how-to – Page 8

Prosciutto, or dry cure country ham

August 16, 2014 by Jason Leave a Comment

I tread lightly on this terrain as this is the first prosciutto I have ever made. Not only that, but there are so many styles, and so many beliefs when it comes to drying a whole ham. You apparently can’t just call a ham a prosciutto (singular for prosciutti) because a real prosciutto starts with the right pork, is made in the right area, and handled in the proper way. The rest of us call it country ham, or dry-cured and air-dried ham. Whatever it is, I’m trying it. This ham went into the cure in March of 2014 so I’m rolling up near a year here soon! Eighteen months around the time I’ll start watching closely for maturity. More on how we’ll do that in a moment. Let’s start from the beginning.

20140318_154807 — Remove the aitch bone and try not to stab or slice up the meat around and behind it as that will be the face of the prosciutto.

Remove the aitch bone

First, the ham needs to be trimmed up tight. This entails carefully removing the aitch bone, and trimming the face of the meat as round and smoothly as possible. Take your time with the aitch bone. The more you stab up the meat, the more you have to remove. We don’t want punctures or other air pockets where bacteria can more easily hide during the curing and aging process.

After I cut the ham trotter and hock off, I removed the aitch bone leaving as much on the ham as I could. See more detailed pictures below in the gallery.

Also, try not to knick the ball of the hip. This will stay on the ham while it dries and is often exposed to the air during the process. Of course, bacteria can also hide in here if there are slices and knicks in the ball joint.

Trim up the face of the ham

Here, we carve the ham as smoothly as possible We want a smooth transition from the meat to the fat, to the skin. The hip bone will protrude out beyond.

You can see I had a little valley from the hip down around the underside. It was likely due to my un-perfect aitch bone removal The scraps I trimmed away were sorted (fat from lean) and into the other stacks that were heading for other products.

I have the ham in a meat lug and will keep it in here during the entire pressing and curing process. It will catch the brine and hold the juices while I re-salt and massage it.

I have seen some demonstrations where they will encase the entire ham in salt while pressing it. This ensures salt is always in contact with the face during the curing stages.

I worked and massaged the ham every day, even a couple of times a day during the process and kept it in my wine cellar. Weigh the ham and note the date in your logs.

Adding the spice and cure

20140319_212635 — Cure and spices on the ham.

The spices are only limited by your imagination, but if you have some great quality pork, as I do, then less is more!

I used kosher salt, cure 2, pepper, paprika, rosemary, bay and garlic. I also added t-spx starter culture into the initial cure to be drawn in with the brine.

The spices and cure mix are rubbed over the entire thing… favoring the face and the exposed hock end. I massaged the leg trying to express all the blood and liquid out as possible. This was a regular thing I did daily during the curing phase. I covered the lug with Saran wrap, and a used a plastic cutting board with weights on top to press the ham. See more detailed pictures in the gallery below.

Periodically, I’d uncover it, massage it some more, rub the spices and cure back on the face, and even add more salt as needed. Of course, a lot of brine was coming out. I left this brine in for now only emptying it towards the end of the curing stage.

Rinse and hang the ham to dry

20140403_180626 — After two weeks, the ham was rinsed and hung up in my wine cellar.

When the ham comes out of the cure, you’ll rinse and dry it with some clean paper towels and hang it up to start drying. Weigh the ham and note the date in your logs. This weight will be your starting weight. We’re watching for 30% weight loss before we stucco the face of the ham.

For 2-3 weeks, I moved the ham between my during chamber and wine cellar trying to dry it, but not too fast. It’s nice and flat now from being weighted during the cure. The ham is dried from a few days of open air and it’s starting to firm up… but it has a long way to go.

Because I’m a novice, I got a little ahead of myself and ended up stucco’ing the ham before the proper weight loss. It was stucco’d for about a week or two when I un-stucco’d it to let it dry out the full 30%. It took another month and a half before it had the proper weight loss before stucco’ing it again.

Now the skin has indication of fine white mold, and there’s clear signs of dehydration, including some cracking along the meat and fat lines. This is normal.

Washing and drying

20141016_113145 — By the time it lost 30% of its weight, it was molded up on the surface and had to be cleaned.

By the time the ham lost 30% of its weight, it was molded up quite a bit on the surface. I had moved it between my chamber and cellar a few more times just based on feel.

I had to clean it off real good before stucco’ing it. For this, I use a dedicated, clean nylon stiff bristle scrub brush. In the sink, I ran lukewarm water and used the brush to scrub the face clean again. Once clean, it was hung back up to dry.

