David Smith 5/11/13 David Smith 5/11/13

More pickled sucker recipes

Since my April 30 blog-post I had those suckers we caught chunked and soaking in brine, and yesterday finished pickling them, using four different pickling recipes. I found a great new cookbook at the library, Scandinavian Classics by Niklas Ekstedt, and it includes some wonderful pickled herring recipes that I used for the suckers.

My grandfather used to pickle small northern pike in a more traditional vinegar/salt/spice pickling solution, the kind that you might normally use for pickled cucumbers. They were fantastic and I always liked seeing an open jar of his pickled northern in the fridge, so I could steal a piece or two. The foundational recipe for pickled herring in Ekstedt's book is not like the recipe my Grandpa used. Ekstedt's version is a sweet pickle, using no salt at all in the foundation pickle, and very little (a pinch) in the follow-up flavoring pickles.

I had the sucker pieces soaking in a light salt brine for 5 days, before moving onto the sweet pickle as outlined in the book.

Here is Ekstedt's "Basic Pickling Brine for Herring", which I adapted for the amount of sucker I had:

6 cups water
2.2 lbs sugar
2 cups white vinegar
10 allspice kernels
4 bay leaves

Bring all of that to a boil and cook for a bit.
Let it cool and keep in the fridge.
Rinse the salted fish chunks in cold running water. Then rinse them again. Then again...rinse the dickens out of them, for 20 minutes.
Place the rinsed fish pieces into a large container and cover with the cooled brine. Put something like a small plate over them fish to weigh it down a bit and to keep them under the brine. Let sit in the fridge for a day.
The next day make another brine like you did above and let it cool. Remove the fish from the brine (I just placed them in a colander), dump the old brine, rinse the container, replace the fish pieces and cover with the new brine. Weight them down again too. Let it sit for another day.

Now you're ready to create various flavor brines that will give the fish distinctly different profiles (tastes and textures). I veered a bit, as I am wont to do, from Ekstadt's recipes in a couple of these. I'll just give you the recipes below as I did them. You ought to feel free to do fiddle and play with these as well.

Ramps and green Apple Pickled Sucker ["Ramps and Apple Herring"]

The recipe for the first batch I pickled sounded like the most interesting: "Ramps & Apple". I have plenty of ramps from the week's foraging harvests and so I was anxious to give this one a whirl. I followed Ekstedt exactly on this one.

1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup sour cream
2 tart green apples
bunch of ramps
pinch of sea salt
freshly ground white pepper

Grate the apples coarsely and finely chop the ramps (the whole ramp,from bulb to leaf top).
Mix the mayo and sour cream, along with the salt and ground white pepper.
Add the grated apples and chopped ramps and mix well.
Add the fish pieces to the sauce and gently but thoroughly mix it all together.
Divvy up the sucker in sauce concoction into clean jars with lids. Be sure to write what's in the jar and the date. Pop it in the fridge until the next day (the longer the fish and sauce get to know one another the better). It should be good for a few weeks.

Herb Sauce Pickled Sucker ["Herring with Herbs"]

This one was really tasty.

1 cup yogurt (Ekstedt called for crème fraîche)
1 cup mayonnaise
1 scant tbl olive oil
Chopped parsley
Minced garlic
Minced onion
Chopped ramp leaves
Dried tarragon
Sea salt
Ground white pepper

Mix everything together in a large bowl.
Add the fish pieces and gently but thoroughly mix.
Divvy up the sucker in sauce concoction into clean jars with lids. Be sure to write what's in the jar and the date. Pop it in the fridge until the next day (the longer the fish and sauce get to know one another the better). It should be good for a few weeks.

Fennel Pickled Sucker ["Fennel Herring"]

2 or 3 cups of the foundational pickling brine, strained (amount depends on how much fish you have to pickle).
Fennel bulb, thinly sliced.
1-2 tbl fennel seeds, lightly toasted.

