Easy Cheese: Making Cream Cheese at Home December 29, 2008
Posted by pinchaque in 101 Things, Cooking, Food.Tags: 101things, cheesemaking, cream cheese
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Ingredients for Making Cream Cheese
For my unbirthday Amanda was kind enough to start me on my journey of cheese by buying me the Basic Hard Cheese Kit from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. One of my 101 goals is to make cheese at home. I’m not sure why other than it’s part of my DIY nature and I like things fermenting in my house. Anyway the easiest recipe that I could make with my kit was Cream Cheese.
I had personally never really considered that cream cheese was real cheese, but it does use the same mesophilic starter that real cheeses use, so I’m considering it a real cheese. Plus that means I get to cross it off my 101 things list!
Adding Starter to the Half & Half
The nice thing about making cheese is that it really doesn’t require many exotic ingredients. Cream cheese is just made from plain old half & half from Trader Joes, plus the starter that came with my kit.
Cheese Curds Placed in Cheesecloth
The first step is to bring the half & half to room temperature in a hot water bath in the sink, and then add the starter.
After 12 hours you have a smelly puddingsome goop that you put into cheesecloth to drain. The liquid that drains is called whey, and what’s left are the curds. In cream cheese the curds are really tiny so I doubled up the cheesecloth.
Creative Cheese-Draining Device
I was scratching my head for a while trying to figure out how to drain the cheese in a spot far away from the cats. Then I remembered I had my beermaking stuff at home and came up with this contraption: the draining cheese rests on my beer stirring spoon, balanced on my brew kettle. It worked wonderfully! Look Alton Brown, that spoon is no longer a unitasker.
Cream Cheese After Draining
Once the cheese has drained for 12 hours (or in my case, 18) then it starts resembling cream cheese finally. I pressed it into the plastic mold that came with my kit to form it into some kind of shape.
And look what resulted: a beautiful hunk of cream cheese! The taste was fairly good, but a little more sour than I like I think that may have been due to the extra draining time that I did because it was still soggy after 12 hours. But otherwise the texture was right on, and it tastes great on Panera bagels 
With one cheese down, I’m now planning on my next lacto-bacterial adventure. The entry-level hard cheese is “farmhouse cheddar”, so I’ll probably give that a whirl. It takes about a month to age, which will necessitate the purchase of a wine fridge (wafna!). I also want to make Mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses, in preparation for the Great Home Pizzamaking Adventure.
The Final Cream Cheese Product
Stuffed Burgers and European Lagers December 21, 2008
Posted by pinchaque in 101 Things, Adventures in Beer, Cooking, Food.Tags: 101things, beer, burgers, lager-showdown
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Stuffed Burger with the Fixings
One of my many fond memories of Portland, Oregon, was our trip to McMenamin’s Kennedy School, which included a very tasty stout and a burger stuffed with cheese. I had never had such a burger before, so it found its way onto my 101 Things List to see if I could faithfully reproduce it. I’m always up for a new burger challenge (the last being Jamaican Jerk Burgers), so this would be fun!
The next question was what to put inside the burger. Cheese, of course, had to be included. But I also gave a nod to one of my favorite Mexican dishes, Chile Relleno. These are chiles (usually Anaheim I believe) stuffed with cheese, battered, and deep fried. Well there wouldn’t be any deep frying of my burger (perhaps something to try another time) but I did choose a good-looking Poblano chile to blacken, skin, chop, and marry with the cheese. It was at this point that I decided I needed to come up with a good name for my burger. Given it’s slighly Mexican heritage and hidden cheese, I decided to call it the Queso Perdido Burger.
Creating a Stuffed Hamburger
Each burger started life as approximately 0.33 lbs of 80/20 ground beef. I split that into two parts and formed relatively thin patties. One patty is topped with the cheese and chile pieces, and the other is placed on top and pressed down in place around the edges.
Sealing the Stuffed Burgers
I seasoned the outside of the patties with salt, pepper, paprika, and ancho chile powder and grilled for ~7 minutes to create this oozing tribute to beef, cheese, and chile. It turns out these were quite easy to make and very tasty to boot.
Now, what better drink to have with burgers than BEER! It was time for my next round of the World Lager Challenge (which changes name each time I blog about it I’m pretty sure). This time it was European Lagers Excluding Germany. And that meant:
Lagers of Europe
- Heineken (Holland)
- Baltika (Russia)
- Stella Artois (Belgium)
- Pilsner Urquell (Czech Republic)
- Czechvar (Czech Republic)
I was fairly sure that Pilsner Urquell would take this one and then be promptly disqualified because, while Pilsner is indeed a lager, it is more heavily hopped and therefore has a stronger flavor profile. It is a different style than the others. However, when the tasting was finished it was not actually my favorite: its bitterness was not particularly welcome and fell short of other pilsners, which I tend to like a lot. Another surprise was Czechvar, which I had high hopes for given that it’s the Czech version of Budweiser. However it came in dead last with tasting notes like “bad”. Heineken was also a shocker, given that I thought it’s mass producedness would land it in the bottom half and it came in second. Stella was “mild, inoffensive” which is a good thing in this group. But the winner was Baltika. Although it was still definitely a lightish lager, it had a great honey sweetness to it that made it pleasing to drink.