You don’t want to stucco the ham while it’s wet from washing. In my case, I washed it, hung it up for another week or so, and waited until the surface looked and felt dry.

Of course, all the while, I’m hoping that the right amount of cure made it inside the ham since there’s no other way to tell from here.

While the appearance is quite ugly, it’s also kind of beautiful… if you know what I mean.

Stucco the ham

I render my own lard from leaf fat I get from the pigs. It’s an easy crock-pot thing you can do during a day you are milling around the house.

The lard, pepper and rice flour and mix together to make your stucco. To make the stucco, use a 50/50% lard rice flour mixture. Add some black pepper to help keep flies at bay. We do this so that the meat on the ham does not dry out so much that it penetrates deep into the ham. The face of the ham will be trimmed off when it’s time, but we want that to be a minimal amount.

Stucco applied. — The ham with stucco (lard, pepper and rice flour).

After a week or so hanging with the stucco on it, I moved the ham into my drying chamber. Here it’s 80% RH, and that may be a little too high. Hence the reason I tend to move it from the dryer back to the wine cellar. I really go by feel. The feel of the skin, and how it compresses when I squeeze the thickness of the ham.

Mold was starting on the stucco. I plan to leave it go for a while since I see mold on most of the prosciutti’s I see aging. I suspect if it gets too bad, we could clean it off and re-lard, but for now, I’ll let it be.

I have procured a osso di cavallo that will be learning how to use. It’s a horse bone… specifically the shin splint from a horse. Traditionally, it is used to puncture the ham through the lard and pull out the aromas that are happening within. This of course is a learned art, and I am on the beginning of it. I have the bone, but have yet to shave and polish it to the proper finish to begin using. Check out the pics. After 15 months of drying, see the sliced result below.

Preparing the ham to remove the aitch bone.

The ham is weighted to press out juices and blood.

I cover just to keep our debris and flies.

Mixing up the lard, rice flour and pepper.

Surface of the ham developed mold and had to be cleaned before stucco.

Skin of the ham has fine mold. This is OK.

There are small critters called “ruffini” that clean and scrub the surface of the hame in the chamber. They are known to “dirty the floor”. They are apparently beneficial in the regard.

After 15 months, here is the result. Also pictured is a hand-cut salame.

Processing meat chickens at home

July 21, 2014 by Jason 1 Comment

More and more, I try to find ways to produce my own food. We have a ways to go before we’re completely self-sustaining, but through each experience, I feel more informed, more prepared… and just more satisfied. For me, meat from the store has been just plain disappointing. I question everything from how commercial animals are raised, handled, the ingredients and preservatives within, and even labeling. When I cut open a package of chicken, I sigh not knowing anything about it. After processing my own deer, and hogs from local farmers to make my own pork products, processing chickens seemed to be the next logical step. While I’ve not yet had the experience of raising my own meat birds, I am in my second season having egg-laying chickens. I am also setting up to allow more space for meat birds in the future.

In the meantime, my very good friends at Funny Farm and I shared a collaborative effort. Collaborative meaning, they raised them, and kept track of the expenses. Later, we split the costs and teamed up to work on slaughter day. It’s my intention to document our experience here. This is not a detailed step by step tutorial. If you want that, this is a great book, and I use it for other animals too. Here, I simply mean to educate the first-timer, or one who’s been thinking about setting up and processing their own meat birds.

Whether you have layers, or meat birds, ideally, you have some space to let your chickens run around. My layers are still in a coop, mainly for protection. It’s been a goal of mine to fence in some space to raise these chickens right. In my case, the fencing is to keep other dogs and animals out. Meat birds also take a different kind of feed than layers and there are many philosophies on feed from one person to the next. Backyardchickens.com is a great resource to answer many of your questions.

To prep for slaughter day, prepare the area. You need designated “dirty” and “clean” areas. This is important. I always clean as I go and take sanitation during any animal-processing effort very seriously. Stopping and cleaning up an area periodically when needed should be part of the process. I’m more used to handling big game, so cleaning up during and after chickens isn’t as much of a chore. Although, I admit, I was busy parting up chickens when my friend worked the outside clean up.

Preparation for slaughter day starts a day, or even days ahead of time. Adjustments to diet, and withholding of food to make the chickens not as full are key. Hopefully, they are not stressed, and of course, raised in a happy environment. As more people begin keeping chickens, and other livestock, I’d like to think that the happiness of their animals is always paramount. After all, we have the luxury of doing it our way, the human way, because the only quota we have to meet is our own.

