Home Made Yogurt and Yogurt “cheese” – Day Two; finished

January 29, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

Here are the final results of the yogurt and yogurt cheese making process.

You can visit the first part here, with the recipe, and the second part here, with the step-by-step to make the yogurt cheese.

First up, let’s compare the finished yogurts.

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This was after the home made yogurt was in the fridge for several hours. It did thicken somewhat from when I first put it in the containers, but as you can see, it’s still quite a bit thinner than the commercial yogurt I’d used as a starter. That yogurt, by the way, was just a house brand of plain “Balkan” style yogurt. I normally buy Greek yogurt, but it was more than twice the price!

As far as texture went, the only difference was that one was thinner than the other.

I couldn’t really taste any difference in flavour.

After taking the photo, I mixed both together with a bit of brown sugar and cinnamon. It was quite nice!

One of my daughters promptly claimed the container that wasn’t quite full for herself, and ate it straight. :-D

Now, on to the yogurt cheese…

After hanging for about 3 hours, there was quite a lot of liquid in the container. Enough that I poured it off into the container I’d already started in the fridge, almost filling it, so that the bag wouldn’t be sitting in so much liquid.

When very little more drained out of it after another hour or two, I decided to take it out and finish the process.

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Look how much liquid there is! I can hardly wait until our next bread baking day. :-D

Once the bag was on the plate, I could really feel how the middle was thinner than the outside. If I had a cheese press, I would have been able to get more liquid out, more evenly. Maybe some day. For now, I’m happy with doing it this way.

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And here is my yogurt cheese baby. With the outside being drier, it allowed me to gently roll the cheese out of the cloth. If that part had broken up more, the softer middle would have got on the cloth and made it much more difficult to get out of the bag.

Guess how I know that? :-D

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Once out of the cloth, I mixed it thoroughly to make it an even texture. This is a bit on the thin side to be a “cream cheese.” More like a really thick sour cream.

I had a couple of smaller containers waiting for it…

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I filled one with the plain yogurt cheese, then added some garlic powder, onion salt and parsley to what was left in the bowl.

I admit, I licked the spatula after doing this, and the onion and garlic one was sooo good!

Like the plain yogurt, it thickens a bit in the fridge, but not by much more.

If I had wanted to, I could have left the bag to hang longer to drain more liquid out and have more of a cream cheese texture, rather than a sour cream texture.

We are looking forward to trying some of this on pierogi soon!

If you try making this yourself, please to pop by and let me know in the comments, how yours turned out, and what you think of it!

The Re-Farmer

Black Olive and Cheddar Sourdough variation

January 26, 2018January 26, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

For the past while, we’ve been using Sir Sour Alot to bake 4 loaves of bread, every other day. Give or take. We’ve been using the Quick and Easy Sourdough Bread recipe each time because… well… it’s quick and easy.

When it came to the final kneading of the dough, before shaping into loaves, that’s when we would get creative and start kneading in other ingredients. Garlic powder, grated dry Parmesan or Asiago cheese, or both together (both from the Bulk Barn), rolled oats, shredded cheddar cheese, etc. Whatever we have in the cupboard that we thought to try.

Yesterday I needed to make a quick run into town, so I was able to pick up a can of sliced black olives. I used half the can, chopping the black olives up finer, and kneaded it in to half the dough, together with about a cup of shredded cheddar. (We kneaded rolled oats into the other half.)

We also used warm potato water, drained from the potatoes I’d made for supper, as the liquid.

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This is what they looked like, by the time the other loaves were done in the oven and I was about to put these in. When kneading the shredded cheddar and olives into the dough, the cheddar basically disintegrates and gets completely worked into the dough. So you can’t really see it, but you sure can taste it!

It took all our will power to finish off the last of the previous baking we did before going into the fresh loaves! Two of which went into the freezer as soon as they were completely cooled.

This morning, we tried the olive and cheddar loaf, toasted.

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It was so incredibly delicious, we’re now thinking of making ONLY olive and cheddar bread from now on!

Since Sir Sour Alot expanded so enthusiastically last night, maybe we’ll do some extra baking tonight. I even picked up more cheese – old, rather than medium, cheddar, for the extra tang.

So, to summarize, to the basic recipe we made the following changes:

substituting potato water for regular water in the recipe.
adding chopped black olives and shredded cheddar cheese (medium) to the dough during the final kneading.

I look forward to when we can start making yogurt cheese again. After draining the liquid off the yogurt to make the cheese, I would use the liquid to bake bread, and it’s even better than potato water.

The Re-Farmer