Yog 2

Bulgarian Yogourt Starter. Our last batch was a little runny, so decided to try real starter. It's supposed to be thick and tangy.

After heating the milk, it must be cooled before adding starter.  That's our dinner in the back,  EE is making corn chowder!

ACTION SHOT: preparing the starter, it's mixed so that is get distributed evenly in the pot.

Thicker and a little tangier then we were expecting... Might need to mix in some jam to sweeten it.

Plum Jam / Crumble

New Book!

We enjoyed making the mozzarella so much we bought a new book: Home Cheese Making by Ricki Caroll. Maybe we'll have home made brie soon... First I need to read it. 

Mozzarella

1 Gallon of heated milk, plus citric acid and liquid rennet

Curds and whey!  Strain curds then start kneading.

Reheat the cheese as you knead, should be shiny and stretchy when finished.

Homemade mozzarella!

Yogurt

yes, we have a yogurt maker

adding the starter

Might as well make some homemade yogurt to go with the homemade granola!  Yogurt is really easy to do if you have a yogurt maker.  It is just heated milk with a yogurt starter (they sell packaged yogurt starters, or you can just use a tablespoon of commercial or homemade plain yogurt).  You mix the milk and starter, pour into cups, and then turn on the machine to keep it at the right temperature for 10-20 hours (depending on the consistency you want).  This batch ran for about 20 hours but was still rather runny, we're going to play with the starter next time- our Trader Joe's low fat greek yogurt didn't seem to get the culture going very strongly this time.

Walnut-almond-pistachio granola

We used honey, brown sugar, coconut, wheat germ, walnuts, almonds, pistachios, (oats, oil, spices).  Had to rebake to get it crunchy, but I think it turned out very well.  Next batch I may try increasing the honey/oil proportions.

American IPA

I just harvested the hops from the garden, so we decided to make an IPA to see how they taste.

Our malt in the lauter tun: 10 lbs American 2-row, 1/2 lb Munich, 1/2 lb Crystal 20L. 

Here, after an hour lautering I'm recirculating the wart to clarify. 

Into the mash tun for the hour boil.

Checking the gravity, if it's too low we the beer will be weak (so we would need to add some malt extract at this point in the process) turned out perfect (1.055). 

Since I didn't have enough fresh hops to bitter the beer, we added 1 oz of Magnum hops (12%) at the beginning of the 60 minute boil.  Since these hops were dry 1 oz will go a long way.

These are the hops I harvested (~10 oz). Since they are fresh and whole  they are much weaker by weight and volume (lots of water weight). This whole gallon sized bag and the single ounce of the magnum ought to be roughly equal in bitterness.

Adding half the fresh hops with 20 minutes left in the boil, the rest were added with 5 minutes left.

After the boil we fill the primary fermentor - in our case a small 5 gallon keg (replacing the 5 gal carboy that was broken last week) - with cooled wart. 

Last, we oxygenate and pitch the yeast. 

The primary ferment is done in 2 weeks...