Next, our happy chickens find their way into the killing cones on slaughter day. We catch them, hold them upside down by their feet and lower them into their cone. The birds turn quite still once upside down. My best understanding is that the blood rushes to their head and makes them dizzy.

My friends allowed me the honors of taking the first bird… which coincidentally was my mean roo, Mr. Rooster. Sometimes I ask myself how the bird commanded enough respect for me to call him Mr., but… it was a running joke about him being so mean to me that I would see him in a stew pot… and that day finally came. I have to admit, it made it easier to take him out. He’s on ice right now, and I plan to make a special recipe with him. That’ll be another story.

Lining up bins of ice water, towels for wiping, and various stations for certain tasks is critical. My hosts did a fine job, and the addition of the Whiz-bang chicken plucker similar to this one was a time-saver.

Here’s the process that we followed to process 25 chickens.

1. Place the bird in a killing cone (see pics), and cut the jugular(s). We didn’t pith the birds this time, and we just let them bleed out. Pithing is said to relax the follicles and make dry plucking easier. Since we were working towards efficiency, we used the whiz-bang. I can see doing this once or twice a year, so it was important to refine a repeatable process.

2. Once the bird bleeds out, it will stop moving. From there, we moved it to the scalding station. Here is where your water is heated to approximately 132 F. Dip the bird in head first, and move it up and down for 2-4 seconds, and pull out (like a tea bag) and then dunk it again and so the same. Bring it back up and do a test pluck. The feathers came out easily each time for us. (Note: On one bird, I let the water get a little too cold and did my dunks. The feathers didn’t pull out easily, even after I heated the water up again and repeated the process. This bird in particular was difficult to pluck. So, maintaining the right temperature is important).

3. Next we moved the bird to the whiz-bang. We turned it on, put the chicken in, and sprayed it with the hose to wash the feathers down as they came off. It worked beautiful. You only need to run it for 5 seconds or so. You don’t want to beat the bird up, so stop it and check the progress. One or two 5 second runs, cleaned all the feathers off well. (see pics)

4. Give the bird another quick wash with the hose and drop it in the prepared bin of ice-water to chill before evisceration. Move to the next bird.
When all birds are on ice, we move to evisceration.

5. We first cut off the feet using a meat shears. across the hock joint. This is easy to separate using either a shears, or a knife. We cut off the preen gland that is near the tip of the tail. We removed the head, and cut a slit down the neck to remove it. We separated the crop and esophagus, then the bung and the intestines. We toss the livers, gizzard and hearts in a designated cleaner bucket for later. We removed the remaining entrails, lungs and were careful not to break the cloaca. After a couple of birds, it felt very natural, and reasonable for anyone to do. Experience makes you better and I found myself in a process after a few birds.

6. The bird gets another rinse, and then it goes back in to a different, cleaner bin of ice water until parting. While the birds are in the ice water, it gives us time to clean up, properly sanitize, and prepare for the next step.

7. Now we clean the gizzards, hearts and livers. There’s an easy action to slice open and peel out the lining of the gizzard. A final soaking in salt water will keep them until they are rinsed, froze, or sent to where they’re going next.

We now move from the dirty area, to the clean area. Here’s where we line up the vac sealers and a couple cutting boards to finish parting out and getting them ready for refrigeration. Of course we left however many birds whole for roasting. Others were separated in to thighs, wings and breasts. Carcasses are great for boiling down into stock. My vac sealer allowed me to compress several carcasses in one bag. I also saved the feet for stock. I cleaned, blanched and peeled them before vac sealing and freezing for later. Apparently, there’s more you can do with the feet, but I’m satisfied just not letting them go to waste.

Important: Do not freeze the birds until after 12-24 hours. The dryer you can get the birds, the better. You can lay them out on racks, and even set up a fan to blow on them. Once dry, keep them below 40 degrees F. It allows the skin to tighten, and decreases the amount of water uptake. All this contributes to more tender chicken later, and also reduces microbial growth. If you do not have the space to hold at 40 degrees before freezing, then leave them in the cooling tub for 6-8 hours.

While the process sounds like it would be a bloody, nasty mess, it was quite the contrary. As you’ll see in the pics, the most blood you see is from the initial cut of the jugular to bleed the bird. The squeamish may have more issues than blood, but knowing the quality of the food you are making and consuming makes it easier. It’s also nice to get a couple of people with the same interests together and share the work. For me at least, it didn’t even seem like work. I look forward to doing it again, and I thanks my hosts for taking me through the process.