Fill the jars with the sliced fennel and sucker pieces.
Add 1/2 tbl of the toasted fennel seeds and a fennel frond (Why the frond? Because it looks cool).
Cover with the strained pickling brine. Be sure to write what's in the jar and the date. Pop it in the fridge until the next day (the longer the fish and sauce get to know one another the better). It should be good for a few weeks.

Tomato/Garlic/Onion Pickled Sucker ["Tomato and Sherry Herring"]

Can of crushed tomatoes
Chopped onion
Chopped garlic
2 tbl olive oil
Sea salt
Ground Black pepper
Bay leaf

Mix everything together, season to taste with salt and pepper.
Add the fish pieces and gently but thoroughly mix.
Divvy up the sucker in sauce concoction into clean jars with lids. Be sure to write what's in the jar and the date. Pop it in the fridge until the next day (the longer the fish and sauce get to know one another the better). It should be good for a few weeks.

I plan on trying these recipes, and more, with any small "hammer handle" northerns I catch this year. Sucker meat is ok, but northern pike is firmer and smoother tasting. Let me know if you do any fish pickling yourself, and how it turns out for you.

David Smith 5/3/13 David Smith 5/3/13

We missed the sturgeon but found another cache of wild edibles

We spent yesterday and today in Shawano County, at my parents' cottage. Kim had a job interview in Wittenberg and I wanted to check the countryside for more potential foraging locations. If you happen to be a friend on my own facebook page you may be familiar with our forays to the cottage. They usually involve a hammock, a few cigars, some good craft beer and grilling of meat. This week, however, Shawano seemed to still be trying desperately to shake off winter's chill and grab hold of spring. It was rainy and nippy, but a most enjoyable reprieve nonetheless.

A trio of wild edibles harvested from a beautiful hardwood forest in Shawano County. l-r: Virginia Waterleaf, Ramps, Trout Lilies.

Virginia Waterleaf. I would not normally dig up the whole plant like this, rather only a portion of the young leaves, but the spot from where these were harvested was being logged and dug up to make what looked to be an entrance road. This image pro… — Virginia Waterleaf. I would not normally dig up the whole plant like this, rather only a portion of the young leaves, but the spot from where these were harvested was being logged and dug up to make what looked to be an entrance road. This image provides a look at the root system.

Handful of Virginia Waterleaf. The oftentimes dappled or lighter "watermark" spots are not especially visible in this image, although they are there.

As far as it concerns Creative Sustenance, I did indeed discover several new locations that look quite promising. One area in particular had me very excited. So much so that when I pulled into a muddy track entering a hardwood forest, where some heavy equipment had parked during the clearing of the area, I did so a little recklessly and risked getting stuck in the deeply ridged muddy tracks of the logging vehicles. But I was too pumped about seeing the acre upon acre of ramps, trout lilies and virginia waterleaf plants that covered the forest floor.

Virginia Waterleaf leaves, the primary edible part.

I grabbed my spade and quickly dug a few plants from the edges of the clearing where the big rigs had been working. I didn't feel guilty about the few shallow holes I dug nor the handful of plants I removed in their entirety, something I would normally never do, because I knew that this spot would soon be leveled and graded of all plant life as the road was put in. When I return and hopefully get the okay to walk the woods proper, I'll do so with my usual thoughtful stewardship of the woodland I'm responsible for when in it.

I was a little surprised at how deeply the trout lily bulbs were buried. Some were 8-12 inches or more below their mottled leaves, attached to creamy white "stalks", or scapes, blanched by many inches of mulched soil. The bulb depth told of an old forest, with decades worth of decomposing leaf matter. It was also an indication of the age of some of the plants that had seeded or reproduced vegetatively many years ago.

Trout Lily bulbs, cleaned and sweet as clover.

Ramps, cleaned and trimmed. They blanketed the forest floor for acres.

The soil was incredibly rich and black, like the most beautiful compost created from the hand of a master gardener. A half-dozen to a dozen worms seemed to be in every spade-full. Even though we're already into May right now, climatically it's still very early spring. Winter is still letting us know he hasn't given up the ghost quite yet. (Last night saw 17" of snow fall in Rice Lake, I was told. We saw a car pass us covered in several inches of the white stuff.)

