than 30 percent goat milk. Whatever. I have no sheep or goats to milk, but I do have whole milk from Walmart. That seemed good enough for a trial that had no guarantee of producing something edible.

Milk, heated slowly to a low temperature, plus rennet and feta starter.

The starter definitely made the process easier, but I don’t think it made it idiot proof. I heated the milk and added the starter per the directions. After letting it sit overnight, it had developed what looked like a pretty good curd, at least to my untrained eye.

Somehow, I think the curd needed to set more.

It turns out you have to cut the curd. I did this, and the curd suddenly looked less defined. That didn’t seem good.

By the time I got the curds into the colander, I wasn't sure they were curds at all.

I let the cut curds sit for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, before moving the curds to a colander to begin draining the whey. (I used a floursack towel as my cloth. Seemed to work.) The directions said to make a bag out of the cloth and hang it to drain. I couldn’t understand how I was supposed to do that until I found a picture online. It looked a lot like this:

It doesn't look fancy, but it did the job.

It took more than the prescribed four hours for the whey to drain off. I knew going in that I would get more whey than cheese, but I had no real concept of exactly how much whey I would be dealing with. I got nearly three quarts of whey from my gallon of milk.

The curds I had left were put in a sterilized jar with a brine solution and left in the fridge for several days. This was good, because I got that summer cold soon after putting the curds in to brine, so I had some breathing space before I needed to deal with the cheese again.

My Cultures for Health directions conveniently ended there. I used my common sense, such as it is, to pull the cheese from the brine and drain it again. It was pretty soggy, but after a bit of draining, it looked something like cheese. A soft cheese, granted, but cheese.

It never did get solid and crumbly like the feta I’m used to from the store. I don’t know if that means I made a mistake or if the cow’s milk changed the consistency. The starter package came with enough starter for four batches, so I will have the opportunity to try it again. Maybe I can get my hands on some sheep’s milk (I happen to know a gal…).

It worked where it mattered, though. It tastes like feta! Well, if feta were made from cow’s milk. While the consistency is similar to cream cheese, spreading rather than crumbling, it tastes divine spread on a slice of French bread. 

I managed to drain the cheese a little more after this photo, but it still spreads rather than crumbles.

All that remained was to find a use for all that whey. It turns out there are many, many ways to use whey. For me, the easiest and most obvious was to use it as the liquid base for a smoothie. (I did try drinking it straight. Tasted kind of like buttermilk.) As with the cheese itself, I have more research and more experimenting to do. I’m feeling good about the prospect.

Whey, a natural source of protein, makes a pretty good base for a smoothie.

 

Writer of All Trades

One thing I love about it writing is the ability it gives me to learn about so many other subjects.

An old chestnut states, “Write what you know.” Some people are experts at a topic or skill and write from that expertise. I’ve never mastered any skill except writing (and some might debate that). I love writing, and it normally comes easily to me. In order to write about something well, though, you have to know enough about it to explain it to someone else.

That’s the real work of writing—knowing something well and being able to pass on that knowledge. In the course of my life, I’ve learned many things and interviewed many people. Not as many as more famous, prolific writers, but enough to know more than most about an embarrassing number of topics—and yet not enough to be an expert in any of them. I find myself being a “jack of all trades and master of none,” and it’s okay. I think that’s the place most professional writers find themselves living. It’s a state of constant curiosity, of exploration and expansion and reinvention.

I remember a professor in graduate school telling a story about author Debbie Macomber. If I remember that discussion (it was 20 years ago, so forgive me if I get the details wrong), she was already a successful writer when she saw that knitting was coming back into fashion as a pastime.

She decided to center her next novels around that trend, but first had to research the world of knitting in order to have an authentic backdrop for her novels. The Blossom Street novels were born, along with several other non-fiction forays into knitting and knitting patterns. I confess that I have never followed Macomber's books, but I have no doubt she has since reinvented her novels and, in a sense, herself.

For me, reinventing myself is not a matter of being uncomfortable in my own skin. It’s more of a curiosity about what it’s like to live in someone else’s skin for a while. I think it must be similar to acting. I immerse myself in a world for a while, and then move on.

So what have I been doing lately? I’ve been dabbling, expanding. When I’ve dabbled a bit more, I’ll share what I’ve learned.

Maybe one of these days I will become an expert on keeping my house clean.

Speaking of knitting, I found these rascals playing with my circular
knitting needles a few minutes ago. I love these kittens to death,
but at eight weeks old, they do nothing to help keep the
house clean, and a lot to make it dirty--such as when they knock over
my basket of needlework and take a nap on top of the contents.