Enjoy the pics below!

Mr. Rooster was first to meet his maker.

The layout for processing birds… from the dirty area to the clean area.

Mr. Rooster. There’s a long story behind this guy. He finally got his.

Cleaned and dropped in ice water until further processing.

Parting out wings, thighs, and drum sticks.

After slaughter meal prepared by my hosts..

Peeling chicken feet after dipping in hot water for 10 seconds.

Chicken feet, peeled and soaked in salt water.

The whiz-bang chicken plucker makes short work of plucking.

We rigged our plucker with PEX tubing to wash the feather away.

Chicked feet waiting to be peeled and soaked.

Staging area ready to go with “clean” and “dirty” areas.

Our whiz-bang plucker looks kind of like a time-machine.

Scald water is 156F with a little dish soap in it.

The hens have been properly finished preparing for the day.

Make Pancetta Arrotolata

March 27, 2014 by Jason 3 Comments

A good primer for those delving into charcuterie is to make pancetta. There are several styles and “arrotolata” simply means rolled. This to me is the more familiar style and the one I chose because I like trussing up the meat. Here, I’m just adding to the many articles on the internet on making pancetta. I’ve looked all over at the many possibilities, but settled on the one from Kyle Hildebrant at Our Daily Brine. Kyle does a really nice job on his pictures (which really mean a lot to me) and since I’m a visual guy, I appreciated seeing the detailed pics. He also provides a nice little chart to use for your logging of ingredients, weights and when you did what. I have to admit, I printed it out and used it too. The same article gives a nice example of how to use weights for the ingredients instead of measurements like teaspoons and ounces, etc. Kyle and I met on the Salumi, Charcuterie, Wurst FB forum where everyone shares their updates on their latest salumi projects. The man who started the forum, Francois Vecchio, is also passionately involved in mentoring all of us. I bought his book and DVD, and have been able to reach out to him with questions. In short, if you are learning the art of Salumi and Charcuterie, this is a great, interactive place for learning from the masters.

Back to the meat… pancetta can be done without a lot of fancy equipment and doesn’t take an absurd amount of time. Here is the general process along with my pictures.

Spices and cure, measured and vac sealed in a bag headed for the fridge.

1. Prepare a pork belly. In any charcuterie project, the quality of your pork is key. I have been sourcing forest-finished pork that is fed a natural diet and the pigs pastured. This all contributes to better fat and tastier meat.

2. Mix your spices based on the weight of the meat. Again, the spices are unlimited, but I tried Kyle’s recipe this time around. Sometimes, less is more, but the basics are usually pepper, garlic… and when I need wine, I use my own homemade wine.

3. I vacuum seal the belly with the cure and spices in a bag to hold it and any brine that is released against the belly. Put it in the fridge and flip it over every other day. The nice thing about adding ingredients based on the original meat weight is that you could leave it in the fridge indefinitely without worrying about it getting too salty or overpowered–because everything is added proportionally. This is called the equilibrium method. Everything you have in the bag, will make it in to the belly in just the right way.

4. When it’s time to roll it up, remove the belly from the vac bag, and wash it off. Don’t worry if all the spices don’t come off. Just wash it off good and lay it flat on some paper towels. Use more towels to dry the top and get it as dry as you can.

5. Now, we’ll add a thick layer of cracked pepper on the top (belly side, not the fat side) and I mean thick. I buy my peppercorns in bulk from Amazon (along with most of my other spices) as I use a lot of it. The pepper acts as an antibacterial agent inside the pancetta… and apparently, flies don’t like it either.

6. Roll the belly up tight and tie it. There’s many videos on the net on trussing (and you can watch for one here soon!). There’s really nothing to it and it’s one of my favorite parts to do. I’m not sure why.

7. Cut the ends to square them up a bit. In any charcuterie project, you will find it’s recommended to trim rough ends to make the surface of the meat as smooth as possible. The idea is reducing crevices that bacteria can otherwise get a foothold. Of course, we have our cure II/prague powder that time-releases nitrites to further protect the meat, but doing all we can to reduce bacterial possibility is just a best-practice.

8. Now, we’ll weigh the final product! This is important so that you can understand how much weight loss has occurred over the drying period. This will tell us how much drying has occurred, and whether or not the pancetta is partially or fully dried. Now, hang the pancetta up to begin the drying process and mark the date next to your weight.

