Tissue sample onto agar then rye, an enthusiastic strain:
Beautiful growth in the bags, but after almost a month, no pinning . . . so I gave them a time-out in 50-55 degrees and 95 percent humidity for a couple of days. Three days later, nothing, so back to the chamber (70 degrees).
And a few days later. Again, seemingly miraculous, nothing the night before, but the next morning?
. . . and the next day:
Go nuts!
Since they took longer than I expected, I had some pinkies fruiting at the same time.
If life gives you mushrooms, make soup!
I ended up with something like 3 pints of concentrated souply goodness, which needs to be diluted by 2 or 3 or it’s just too much:
This was my first try at a Ste.-Maure-type cheese, and I was worried both about the tall and skinny molds, which the site I took the recipe from (cheesemaking.com) made seem really scary and likely to fall over if you just looked sideways at them, not far from the truth:
And I’ve had some failures with lactic-coagulated cheeses – – think cheese soup.
Based on Caldwell’s recipe, I used Aroma B and two skewer tips of Geo. candidum (but no Pen. candidum), and four drops of calf rennet. At 24 hours:
The curd was, indeed, really soft. Just putting a spoon into the pot broke it:
There was something wrong with the recipe from the beginning, just in terms of volume . . . a gallon of water is 231 cubic inches, and a 2″ diameter X 8″ in length mold holds about 25 cubic inches . . . a gallon ain’t gonna go into two molds.
I had to quickly skewer some little plant pots:
Only by moving really slowly could I get the bent spoon into the pot without breaking the curds, then had to steady the mold with one finger while carefully pouring the curds from the spoon. Still, the curds sometimes broke, and escaped:
Even with the plant pots, there was far more than could fit into the molds. First lesson learned: I assumed that after 18-24 hours, lactic coagulation was done. But because it took like six hours until I could finally get the last of the curd into the molds, I found out that at the end (30 hours or so), the curd was much solider and easy to work with.
After a day:
Boiled for 20 minutes then dried in the oven for 20 minutes, so the straws should be okay!
The goat milk was raw, so I pasteurized it with the low temp method, then it was treated in the same way (temp/time) as the cow milk. The goat curd was smaller and more solid, and had drawn away from edges of the pot more:
And there was much more of a clean break:
Because the goat curd was smaller in terms of volume, it was obvious it would fit into the two molds, with just one extra plant pot. After 18 hours, here’s one:
Nice logs, dude!
Kept at about 50-52 degrees and 90-ish% humidity, three weeks after the cow milk (right) was done:
I’m a little worried about the cow – some of that mold looks a little too moldy:
Now, one month from the cow, and three weeks from the goat:
Time to taste!
Goat (left) is unsurprisingly pretty firm. Cow (right) is pretty soft, and the paste near the rind is starting to goop out, so much so that after a few minutes I had to wrap it and put it in the fridge:
The cow was better than I expected. I’m not usually a fan of lactic (cow) cheeses, but this had a nice balance with something resembling depth. The goat was, well, goat — a nice tang, but not enough, and some chalkiness, but too much. I think that’s just ’cause it’s too young, and I expect it to get better. I’ll try them both again in two weeks (less for the cow if it all falls out of the rind!)
I don’t have much experience with washed rind cheeses, at least not those that include Brevibactarium linens (or its various names). The washed rind cheeses need regular care, by which I mean that not only do they need to be kept at a certain temperature, but also that their rinds need to be wiped regularly (thus the name!), maybe every two or three days, to promote the growth of the bacterium. Eventually the rind stays damp (“sticky”) and turns orange or reddish, depending on the particular strain of the bacterium (mine is FR22).
From Wikipedia: “Brevibacterium linens is ubiquitously present on the human skin, where it causes foot odor.”
I don’t mind the smell at all. Perhaps an unrealized foot fetish?