This morning Kim and I drove over to the Shawano dam area of the Wolf River, as two of our cottage neighbors told me this morning that the sturgeon were spawning with great theatricality just a couple days ago. They described the big fish as looking like logs bouncing around in the water, swimming over one another, as thick as cordwood. Every year the sturgeon spawning run draws people to the river to watch the giant prehistoric fish do their thing. Unfortunately for us, the day was cold and the dam had been opened, changing conditions pretty dramatically. A good number of other people were also at the river, hoping for a glimpse, but we saw no fish. Still, it was cool to know that they were in there, hiding in the deep water.

Addendum: I call this my Wittenberg Sandwich, because I got all of the ingredients in or a bit outside Wittenberg this day. Jack cheese, sweet/hot mustard and vinegar&herb sulze from Nueske's Meats, ramps and virginia waterleaf greens from a forest a few miles from town. But the swirled rye I did get from a sweet little local butcher shop in Shawano. If you're not familiar with sulze, it's just head-cheese with herbs or spices and vinegar added. It was fantastic.

David Smith 4/30/13 David Smith 4/30/13

Suckers, Ramps and Trout Lilies

While scouting for young burdock rosettes today, I stopped at a small bridge a mile outside of town, just to see what I could see in the river below. The fast moving water was greenish but clear and, lo and behold, I could see several small groups of suckers. So, I drove home, grabbed the dip net and called my Dad to ask him if he wanted to join me for an hour of fun.

I set up the net on the bridge while Dad walked downstream a-ways and started "herding" suckers to my net. We had a blast, hollering, "Here they come!" "He went under the net!" "Got one!" (used that line several times). We thought we'd give it a whirl further downstream from the bridge, where I just threw the net into the river, watched for suckers speeding past and pulled hard and fast when one or more passed over the net. "Got one!" became "Holy cow!" when on one pull I hauled in six.

I cleaned , cubed and salt brined the fish for later pickling. The jagged odds and ends I breaded and fried for a tasty snack before heading back out to the woods for more wild edibles scouting.

The ramps are well on their way now; it won't be more than another week or two before the forest floor is carpeted with them. Trout lilies make good opportunity in the spots where ramps choose to share the ground. I harvested one modest cluster of ramps and a few sweet trout lily bulbs, enough to give everyone at home a bite or two.

Mottled trout lily leaf next to young ramps.

I love trout lily bulbs. They're one of the real treats of the early spring edibles. Sweet, crunchy, easy to harvest. I wish they were larger than pea-size, but were that the case I might make a pig of myself with them. As it is, they do well as simply a lovely little candy treat.

Trout Lily bulbs next to a bunch of ramps.

David Smith 4/23/13 David Smith 4/23/13

Pickled Suckers and a few Ramps

It seems that this year's "spring" has been stalled in winter-mode forever. April 23rd today and it's a crisp 42°. Someone said close to a foot of snow fell last night in northern Wisconsin. I'm not one to complain about weather; I enjoy all of our region's elemental inconsistencies. But even I am tired of waiting for spring warmth and sun. Mostly I'm tired of waiting for the flush of wild spring edibles that I covet each year.

Today my impatience got the better of me and so I went out and dug up just a few fledgling ramps, their leaves with no more than an couple inches of nascent growth. I don't normally like to do that, as the leaves of mature ramps are as flavorful as the bulbs. But I needed something now! Ramp and duck egg pizza is tonight's dinner entree.

Early spring ramps, with only an inch or two of new leaf growth.

Last week saw my daughter Jesse and I doing a bit of sucker fishing with our dip net. The suckers are running now, though not impressively, and as the larder is bereft of last year's pickled sucker I had a hankering to make some more. We scored a couple of modestly-sized males from the Little Manitowoc River, enough for two jars of pickled meat. See my recipe from last year's (2012) May 5th blog post (the only difference in the recipe is that this time I used apple wine instead of regular white wine).

