Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Upthread he refers to the fact he can.

Geez, between you and Tim I think you guys just really don't read threads sometimes. Third time this week you've blown by something someone has posted.

Amy

P.S. You know I'm just giving you a hard time, right?

TheFuzzy, thanks, I will check that recipe out and give it a try. And yes, water buffalo milk is available here. It is a higher fat content milk, the only drawback is the diet the average farmer keeps his carabao (water buffalo in native dialect) does put a damper on the fat content to some extent. I ran into a website oriented toward carabao as a rural resource for economic development and they talked about that aspect a bit. Still it is a higher fat content even if it is not on quite the same standard as the buffalo's milk the Italians use. I hope to play around with it for cheese in the future.

Cost of milk here is currently 50 pesos for a liter of fresh (at the local dairy) and 65 - 75 pesos for imported UHT milk. Carabao milk, only available frozen (for transport from the next province) is 80 pesos a liter. Currently the dollar is worth about 43 - 44 pesos. So by the gallon: fresh cows milk is roughly $4.25 a gallon and carabao milk is $6.81 per gallon. I won't do the math on the UHT stuff since it is worthless for cheese making.

Until I get some experience, I am not sure how much cheese per liter I can get. I doubt, based on reading up on it, I will be able to produce a mozzarella that is priced close to the cheaper commercial stuff which is going at 400 pesos a kilo. But hopefully I can make a fresh mozzarella that is much cheaper than the real Italian stuff I found down in Manila at 450 pesos per 250 gram or 1800 peso a kilo. Cheap mozz for pizza is just under 10 bucks a kilo and the real stuff is four and a half times that. I am figuring my mozz will cost about 600 peso per kilo or maybe a bit more, after talking to the folks over at cheeseforum.org

Amy, I think we are maybe a bit heavy handed on the sauce but not hugely so. Being raised in the fifties, I was imbued with the motto, "If a little's good, more's better!" Whether cubic inches of displacement in an engine or grams of topping on a pizza, I sometimes still show my heritage. Our homemade pizza is rectangular, better to fit our oven. It is about the same area as a 13 or 13 1/2 inch round pizza and we use 125 to 150 grams of sauce per pizza. About the same amount of cheese as well, close to the 150 gram mark. So it is generally covered, but not awash in sauce, with some areas a bit heavier than others, due to the nature of our sauce. It isn't pureed completely smooth, but still showing fairly small bits of tomato and onion.

Amy,

Hey, gimme a break. Tatoosh's posts are long.


Tatoosh,

You can get about 1lbs ricotta per gallon of cow's milk. Water buffalo milk should yeild more, I think. I haven't made the mozzarella enough to have a clear idea of yeild.

Thanks for insight, TheFuzzy! And my apology for the length of my posts. I am a wordy ol' fart, to be sure. Another wannabe writer who never understood the use of an editor's red ink.

Tatoosh,

No apologies necessary! Welcome to the board.

Thank you and everyone else for their kind welcomes.

This year is my "cheese" year, or will be starting next month. The main focus will be on cheeses for use with pizza of course. After I can produce a reasonably tasty Mozzarella reliably and a Ricotta from the resulting whey, I will look at Gouda/Edam and Provolone. Someday, if I have a chance I will take a shot at Parmigiana too, but that is aged quite a while I think. I don't have storage or aging facilities easily at hand.

Next year will be my sausage and smoked meats year. The sausage will be a pizza pepperoni (a bit moister than normal and not so tart) and a spicy sausage such as a Hungarian or Chorizo, something along those lines. I already make a loose sweet Italian with just a bit of hot pepper in it. But that is made from store bought ground pork, since I don't have a grinder yet. I will give the single head Chinese made grinders (like grandpa and grandma used) a try since they are so cheap here, about 15 bucks. But they do one grind only.

I also will take a whack at my personal quest for a better "hot dog" to serve as the base for a coney. Hot dogs in the Philippines are pale imitations of the real thing, even if you consider Oscar Meyer or similar as "the real thing". National Hebrew or Sabretts are pretty much unheard of. Filipino hot dogs shrink when cooked while good US hot dogs will split open.

And then there is bacon. American style as well as Euro and Canadian versions are available, but a bit pricy and usually sliced about as thin as possible. Thick cut button, pepper bacon, etc etc is simply not to be had without curing and smoking your own. I won't be able to do the traditional Maple smoked bacon, but there are all sorts of recipes for bacon and I have been looking at a Cinnamon and Sugar bacon that sounds pretty interesting. Pork belly is ubiquitous here.

Almost all of it, including the bacon, will end up as toppings for my pizza. And while pretty quality conscious, I am not compulsive about it. Well, I don't think so anyway, others (in my family) may disagree. I am not after a wood fire stove, I am happy to bake pizza in the 450F to 500F range. I will use standard, store-bought Mozzarella as a topping, but I really want to balance that with some of the quality fresh Mozzarella cheese too. A marriage of economics and taste. And reliability. I want to be able to do it when I want, not when some store gets some required ingredient. I went four years before seeing a bottle of Dijon style mustard show up on store shelves, so if I had a Dijon fixation, I'd be in a world of hurt (or making my own).

Part of the pleasure of the Philippines is that it isn't "easy-peasy". No picking up the phone or getting on the computer and ordering a shopping list of high quality products. It is a constant challenge to find good, reliable sources. Sort of a mixture of mystery, puzzle solving, and culinary adventure all wrapped up in a multicultural bow. Which makes it uniquely satisfying when we get something "right". End o' Soapbox.

Tatoosh,

Well, I really recommend the Ricki Carroll book as a starter. If you pick up some rennet and cultures (maybe on a visit to the States), they'd last for years.

We did pizza for a christening party today (one of those mandatory events in the Philippines) and I have a nice glow from the crust experiments at this point. We do a short blind bake (4 to 5 minutes) and egg wash after the blind bake. When we added the toppings and did the finish cook, we ended up with, to my eye, a nice crust that was crispy and displayed minimum sogginess. I could see the crust was done all the way through, small air pockets discernible almost right to the sauce. Paint a big smile on my face.

Cheese-wise, after 3 months, my cultured buttermilk starter arrived from the USA. Primarily intended for baking, since I never acquired the taste for drinking buttermilk, unlike my parents, it can also be used as a starter for a Mozzarella-like white cheese. Providing it will work after the long voyage over. I am keeping my fingers crossed. I also received a yogurt starter for a non-thermophilic yogurt, a Finnish variety that purportedly has a "cheesy" taste. A very simple yogurt cheese can be made from it simply by suspending it in cheesecloth for a while and then combining it with whatever herbs seem appropriate. Not a "pizza" component, but a nice accessory flavor for dips and such.

I am, none the less, eye-balling Fuzzy's Ricotta page/recipe and will give that a serious try next month as well. A fresh Mozz style cheese and some nice creamy Ricotta would open so many possibilities for me along with kicking my pizza up another notch or two. Lasagna, stuffed cannolis, and so forth are dancing in my head.