Tag: Homemade

Cheese

Cheese was first eaten by single-celled organisms on Earth around 4.2 to 4.0 Billion years ago. It is a fundamental aspect to the origin of life. Cheese landed on this planet via the comet Colby when it crashed into Earth’s crust spreading cheese particles around the globe. This created what scientists call the primordial soup. Single-celled organisms went on a feeding frenzy. With the over consumption of cheese some of these unicellular organisms combined with the living cells from the cheese. This was the first of the multicellular organisms. There is fossil evidence of this buried under the Great Wall Of China.

Get yourself some milk. Not your ordinary homogenised milk, get some un-homogenised milk, 2 litres of it. Warm it up to 30⁰C. Add some calcium chloride and white mould culture blend. Keep it at 30⁰C for 15 minutes. I made a water bath with an immersion circulator to hold the temperature.

Once the milk has “ripened” add in some rennet and let the milk set. This will take about an hour or 2. What is needed is a clean break. Tell my family I love them.

with a long bladed knife cut the curds into 1cm cubes. How you are supposed to do this while it is sitting in a pot beats me. Then scoop the curds into some cheese moulds.

Now let them drain, then after 2 hours flip them. Use some cheese cloth on the open end. Continue to flip them every hour for at least 5 hours.

Take them out of the moulds and leave them dry for a couple of days.

Put them in a container to mature.

This will take a while.

Olive Oil – Update

The centrifuge turned up today. I am going to use it to make Vegemite. Before I do, I am going use it on the product I made when trying to make olive oil, to see if it will separate all the parts. At the moment there is water, very fine particles of the olive flesh, and olive oil. There is olive oil in there somewhere. It looks to me that the the oil and the olive particulates are combined in an homogenised funk, because that is what is floating on top of what I presume is the water. There is water there because, initially I added it into the blender with the olives to help the blending process.

The problem occurred when I hit the olives too hard with a high powered blender and basically turned the olives into particles so small that they wont separate out.

The centrifuge is a low speed one which does 4000 rpm maxing out at 2395 x gravity. At that I would weigh a bit under 191600 kg.

I have skimmed the very top off the solution and added that to 2 of the tubes. I mixed the rest of the goo and water together for the other 6 tubes to see if there is a difference.

After one and a half hours there seemed to be some separation and I can see a very small amount of oil in 2 of the tubes.


But that was it, it never got any better than that.

This was a total fail. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.

Vegemite

I’ll be using a centrifuge and beer waste to make Vegemite.

How It’s Made

Spent brewer’s yeast is strained to get rid of hop resins, and washed to remove bitter tastes. Then it is suspended in water at a temperature greater than 37 C with no nutrients. The yeast cells die, and vitamins and minerals leach out. Then the proteolytic (protein-splitting) enzymes take over, breaking the yeast proteins down into smaller water-soluble fragments. These also leach out, a process called autolysis. The yeast cell membrane is unruptured during this time, and can be removed by centrifuging. The clear light brown liquid is then concentrated under a vacuum to a thick paste (the vacuum helps preserve flavours and vitamin B1, thiamine). It is seasoned with salt, and a small proportion of celery and onion extracts to increase palatability.

Sounds Easy.

How to make Vegemite

Centrifuge
  1. Find out how long it takes yeast to die, and then once they have how long does it take before autolysis to be complete.
  2. Make beer and keep the spent brewers yeast.
  3. Using a sieve strain the brewers yeast, wash it.
  4. Suspend yeast in water at 40⁰ until the yeast cell destroy themselves.
  5. Remove the cell membranes using a centrifuge.
  6. Concentrate the remaining liquid under vacuum.
  7. Add salt, celery extract, and onion extract.
  8. Mix it all together.
  9. Make toast.
  10. Butter toast.
  11. Spread Vegemite onto buttered toast. Not too much.
  12. Enjoy.

A Brief Hostory

Vegemite dates back to 1922 when the Fred Walker Company hired a Dr. Callister to develop a spread to replace Marmite, a thick past made from spent brewer’s yeast.

Dr Callister

Brewer’s yeast is a good source of vitamin B, but it is poorly digested. Making yeast extract using autolysis: a process where the yeast’s own enzymes break it down, makes it more digestible. Yeast extract, contains a high concentration of glutamic acid, which is the source of Vegemite’s rich umami flavour. Vegemite does not contain any fat, added sugar or animal content.

Vegemite is so rich in vitamin B that that in 1939 Vegemite was officially endorsed by the British Medical Association. During World War II, Vegemite was included in Australian Army rations.

Olive Oil

I found a way to turn unripe olives into a homogenised goo that smells really nice.

I found a way to turn unripe olives into a homogenised goo that smells really nice.