Dip net. A lot of smelt and suckers, and even crayfish and a few snapping turtles, have made acquaintance with this small net.

Jesse with two small male suckers, our only fish on a cold, rainy day.

We hope to get a few more suckers this week, as I want to pickled at least a dozen jars-worth.

Pickled sucker. See the May 5, 2012 blog post for recipe.

The rainbow trout are running now as well. The day after Jesse and I went out, which was a weekend, I went out with rod and lure to try my luck alone. One beautiful, silvery 19" male rainbow was my reward, just enough to satisfy my wife and I for lunch that same afternoon.

Rainbow trout, caught in Little Manitowoc River on a small cleo. Pan-fried with a coating of toasted sesame seeds, he was just what the doctor ordered.

Yes, it's been cool to downright frosty this phony spring month of April, but a few fish and a handful of small ramps are enough to keep the fire in my belly alight.

Several days of rain made for a high and swiftly moving river.

David Smith 4/17/13 David Smith 4/17/13

Hello old friends

Our last post was on March 29, almost 3 weeks ago, and I thought spring was right at the doorstep. Fooled again! I'd been scouting the woods and fields every day or two since then. We noticed the first new green of the year only yesterday, with ramps making their 2013 debut.

Ramps (Wild Leeks) breaking through a soft bed of pine needles.

The ramps I transplanted along the side of the house last year - perhaps six total root clusters - also showed themselves yesterday. That project looks to be a success, and I'll be transplanting even more this year, possibly 50 or more root clusters along the north side of the house.

Cluster of transplanted ramps from last year sprouting at the side of the house.

During a short walk through the woods I did find a single, small garlic mustard seedling making a lonely first appearance. Of course its solitariness was just a ruse; no doubt it will soon be joined by an army of its invading brethren. We found no morels, which did not surprise me, as we haven't had more than a few hours total of adequate temperatures in the last month (it did hit 63° for a couple hours two days ago, before quickly dropping to the lower 50°s). But there were plenty of other interesting things to see in the still naked forest.

A few Great Horned Owl pellets with the remains of mice and squirrels.

I picked a few bones from some owl pellets, saving a couple of mouse jawbones for my daughter to make a necklace charm with (I suppose that does perhaps sound a tad unusual, but she's an unusual girl...the apple didn't fall far from the tree with her). A group of seven whitetail deer were unafraid and curious, as urban deer are wont to be. One young buck was showing the knobby beginnings of what will become his headgear this year. We also enjoyed watching three beautiful and glossy mallards making use of a small rainwater puddle. They looked so pristine that it made me slightly embarrassed for our own ducks at home, with their natty plumage.

Mallards enjoy a puddle swim in the middle of the woods. These fellows were so glossy they appeared to almost be holographic.

We plan to start filming again early next week. Stay tuned and, as always, please feel free to let us know what you think or would like to see in the way of Creative Sustenance episodes, wild edibles and other food projects.

David Smith 3/29/13 David Smith 3/29/13

Spring is here, right?

I've been waiting, waiting, waiting for spring to show it's face for more than the quick, furtive glances it's been teasing us with lately. I think it's finally here to stay. The coming days promise temperatures in the 40s and the snow seems to be melting at a fairly steady rate (still don't see the grass beneath, but it's getting close!).

This is always a fun and enjoyably anxious time of year. Spring's wild edibles will soon be appearing, a little here, a little there, hinting at the mass invasion to come. And the roots that have always been available, though buried beneath several feet of snow, will be accessible too.

I've got a lot of dishes and recipes to share with you that make great use of spring's wild edible harvest, some that are very simple, some that are more involved, all that are delicious. I'm excited.

Maple blossom. These tasty and stunning little flowers were out in force on March 25 of last year.

