Cheese mistake...

We had our fun friend Ann over for dinner the other night - for our weekly Friday night Cozzola's pizza and killer wine. Ann helped me so much with my little garden square and making our hard packed clay, Deliverance yard look like somethin' OTHER than the setting to someone wanting me to squeal like a pig, that she now has a 'magic cheese container'.

Any time I see this container, it is magically filled with cheese.

I thought I might see that 'magic cheese container' Friday and I wanted to make a fresh batch o' chevre. Spot is our only milking goat right now and she's giving 3-4 lbs of milk a day. I have to save up 3 days worth of milk to make cheese glorious cheese...

Thursday night I pasteurized the milk... only I forgot about the milk in the hot water bath on the stove while I was uncharacteristically torturing myself on the treadmill. Furry Husband normally has my back, only he was in the office working on his laptop. The milk heated up to and right past 160 degrees for pasteurization to over 200!

Well crap-ola.

We hate to pour 3 days of saved milk down the drain... only we weren't sure if this milk would form curd or taste like anything you'd WANT to eat. Shrug. All you can do is try!

We put the chevre starter culture in the milk once it cooled to 86 degrees and we waited. We let the starter culture stay in the cheese longer than recommended because we'd screwed it up this much already... we wanted to let the curd have ample time to form.

When we put the curd into the cheese cloth it was really solid... hardly any whey to it at all. And while it drained all day? The whey was a much smaller amount and completely clear... really odd.... normally it's sort of opaque.

Hmmmm. Dunno 'bout this batch.

We warned Ann when she came over and we moved it from the cheese cloth into her 'magic cheese container'. The texture was not like normal chevre - it was softer - it was almost like thickened cream - like maybe a super soft cream cheese.

And it was super tasty! We dipped our pizza crusts into the cheese and called it a success. Who knew.

When I took Spot to meet her buck, the buck owner and I stood around talking and watching to make sure there was really something going on between Spot and Headliner... you gots to make sure there is "penetration"... and that in itself is so bizarre....to be at a ranch in Livermore CO with some young vet student you've never met, making small talk while your goat is being bred.

I told this guy about a Parmesan I made. It looked like Parmesan, it tasted like Parmesan, smelled like Parmesan but it was so hard that we could barely get any knife thru it. I ended up scrapping it because we just could not cut into that sucker...

He laughed and said someone once told him that whenever you tried to make a cheese, it WILL be cheese. It just might not be the cheese you INTENDED.

Lucky for me, the 250 degree, super pasteurized milk with extra long starter culture exposure was worthy of the 'magic cheese container'!