A Good Tip in Cheese and Wine Making

Tomorrow will be a 3 am start as Jean arrives back from Stanthorpe at 5 am courtesy of the bus at Maitland station. It's still nice to enjoy the morning routine of coffee and blogging before moving into the day hence the 3 am start which will allow time for this before the 40 minute drive. The herd checking has been adjusted to an afternoon chore over the last couple of days to take the pressure off the morning.

Sunday was a spectacularly sunny day although a bit cool in the morning. Rather than rush down to the workshop and work on my project in a freezing shed the time was spent making Camembert and watering the gardens. Then when the sun had brought some warmth into the atmosphere it was down to the workshop.

There has been this tendency in my workmanship to rush things and bugger them. The solution discovered recently is to play podcasts into my ear buds. For some reason the multi tasking slows me down. Having used up most of the http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/, http://sshomestead.com/, http://www.saveourskills.com/, http://www.thesurvivalpodcast.com/ and all of http://www.littlegreencheese.com/ the search for something entertaining and useful has fallen on Wine Making ( http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/Sports-and-Hobbies/Cooking-and-Wine/Wine-Making-Radio-Podcast/6799) . And this has been a real bonus. So many new ideas and techniques have been floating through the ear buds its come down to having a pad and pen at the ready to jot down notes.

Now to the big tip. In wine making there is this golden rule that  when adjusting a batch of grapes, must, wine etc.  NEVER EVER do the adjustment in one step. Better to calculate half the adjustment, do the adjustment and measure the result before making up the difference. It's very easy to add more but very difficult to take some out. The confession here is that in making the Camembert that advice was not followed and the end result is undetermined and will become clear in a couple of weeks. The cause: when adjusting the temperature of the curds and whey from 32 to 35 with the addition of warm water rather than do it gradually I dumped a jug of really hot water in into the container in one big motion assuming it would with some vigorous stirring work perfectly. Well it did work perfectly to raise the temperature to above 40. How dumb!

The texture of the curd was a lot closer to Mozzarella than Camembert. Will wait and see.