After completing the Ricotta, my son (J) and I were very excited to take on the chèvre. I personally like the tang and the versatility that it has, and I must confess that in the past I would buy it at Costco (it was such a good value!). J was not necessarily keen on it in the past as he tends to prefer stronger cheeses.
We were away in Calgary when challenge 2 came out and J was insistent on making it straight away! In reading the recipe I realized that I forgot to order the C20G mesophillic starter, but luckily there was the alternate buttermilk recipe from Valerie A Canadian Foodie As soon as we came back we headed to Planet Organic to get some goat milk and buttermilk (technically we actually went and got haircuts first, but I digress).
We assembled all of our ingredients and went through the sterilization process to have everything ready to make the chèvre.
We used Fairwinds goat milk and ‘D’ Dutchmen buttermilk. My faithful assistant carefully poured the goat milk into the pot then stirred in the buttermilk.
And there was no spilling this time! Next we heated up the milk to the desired temperature, that was sure a lot faster than the Ricotta! (of course it was a much lower temperature).
We then added the rennet that we had already diluted (thankfully we had some bottled water). My assistant stirred it with the appropriate up and down motion.
This is actually a nice recipe to make in the evening as it was now bed time for the young one (parents too!) as the milk had to be covered and left for 12 hours. When we got up in the morning it was almost like Christmas, as J came bounding into the bed “Daddy we need to check the cheese!”. We went down and took the pot out of the oven lifted the lid and voila!
We had custard! A very nice separation between the curds and whey around the side of the pot. We carefully, well J carefully, started to place the curd into the cheesecloth lined colander to let it drain.
We let the whey drain away a bit.
Then we tied it up to drain for about 6 hours.
Again it was like Christmas as we carefully opened up the cheesecloth to see what kind of delicious goodness would unfold.
We opened it up and were very pleased to see cheese!
We actually used sushi matts wrapped in cling wrap to help roll the cheese into the logs. We rolled two logs in fresh basil leaves and left two plain. We left the basil whole but did wonder if we should ave chopped it.
A couple hours later I decided to roll one in cracked pepper too. They all tasted great. We tried plain that night and let the pepper and basil sit for another day. J really enjoyed this cheese particularly the basil rolled one, he said “This one tastes way better than the other one – it has flavour!”
We also made another batch of ricotta, both ricotta and in particular chèvre were a big hit with the extended family and they eagerly await the next creation. J wants to take some chèvre down to Calgary to his cousin at Thanksgiving.
Below is the plain chèvre, ricotta Boursin and basil lemon ricotta.
Appearance: A nice white , grainy and dry
Nose (aroma): not much, is tangy an aroma
Overall Taste: nice mild tangy goat cheese, basil wrapped had nice basil taste, pepper rolled was peppery and favourite of J
Sweet to Salty: sweet
Mild (mellow) to Robust to Pungent (stinky): mellow
Mouth Feel: (gritty, sandy, chewy, greasy, gummy, etc.): very creamy
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