Bash them up with a stick and take the seeds out.

Put them in a high powered blender with some warm water. Blend. I think this is where I went wrong.

The Thermomix might be a little too high powered. It’s supposed to come out a paste. But I think my paste has a max particle size of about 10 microns. That’s to say it’s a very smooth and luxurious paste at this stage.

Put that goo into a cheese cloth and press.

Wait for it to seperate.

This where I have to stop. The oil hasn’t separated out. The liquid at the bottom is mostly water. The oil is floating on top. It has a lot of the olive still in it. This is where the over blending has caused a problem. I can’t separate out the oil.

Chewing Gum

Chewing gum. A guilt free way of eating sugar. The sugar is bound to the gum so you get all the flavour with no empty calories.

Chewing gum, the next “Super Food”. A guilt free way of eating sugar, because the sugar is bound to the gum so you get all the flavour, with none of the calories.

This is chewing gum.

It’s basically a mix of stuff you shouldn’t eat. It’s sugar in 2 ways, flavouring, and little balls of gum base. Taste so good.

You can tell it’s an American recipe by the fact that it uses corn syrup.

It’s not too hard to make, although it requires a fair amount of elbow grease not mentioned in the ingredients list.

Melt the gum base
Mix the corn syrup and gum base together.
Knead the gum into the confectioners sugar
Add the flavouring and knead some more.
Chop it into sticks.
Present.

I have to admit, before I say any more that I have a sweet tooth, but these were delicious. Such a throw back to when I was a kid. I will call them happy sticks.

Milo

What’s the difference between a rocket booster on Elon Musks latest creation the Falcon 9 and Milo? Milo is packed full of enough energy to keep a 12 kid playing all afternoon without having to come back to earth.

What’s the difference between a rocket booster on Elon Musk’s latest creation, the Falcon 9, and Milo? Milo is packed full of enough energy to keep a 12 year old kid playing all afternoon, without having to come back to earth. It’s special formula was created by a chemist in Australia over 100 years ago and was used by the Post Dept. on their horses to give them enough energy to cover the great Australian plains. It is now one of the six major food groups.

I turn this into Milo

Doesn’t seem like much, and it isn’t.

What you do is use the syrup and butter to make a toffee. Let it cool, then blend it.

 

Add the rest to the blender and blend some more.

Job done.

Although it is  similar and it tastes nice, it isn’t as sweet as Milo, or as malty.

Beer

I turn plants matter and sugar into beer using a big glass bottle.

For thousands of years beer has been the alcoholic beverage of choice for the majority of people. It is the major driver of overpopulation, and “Big Pharma” lobbies governments all over the world to keep it cheap and legal so they can sell headache pills to the masses, no one ever stops at one headache pill.

This is beer. All you need to do is put all this stuff together in a particular way and “voila”.

I’m using a 5L Saison kit I got from the Hop + Grain. It’s an intermediate step between using the extract brew kit and all grain method.

Steep the grain

Remove the grain

Add some malt extract and hops then simmer for while. Part way through “The Boil” add the remaining malt extract, and just near the end add the other hops.

Put it in a big glass bottle, find a quiet spot for it then

wait…

Dry Aged Beef

Cannibals knew of the extraodinary qualities of dry aged beef. As told by the ancient tribes of Papua New Guinea, the older the tribes man the tastier the feast. This has been passed down by generation after generation and now, thankfully for the most of us, we just dry age our beef.

Cannibals knew of the extraodinary qualities of dry aged beef. As told by the ancient tribes of Papua New Guinea, the older the tribes man the tastier the feast. This has been passed down by generation after generation and now, thankfully for the most of us, we just dry age our beef.

This is a slab of meat, or a fillet, if so inclined. It’s a tasty treat if you’re into that sort of thing.

I got some Banquet Bags from Smoked and Cured to try my hand at dry ageing some beef at home.

I put this Scotch Fillet portion into one of these special bags and sucked all the air out. Following the recommendations that came with the product I left as much of the blood as I could. This is to help bind the bag to the meat.

Once sealed in the bag I put it on a rack and plonked it in the fridge. You can leave it there for as long as you like.

Now wait…

Bringing Home The Bacon

This follows on from my original Bacon post

Here it is. After turning it over pretty much every day for 7 days. I took it out of it’s bag, washed it off and soaked it in water for an hour.

While I was making Cornflakes I started the coals for the Weber and set it up for smoking. The target temp in the grill was 110°c. Once I got it there it was time to put on the pork belly and finish its transformation into bacon.

Now that that is done, sit back and wait for the internal temp of the meat to hit 68°c.

Remove and let cool.

Slice

Enjoy. I was told that once you try your own bacon you will make it again, and this is true for me. I will be doing this again and again.