Decanted Lagers of Europe
The final rankings:
- Baltika
- Heineken
- Stella Artois
- Pilsner Urquell
- Czechvar
That means that Baltika moves on to the next round to face off against Coors, Tecate, and the yet-undiscovered winners from Asia, Germany, and UK/Italy.
Amanda had another good idea that I should include an “American Craft Beers” grouping. For example, I don’t have a Sam Adams on the list and I don’t have a good reason why. Most of the craft brewers do make their own lagers to go up against the Budweisers of the world, so why not add them to the fray? I feel another beer run coming on…
Saving Tapirs, One Stuffed Animal at a Time December 18, 2008
Posted by pinchaque in 101 Things, Tapirs.Tags: 101things, club tapir, stuffed animals, Tapirs
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Collection of Stuffed Tapirs
My infatuation–no, obsession–with tapirs began several years ago on one of my first visits to the San Diego Zoo. There was something enchanting about their prehensile nose, awkward gait, and prehistoric looks. As I did more research I learned even more about this remarkable animal: they love to swim, have watermelon-patterned babies, weren’t discovered by the western world until the late 18th century, have four toes on each front foot and three on each back one. It just seems so unlikely that such a creature could exist, and instantly I was in love.
Mini Steiff Tapir
Shortly afterward the collecting started: a couple dozen stuffed animals, several statues, magnets, antique prints, dozens of stamps, original artwork, magnets, postcards, tobacco cards, books, puzzles, and even used calling cards. Most of this was from eBay, with my favorites being my mini Steiff Tapir and a series of art cards by Amy Weber. (My buying sprees were hindered only by my ebay arch-nemeses rat15 and gogo-tapir.) These have served as excellent decorations for our house, and serve to offset all the okapis that are lurking about.
Baby Mountain Tapir at LA Zoo
One of my quests was to see all four species of tapirs in zoos. I’m fortunate that San Diego Zoo has both Baird’s Tapirs and Malayan Tapirs, so those were easy to see. Mountain Tapirs are only in three zoos in North America: Los Angeles Zoo, Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs, and (a recent development) the San Francisco Zoo. For one of my birthdays Amanda adopted a Mountain Tapir for me at the LA Zoo and then took me to see it! It was wonderful and there was even a cute fuzzy baby. (I’ve since also seen the Mountain Tapirs in San Francisco and Colorado Springs.) Seeing a Brazilian Tapir was more difficult, but was accomplished a couple years ago during my trip to New Orleans.
Yanisa the Stuffed Malayan Tapir
I learned early on that all four species of tapir are endangered, mostly due to habitat loss with some hunting mixed in. Of course I want to save the tapirs for the next generation, so I’ve also done what I could to participate in conservation efforts. I’ve made several purchases at the Tapir Preservation Fund’s Gift Shop, including my latest acquisition, Yanisa the Tapir.
At some point I was looking up adopting tapirs and ran across the Baird’s Tapir Project of Costa Rica run by Charles Foerster. He had a program where you could adopt a tapir for a relatively inexpensive amount (around $200) and then when you visited Corcovado National Park in Costa Rica he would take you to see the animal!
Baird's Tapir in Costa Rica
Well, that pretty much sealed the deal. Tracking him down was a whole other project and, to make along story short, I was introduced to Kendra Bauer who is the current project lead. I met her in Costa Rica and she gave some advice on when to see the tapirs: at dawn near the beach. So on a fateful February morning last year we set out on the trail and spotted my first wild tapir: a Baird’s Tapir who we learned later is named Noel.
After talking with Kendra I also ended up volunteering to help build her a website, SaveTapirs.org. This has lots of information about the tapirs and the projects going on in Corcovado Park. It also serves to gather further donations to the project, which are much needed to cover the costs of radio collars, research equipment, and travel.
Where will my love of tapirs take me next? I would really like to see the other three species in the wild, although it may be several years of travelling before I can get to that. (Amanda’s and my list of places to visit is out of control.) I’m continuing to collect tapir items (although there has been a steep drop-off of what’s available on eBay lately), work on the SaveTapirs website, and also support conservation projects through donations. This month I’ve also donated to Club Tapir to support my favorite species: the Mountain Tapir.
So that’s a couple more things off my 101 things list (new stuffed tapir, and a donation) and a long-winded explanation of my love for the animal!