The ideal environment is temperatures between 60-65F and humidity 40-50%. This is flexible. Many people hang it above their kitchen sink, where it gets some extra humidity. However, remember that light is what turns fat rancid. You can wrap the pancetta in several layers of cheese cloth to help keep the light off, but still allow the moisture to escape. I hang mine in my wine cellar where it remains between 60 and 65F and the humidity is higher than in the rest of the house. You can also put a pan of salt and water to add humidity to a room.

Pancetta can be party or fully dried. Fully dried pancetta can be eaten without cooking and here, you will be looking for a 20-25% water/weight loss. This is art of any charcuterie project… allowing the meat to dry out before it rots and providing an environment that is conducive to allowing the meat to dry from the inside out without the outside hardening to a point that prevents it.

Enjoy a few pictures below on where I’m at with this one… and I’ll be sure to post some pics of the slicing in a couple of months.

Rub the spice mix in good on both sides and the edges.

Rinsing off the cure and spices after two weeks vac’d in bag and placed in fridge.

You want to get the seam as tight as possible

Trimmings from the pancetta after rolling.

Make a Crystal Radio with your Kid

March 18, 2014 by Jason Leave a Comment

We had to choose a few electives out of the scout handbook to do with our boys at home. One that stuck out was making a radio. There are a few different ways to build a radio, but the one they say dads used to make with their sons back in the 70’s were the crystal radios. The it hit me… my dad never built one with me. He and I built a lot of cool things together, but a radio wasn’t one of them. Then I thought, well, I haven’t built one with my son yet… so what the heck. The challenge was on.

I think the crystal radio is probably the most basic radio concept. It can capture AM radio waves within a 20-25 mile radius and using a resistor, a diode and a capacitor, you direct the radio wave in to something you can hear. Disclaimer: I’m a complete noob to radio, and that was half the attraction for me. That, and for some reason, I feel like I should expose my son at least once to capacitors, diodes and resistors. It turns we out we learned a lot about these components. Resistors have various colored stripes on them to identify the type and value of the resistor. There are ceramic and electrolytic capacitors, and all different types of diodes for your specific application. Resistors, limit the passage of electricity, diodes allow electric current to flow only one way, and capacitors store current, and condition it… providing a steady flow of current at a certain value. Pretty cool stuff right there! Apparently, the radio waves are that current… as this radio has no battery! It harnesses the radio waves, and by limiting and controlling the passage of current, we pound the signal something we can hear. I found a lot of resources on the internet and came across the bottle radio. This looked like a fun one to do. We even had to wrap the bottle with the magnet wire to make our tuning coil. Here’s the link to the bottle radio we made from lifehacker.com. They also tell you all the things you need, as well as how to build it. Going through the exercise is how you learn. Pay special attention to how they illustrate the germanium diode affecting the radio wave. It was really well done.

They said you can get almost all the things you need at Radio Shack, but alas, the location near me is nothing like the Radio Shack I remember growing up. There was one cabinet of drawers in the back that had the resistor I needed… but I had to order the germanium diode and the ceramic capacitor online. Still, cheap stuff and worth the fun with your kid.

We took the concept a step further and instead of hooking up the crystal earphone to hear the radio, we routed the signal into an electronics learning lab kit (that we did get at Radio Shack) and played it over a small speaker. This learning lab is pretty cool. You can build 200 different circuits from the book until you understand things enough to invent a few circuits on your own. For our radio, we built a 2-transistor amplifier on the bread board to amplify the radio signal. See a few pics below along with a video of the finished work below.

Be able to say you built a radio with your son, and have some quality time doing it. Here’s a video.

Scrap piece of wood for the board and the terminals.

Homemade crystal radio routing signal through a homemade amplifier curcuit

Make Traditional Cheddar Cheese

March 3, 2014 by Jason 2 Comments

hardened blocks of cheese — 6-year old cheese. My first ones. Unfortunately, I didn’t wax them and also didn’t have the humidity under control. They went solid as a rock.

I “cut the cheese” today. Did you ever wonder where that saying came from? Thing is, I love the smell of cheese when it’s being made, so yeah… I cut it. I found myself drinking the whey too. And why hasn’t anyone eaten curds and whey since Little Miss Muffet? Did she know something we all didn’t?