David Smith 3/27/13 David Smith 3/27/13

Images & Wis Public Television

Yesterday I added several images to the Gallery page of this site. Most of the images are shots of various wild edibles gathered while foraging, although in the coming days and weeks I intend to add more shots of food and other related subjects. We also changed the viewing format from a slide-show to one where the page displays a grid of thumbnail images that you can enlarge by clicking on a specific image. The enlarged image will appear in a lightbox, from where you then can scroll through more images by clicking the arrows on either side or by simply clicking the image to move you forward. Mousing over the enlarged image will also activate a description at the bottom of the image.

Also, last week we mailed our Creative Sustenance program proposal to Wisconsin Public Television. The WPT Program Proposal forms asked several questions, including asking for a show description, how it complies with WPT's mission, what viewers might get out of it, and so on. I thought I'd share with you a portion of the answers we gave, condensed, below:

Creative Sustenance is a video and multimedia project that takes viewers into the fields and forests, rivers and lakes, backyards and alleyways of Wisconsin and the Midwest to discover our region's abundant and diverse wild edibles. Our main focus will be on foraging and preparing wild vegetables and fruits (nettles, ramps, mustards, milkweed, docks, nuts, berries, etc.). Our state is blessed with a plethora of delicious wild plants, although we will also pursue the occasional under-appreciated protein source with episodes featuring animals such as turtles, frogs, possum, beaver, and even insects.

We will follow up the "in the field" portion of the program with an "in the kitchen" section, where we'll show some ways to prepare for the table what we've harvested from the field. The kitchen segment will feature either myself as chef or, in some cases, other restaurant chefs who make use of wild edibles in their menus.

Creative Sustenance is both an educational and entertaining program. Viewers will learn that there is a cornucopia of wonderful and nutritious food not too far from and oftentimes right outside their own back doors. The program will certainly enhance and enrich viewers' understanding of and appreciation for many of our region's hidden food treasures. It will also educate them on how they may take good and ethical advantage of these wild food resources in their own homes by creating delicious meals that use wild edibles, thereby further enhancing their personal connection with our region's flora and fauna.

We're in the midst of a food revolution in this country, from urban poultry and beekeeping to a significant increase in people growing gardens again and more and more restaurants using wild edibles in their menus. Creative Sustenance speaks directly to that growing interest.

Wish us luck!

David Smith 3/23/13 David Smith 3/23/13

A gallon of yogurt for the price of a gallon of milk

Everyone knows that yogurt is a healthy food choice (I'm talking natural, live yogurt, free of sugars and additives). Most people also know that it's very easy to make yourself. It's so easy, in fact, that a lot of people already know how to make it, and this blog post is probably little more than an exercise in redundancy for many readers. But making yogurt is an activity that I'm doing on a pretty regular basis, like making bread, and I thought there might be a few folks who read my stuff who haven't made yogurt but would like to give it a whirl.

One of the perks of making your own yogurt is that you can make a gallon of the stuff literally for the price of a gallon of milk, after the first batch. A large (I think they're quart-size) container of store-bought plain yogurt costs around $5, depending on the brand. If you make a gallon you end up with 4 quarts for the price of one, or even less, depending on what you pay for a gallon of milk.

Here's what you'll need:

candy thermometer (cost around $7, but you also might find one for a buck at a resale shop like St. Vinnies or Goodwill).
kettle large enough to heat a gallon of milk (of course you can make smaller batches, but I make a gallon at a time, once every week or two).
rubber spatula to stir with.
containers to keep the yogurt in your refrigerator.
heat source that will incubate your yogurt at 100° F.
gallon of milk (I use organic whole milk, but pretty much any milk will do, although you may have some issues if you use skim milk).
yogurt with live, active cultures to use as a starter (the container will tell you if it has live, active cultures. This is the only yogurt you'll need to purchase from a store. After this you'll be able to use the yogurt you've made as a starter for the next batch.).

Procedure:

1. Clean and sterilize all of your equipment and utensils. Add the milk to the kettle and slowly bring the heat up, periodically stirring/scraping the bottom to avoid burning or scalding the milk. You're aiming for 185°.