This is a Taleggio type, kept at about 50 degrees, that has turned a nice color after five weeks:
I didn’t want to pay $47.95 for a Taleggio mold, so here’s my Dollar Store version, poked many times with a red-hot skewer (ooh err, missus):
Some of the curds didn’t fit into the mold, and went into a 4″ hoop. Kept in the same conditions as its parent, 48-50 degrees and 80-85% humidity . . . after a bit less than a month . . ., Houston, we have a problem:
The rind wasn’t appealing, but the insides were delicious, oozy, unctuous and buttery. Maybe the Big Cheese will be the same in a couple of weeks – – if not, I’ll have to try to repeat my failure 🙂
This is the Greens Machine ™, upgraded to one thousand awesome watts of power several months ago. First crops were mizuna and tatsoi, both great, both of which are now desperately trying to go to seed, so I really need to start them again. Mache was slower but also also slower to bolt. No growth whatsoever from the Red Deer Tongue, which looked like it would be cool.
If you look closely, you can see seedlings (just experiments) of Chinese celery, mustard and rape (that’s what it said on the package!) and a few others. (The blank spot is waiting for repotted watercress.) The mixed lettuce seedlings took stupidly forever to get going, probably because it’s winter, but now they’re going nuts . . .
In terms of a Cost-Benefit Analysis, this doesn’t really make any sense, even if you already have the light fixtures, which I’ve recycled from my reef aquarium days. One kilowatt of power is a marginal cost of about a dollar a day here in Ole Virginny, where electricity and tobacco are cheap. It’s a beautiful luxury to spend a minute or two snipping away, then have a bowlful of greens for any meal.
I go often to Aldi, because they usually have a good-quality milk for $2.54 a gallon, and then it’s cheese-making day. They also have the, for lack of a better term, “finds” aisle, rather half an aisle, which starts out with kitchen gadgets and ends with things like half-body warming blankets or somesuch.
The kitchen gadgets, most of which are made by Crofton, and despite their SHOCKING LOW LOW PRICES, are surprisingly not crap. A reasonably good potato ricer for $4.99 . . . Hard to believe, but I could have lived out the rest of life without a potato ricer, had I had to pay more.
So, damn you, Aldi! A 16 inch pizza pan, nonstick and perforated, for the low low price of $3.99, how could I resist?
Unfortunately I went just before they closed at 9 p.m., but the pizza pan was calling me, and I had to obey . . .
I always have leftover ricotta in the freezer from my cheesely activities. One of these is from a cheese that used annatto (a natural coloring agent), so it’s orangish.
Since the pizza was so ginormous, I decided to do a Quattro Stagioni (four seasons), although not the traditional kind, so there’s shrimp, roasted vegetables, broccoli, and hamburger with feta.
I used some of the feta I had just made the night before with the hamburger. With a sprinkling of the house Italian seasoning . . .
2 a.m. and (finally!) eating pizza, which at an earlier age would only happen if I was drunk. I’m made some not-so-great pizzas in the past, but this was really good, a better sauce (link saved) than I’ve made in the past, and the feta (of which I’ve also made some less than stellar versions in the past) gets thumbs uply. And the pan? More thumbs uply, because the crust was crispy on the bottom and cooked perfectly through.
This is a Dutch-tradition Edam-Gouda washed curd cheese. “Washed curd” because once the milk is coagulated, you remove part of the whey and replace it with water, so there’s less food for the bacteria to convert into acid, and the resulting cheese is less acidic and “sweeter. “
This was a three gallon make, and I got a bit creative with the molding:
A blurry shot of it hurled across the evening sky would surely end up on some internet sites . . . so it’s my Unidentified Flying Cheesy Object.
After a week or so it calmed down and became a lovely lump with what might be Geotrichum candidum in its yeasty form:
This type of cheese can be really complex and delicious, but only if you’re willing to wait 18 months, and I’m not, so this one got a rubbing instead :
It will get more rubbings, but I don’t think I’ll be able to wait the three months my cheese buddy recommended 🙂
I used to wear a full Tyvek suit, but that made me look silly.
