Category: Cheesemaking

October 1, 2013

Edam Heart Mother

For the October Chronogram, I wrote about the nuns at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut and the cheeses they make. It’s a remarkable community that produces great artisanal cheese, especially their Bethlehem, which I had the pleasure of eating yesterday; Mother Noella gave me a whole wheel to take home on the condition that I waited a few weeks until it was mature before eating it. I brought it with me on the residency I’m currently doing, and we all demolished it with great enthusiasm last night before and during dinner.

I took the pictures, too; see another one I’m fond of after the jump and be sure to click the shots in the article to embiggen them.

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March 8, 2013

Positively 6th Street

Paneer is one of the easiest cheeses to make at home, and it’s superbly rewarding because A) there’s almost no waiting and B) if you live, say, in an area that has no good South Asian restaurants, you can make yourself a steaming bowl of saag paneer whenever the urge strikes. And you can make a lot of it, because as we all know Indian food is even better the next morning for breakfast.

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January 16, 2013

Lambs And Clams, Fit The Last: The Sandwiching

September 17, 2012

I’ve Seen Fire And I’ve Seen Sauce

I do enjoy a vacation from blogging sometimes. There has been no shortage of cooking, both here and in Vermont, but not so much documentation. Among other memorable events, I taught a bread class, cooked for 75 or so people at a charity benefit, and fed my family daily as is my wont, but just wasn’t feeling the writing about it part. With an average of a post every other day for six and a half years, I don’t feel bad about taking a break. So now, as regular content resumes—subject to an impending deadline and how well I stave off the cold that Milo caught right before his birthday, torpedoing a weekend’s worth of fun—I’ll begin lazily simply with a few shots of How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

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July 2, 2012

Lavorazione Artigianale

As regular readers know, I’m a fan of from-scratch standards (often sandwiches, for some reason) as an ideal format for drilling down into the essence of food while following it up the supply chain as far as possible. It helps me understand cooking better. More often than not it also tastes really fucking good, so there’s also that. In this instance, to celebrate the ninth anniversary of our fun summer wedding (we had the legal one the previous December while my Mother was still alive), I prepared what was by any measure a simple meal. But it technically took seven months to make it.

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April 4, 2012

Bread And Cheese

I was so busy posting fraudulent nonsense on Sunday that I forgot to mention that the new Chronogram is out and in it I profile Café Le Perche, an excellent bakery in Hudson where they’re making some seriously pedigreed bread at a high level using local, organic flour. I also have two pieces in the new issue of Edible Hudson Valley: one about my homemade Camembert and a sidebar about uses for all the whey…

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July 7, 2011

Leaves Of Ass

The chorizo from last month is finally ready for eating as is. I’ve used a couple for cooking while they were still soft in the middle, but now they’re firm all the way through. I celebrated by making the sort of lunch that I would happily eat every day, and which neatly encapsulates my motivation for spending all the time that I do making all this food from scratch: pleasure.

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June 15, 2011

I’ll Give You Something To Fry About

So that paella? Was but foreplay for this, my original idea. I’ve been basing dinner on strategically deployed leftovers for so long now, I’ve started to think backwards. See, I took a small square camembert from a recent batch and cold-smoked it back when we did the photo shoot for the DIY article. I figured that if I was going to fire up the actual cold smoker, then it would behoove me to use it to good and photogenic effect. So I popped the camembert in there to bask in the fragrant smoke of cherry chips and some grape vines I had pruned.

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June 6, 2011

Kvellin’ Like A Felon

It’s funny how sometimes we randomly reach the critical mass needed to push us headlong into a new endeavor. Recently I was talking to some friends about their homemade bagels, and then I saw this post on a reader’s blog and it suddenly hit me that making bagels is just making rolls with some toroidal geometry and boiling thrown in. And the presence in the fridge of homemade lox and cream cheese provided all the impetus I could possibly have asked for to shove me face-first into the wonderful world of bagel making.

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May 16, 2011

It’s All About The Cheddar

I finally finished the painting and now I have to wait three days until it’s fully dry so I can assemble the hundreds of pieces and put it in the crate (which I get to build in the meantime). There have actually been some foodular developments here at cookblog HQ, but they’re of various other process-heavy things and as such not ripe for the posting. But not very much visually dramatic is going to happen to this cheese over the next six months, even though the interior will be undergoing all sorts of cheesy alchemy as it transforms into sharp, crumbly cheddar, so I figured I write about it now.

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