Muenster on the loose!

Several weeks back I made what I'll call a Muenster-style cheese (I was actually following a Brick Cheese recipe but they are very similar) complete with Red bacterium on the surface. It's been aging well, but i coated it with wax and noticed the wax starting to puff out a little. I cut off the wax and found the surface to be still very wet but looking normal. So I dried it out for a few hours and re-waxed it. I'll give it a few more weeks before I cut it open.

Made another Tomme-style, hard cheese Saturday; with cow milk instead of goat this time. The style gives me pretty good cheese each time, plus I still have the culture to use up.

Homemade yogurt has been very successful. I add a little vanilla extract when I set it in the Coleman cooler to incubate. It was delicious on top of my Duncan Hines Spice cake!

On the beer topic: if you can find Sam Adams Winter Lager in a store near you, try it. The label lists several ingredients that would normally be associated with Belgian-style beers (orange peel, spices) but the resulting beer is very pleasant to those who do not particularly like the bold Belgian beers. It is seasonal, so it won't be in the stores much longer. My own beers are aging well, but the Lager is by far the best.

peace;
Cheesey-boy

New Year, New Outlook

Six-months later...
Divorce is over, house is once more solely mine, sanity is intact and the desire to forge ahead with Bread, Beer & Cheese is re-newed! whew!!

The beer cellar currently holds three batches of homebrew that are aging. I've made a Dunkel-weiss (dark wheat), English Pale Ale, and a German Lager. Each one seems to be on-target for the particular style, and I'm thinking they will only improve with a few more weeks of aging. I have been working towards all-grain brewing but have to improve the equipment if I really want to mash many pounds of grain. The Lager was done without the benefit of malt extracts and the yield was not as many gallons as it should have been; due to troubles with my setup.

In the Cheese Department I have been happy with the results of an October batch which was made using goat milk and Flora Danica culture to approximate a Havarti-style cheese. I also received a little X-mas gift from Vermont; a chunck of cheese that I helped make at the Cheesemaking Class at Bardwell Farm, back in April. A very solid cheese, almost a grating cheese, but still slice-able, and delicious.

I've also been making yogurt at home, both with purchased cultures and lately with store-bought yogurt. I'm looking into methods for improving the incubation equipment and methods to make the process better.

Breadmaking hasn't happened simply because of the limitations with my 1940's vintage, Chambers gas stove. My oven thermostat is not functional, so anything I do bake has to be watched and regulated by propping the oven door open just enough to keep the temperature in a plus or minus 5 degree range.

Anyways, I'm still here and I'm looking for 2011 to be the first year of the next great chapter of my life.

Peace,
Cheesey-boy