2. Again, 185° F is your target.

3. As soon as you hit 185° place the kettle in a sink of cold water and ice, and bring the milk down to 110°.

4. Once you hit 110° add 1 cup of the active culture yogurt (2 tbl per quart) and gently stir to mix.

5. Transfer the milk/yogurt mixture to containers that will be okay to heat to 100° for several hours. I use plastic freezer storage containers or glass canning jars.

6. Place the milk/yogurt-filled containers in something that will safely heat them to around 100° for 7 to 10 hours. An oven will work if you can regulate the heat low enough not to melt plastic if that's what you're using. I use an old electric blanket set on high. I probably didn't reach 100° but I fold it four times and wrap it around and over the containers, let them incubate for about 10 hours and it comes out fine.

7. After 7 hours or so, check the yogurt to see if it's set up. If not, let it incubate longer. As I said, mine takes 10 hours buried in an electric blanket. When it looks like yogurt, just refrigerate it and that's it...badaboom badabing, it's ready to eat. Add fruit or jam if you want to sweeten it up. Also, if you prefer the texture of Greek yogurt you can get it by simply draining the yogurt in a couple layers of cheesecloth to get rid of the whey.

* Forgive the shoddy, grainy photography on this post. Had some technical issues with the camera to overcome.

David Smith 3/19/13 David Smith 3/19/13

Faviken Linseed Crisps

There hasn't been a lot to blog about this past month. In spite of several warm days (if temperatures in the 30s can fairly be called warm) the ground has remained hidden under a thick blanket of snow. I think we've had three nice, heavy snows in the past 4 weeks. I've been doing a good deal of playing and cooking in the kitchen, but nothing I really consider worth sharing with you all. Mostly I've been replanning the garden, replanning our Creative Sustenance shooting schedule, replanning the order of things that need to be done in the house and yard...replanning already laid plans.

Today, however, I did make something worth sharing, if for no other reason than because I'd not made it before.

Linseed or Flax Seed Crisps with hot honey sauce.

One of my favorite cookbooks from last year is Magnus Nilsson's Faviken. It's as much foodie philosophy as it is recipe book, and the recipes are wonderfully interesting. One that I thought would translate well to our future dining and tapas menu is Nilsson's "Linseed Crisps". It's a very simple recipe (only three ingredients), yet one that creates a finished product that is elegant and unusual. I of course complicated the process a bit by making my own potato starch rather than simply purchasing it, but we've been snowed in for a month and such circumstances are conducive to more hands-on effort.

Ingredients (for my initial experiments I reduced Nilsson's quantities by half):

100g flax seeds (flax seeds & linseeds are the same thing)
20g potato starch (you can buy it. I made my own, and tell you how below)
2g salt
350g water

Weigh everything out. Mix the seeds, starch and salt in a bowl. Pour in 350g boiling water and mix thoroughly. Let it soak for a while (Nilsson recommends 20 minutes; I was impatient and waited 10 minutes). Pour the mixture onto a baking sheet pan covered with a sheet of parchment paper. Nilsson recommends laying another sheet of paper on top and roll the mixture very thinly. I just spread it out into a more or less even layer with the back of a spoon. Bake at 300° for as long as it takes for the layer of "dough" to get hard and begin to pull away from the paper. It took more than 30 minutes for mine.

Gently, very gently, pull the crispy layer from the paper. It will likely break up into any number of irregular shapes and sizes. Achieving more uniform pieces is something I intend to work on in succeeding attempts.

The crisps are now ready to eat, with a dipping sauce or as a funky topping for ice cream or any other way you can think to use them. They have a warm, nutty flavor and look pretty cool. They're also gluten free. Part of the appeal of these is the appearance, with the seeds looking as though they are suspended in sugar glass or candy glass. This gave me the idea of trying to make some in actual candy glass, or at least making them with an added sweet ingredient like cane sugar or maple syrup. I'll let you know how that works out when I do it.

Make your own potato starch.