A “SAB” is a Still Air Box . . . yep, it’s a plastic tote box, with holes cut in the sides for one’s arms. In combination with copious amounts of bleach, rubbing alcohol, and slightly soapy water, it’s a cheap-ass way to get some amount of sterility, which you need for some mushroom work, like agar plates, grain jars, and sawdust growout. I’m getting about 10-20% contamination level, which is pretty good for basically no money.
As one (and probably the only) mushroom wag put it, “It’s easy to grow fungi, but it might not be the fungus you want.” Luckily, contamination is usually green and quick-growing and easy to detect.
With all that balling going on, the pic isn’t good, but here’s the difference between lovely fluffy huggable white mycelium (left) and ugly horrible obnoxious most likely racialist bacterial contamination (right):
Everything gets an alcohol rubdown before it goes into the SAB. The paper towel is sprayed with slightly soapy water . . . the “slight soap” breaks the surface tension of the water, so more airborne contaminants stick to it.
There’s a definite correlation between contamination levels and the number of languages your paper towel says “Hello” in:
Here are my latest pink oysters, with a “spawn run” (the amount of time between when you mix the grain jars that the mycelium has colonized, with the straw, then pack the mixture into bags, then see mushrooms) of less than 10 days:
Once the mycelium has had enough to eat, it starts to produce the fruiting bodies wherever there’s less carbon dioxide and more oxygen, which is why the mushrooms grow through the Xs cut in the bags. This one was very eager and started to grow through the bag’s filter patch. This is its growth over three days:
Pink oyster omelet for breakfast tomorrow!
Here’s some Black Oysters (a different species), just now fruiting:
My pinkies started with a mycelium syringe, but the blackies started out from a grocery store mushroom I bought back in October . . . so I’ve done a full cycle, mycologically speaking. Pretty exciting (to me!)
I’ve had a couple of these #$@% black oysters in bags for over three weeks now, and they seem to have pretty much colonized the straw, but no pinning:
They’ve been in the grow chamber (70 degrees approximately) and black oysters apparently need a cooler (60 or so) spell to pin, so I came up with this, in a cooler room:
It’s just my SAB, with a humidifier hooked in, on a timer so it ran 15 minutes every hour, which kept the humidity around 95 percent or higher (with the top on, of course). After three days, nothing – – so I bunged them back into the grow chamber. Keeping my fingers crossed!
When I first started with mushrooms, it was one of those “boil some cardboard, then mix with some cut-up mushrooms in a garbage bag, and put it under your bed and forget it for a few months” deals, which actually worked, at least in the sense that I had a big bag of nice mushroom-smellying cardboardy mycelium. And I tried a couple of other times, also with straw, but no mushrooms . . . but on 10/26 (apparently, I don’t quite remember it) it looks like I mixed up some of the the cardboardy mycelium with straw and bagged it up.
Anyway (this story is getting longer than it deserves) I cleaned out all those various bags & boxes of straw & cardboard from under my bed (literally) and put them all into the garage, where they will go into some sort of mushroom compost pile, in the spring, but kept the bag. And – – glorioski and mmmBop – – after a couple of days, here’s what I saw:
I assume they’re responding to the O2, since they bag had been in a plastic garbage bag. The mycelium growth through the straw is very uneven, which I assume is due to lazy mixing with the cardboard:
Anyway, pretty excited. A lot of the would-be pins are stuck behind the plastic, so I cut more holes in the bag to free them from their bondage.
As for the pinks, the ones I bagged on 1/10 have gone nuts, with a spawn run of less than 10 days.
Eagerly growing through the filter! Pics from 1/20 and 1/21:
I’ve tried the lime pasteurization process twice, the first time with 6g per gallon of water, the second with 10g +. Both times something has sprouted . . . doesn’t really seem to be a problem, certainly less so if I keep the bags in relative shade during their spawn runs, but still kind of annoying. This doesn’t seem to be problem with heat pasteurization (using the same straw).