I made two wheels of cheese around 2008. One was a parmesan and the other, farmhouse cheddar (an abridged cheddar recipe.) Everything seemed to have went well during the process. I had a cheese mold, but didn’t have a press at the time. I used weight to balance on top of the cheese follower and just did the best I could. In the end, I had two nice-looking wheels of cheese in my “cheese cave” aging. Being the patient guy that I am, I thought I’d let the cheese age as long as it needed, flipping every now and then until I located a “cheese trier” (a little tool that allows you to pierce the rind of the cheese and pull a plug out to try it.) Well, I never got around to that… and still being a juvenile when it came to cheese-making, I thought I’d just let it go. After all aged cheese is always better right? I had it stored in the proper temperature and humidity, so I let it do it’s thing until I could get back around to it.

Well, it *may* have went better had I coated the cheese with wax. Wax holds some needed moisture in and because I neglected to coat it, by the time I went to cut into it (which was just last week, so… 6 years later) it was hard as a rock–both of them. Check out some pics below. The parmesan didn’t look too well, but the cheddar looked delicious! Alas, it too was hard and ruined. Of course, I had to gnaw up some rocks to see how it tasted. A little gritty, maybe dusty… but sharp. I could tell, at one time, it may have been some good cheese! I consider it a lesson learned. However, such a blow makes a man want to right the wrong. It was time to try it again. This time, I have the cheese press built and ready to go.

Cheese making doesn’t require a lot of things, but it does require some special ingredients. Jump on the net, or grab a book. Once you have things in hand, all you need is a little time. By that, I mean set aside an entire day. The process is easy, but the waiting in between steps takes the time… and requires a thermometer, and a timer. I used a cheddar recipe from Home Cheese Making Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses. Depending on the cheese you will make, the process has variations., but here are the basic steps.

Warming the milk (usually to around 86 F)
Combining additives (optional, sage, caraway, pepper, etc.)
Adding the starter culture (mesophilic for hard cheeses, thermophilic for soft cheeses)
Adding the rennet (vegetable or animal rennet)
Letting it set until you achieve a “clean break”
Cutting the curds
Cooking down the curds
Draining and milling the curds
Salting the curds
Adding to a mold
Pressing the cheese (for hard cheeses only)
Air drying
Waxing the cheese (for hard cheeses only)
Aging the cheese

Again, there are subtle variants based on the style of cheese you are making. Eventually, you’ll begin to develop your own styles. Another critical thing to consider is how you will control your temperature throughout the process. I’ve tried stove-top, the griddle method using the steam table pan… and the sink (using hot water to warm the water back up). All of it is a hassle. For cheesemaking, I now use the Anova immersion circulator and I don’t know what I’d do without it. You can really control the temperature, including holding the same temperature for as long as you need, and also manage the ramping of temperatures needed in most cheesemaking. If you’re really a techie, here’s the Anova Culinary Sous Vide Precision Cooker w WI-FI and Bluetooth, the same unit, but has Wifi.

During the process, you will be pouring whey off the curds (usually straining through a colander). Never throw this away. It’s incredibly healthy and you can make stuff with it. I make ricotta cheese with it immediately and use it for the next meal. You can get really fancy if you want… but I simply add another quart of whole milk tot he whey… heat it to 200 F. Then, cut the heat and while stirring, pour in 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar. You’ll be amazed as tiny white curds float to the top. The yield is pretty impressive. Strain again through a colander or cheesecloth to drain and catch the ricotta. there’s a multitude of other ingredients to make different whey ricotta’s. recipes abound on the internet. It’s pretty darned good eaten immediately while it’s warm… along with salt, thyme, and dill. Or, put it in the fridge for use over the next week.

If you go through the pics below, I detail the steps more via the photo captions

The video below just provides a few steps in the process I employed today for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy my kids in the background 🙂 What is not covered here with pictures and commentary is the end of the process, so here it is. This info is fresh off the “press” since I just did this today! After removing the cheese from the third pressing, I’ll dry the wheel on a rack at room temperature for 3 days to let it start the rind. Then, I’ll do the ever-important step that I didn’t do on my last cheese. That is, dip it in wax so that it can hold in some moisture. I’ll put it on a cheese mat and into my cheese cave (50-60F) to age. I’ll flip the cheese several times a week for the first month or so. The reason for flipping is because the whey still in the cheese will want to settle on the bottom. Flipping lets it flow back to the other side to keep the inside of the cheese aging evenly. During the aging process, the cheese develops it’s character and flavor. I may cut my wheel in half before dipping in wax just so I can let one wheel age longer than the other.

I’ll post pics and updates back here… stop stop back again soon.

See the video below for three video cuts.