You can buy potato starch. I think Bob's Red Mill sells it. But what fun is that, when making it yourself is so easy and so interesting. Here's all you do:

Peel 7 to 8 average-size potatoes. I included a cassava root I had, along with the potatoes, as cassava is a very starchy vegetable (there are apparently some pretty intense toxicity issues associated with cassava if it's not cooked or prepared properly, so do some research and keep that in mind if you're going to use it). Grate the potatoes over the smallest holes on your grater.

Double layer some cheesecloth over a bowl and drop a big handful of the grated potatoes into it. Pour a little water (maybe 1/3 cup or so) onto the potatoes, Bring the corners of the cheesecloth together and twist tightly. Then squeeze the dickens out the potatoes, with the juice going into the bowl. Repeat this process until you use up all of the grated potatoes. Let the liquid sit for a while (20 minutes), then gently pour off the top liquid, leaving a sedimentary layer of starch at the bottom of the bowl. Scrape this sediment out with a spoon and there you go. I let my starch dry overnight, before breaking it up with a fork into a more powder-like substance. There are all sorts of ways to use this starch (just about any way you can use corn starch). It's just pretty cool to be able to make your own if you ever want to. Note: I mixed the starchless potato/cassava gratings with salt and pepper, and a little onion, and fried them as hash browns for breakfast. Double bonus!

David Smith 2/21/13 David Smith 2/21/13

Goat Cheese

This past weekend we lent a hand (literally) to friends Brian & Christine, by agreeing to milk one of their goats while the couple took a day off to head out of town for their anniversary. Nina, one of a dozen or so goats Christine has, had lost her kid and needed to be milked three times while the two still-kind-of-newlyweds were away. We got a little more than a half-gallon total from Nina.

Nina   (click all images to enlarge) — Nina (click all images to enlarge)

While goat milk tastes great all by itself I instead decided to make a little goat cheese from what we had. This particular recipe for goat cheese couldn't be any easier or quicker. I think, all-told, it didn't take more than an hour, and I dawdled at that. The simple recipe also lends itself to a lot of flexibility in the final product, depending on what you choose to add to the finished cheese. I chose to make a savory goat cheese, by adding the herbs thyme, summer savory and a little rosemary, along with garlic. But you could just as easily make a sweet or fruity cheese by adding things such as blueberries, honey, or figs.

Ingredients:

2 quarts goat milk
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
sea salt
fresh herbs (thyme, summer savory, rosemary) or berries, honey, etc.
garlic clove finely diced

Other gear:

cheesecloth
thermometer
large bowl
deep sauce pan
wooden spoon and/or spatula
sieve (I used a cocktail strainer)

Heat milk in sauce pan to 180°, stirring constantly.

At 180° drizzle the lemon juice into the milk and gently stir to mix.

Procedure:

Heat milk in sauce pan to 180°, stirring constantly.
Once you hit 180° drizzle the lemon juice into the milk and gently stir to mix.
Let milk/lemon juice sit until small curds form, which should be almost immediate (maybe 10 seconds or so).
Set a double layer of cheese cloth into a deep bowl and ladle, with a small strainer, the curds into the cheesecloth.
Bring the corners of the cheesecloth together and tie them (2 loose knots, from opposing corners) but leave enough room or play under the knots to get a wooden spoon through. The cheesecloth bag will hang from the wooden spoon over the bowl, allowing the curds to drain the whey into the bowl. this shouldn't take long; maybe 5 or 10 minutes.
Remove the drained cheese from the cloth and add the herbs, garlic and sea salt to taste. Mix everything together well.
Press the cheese into a mold (I just used a small bowl), and that's that.

Let the curds drain for about 10 minutes.

You can eat it right away...make some bruschetta, for example...or wrap it and store it in the fridge for a week or so. I like to let it sit in the fridge for at least a day to let the cheese, herbs and garlic get to know one another a little better. I tell you, this is so easy and so tasty that my desire to get a couple goats is getting more serious with every bite.