another sale + more cheese.
First of all: another sale! Today my book The Dragon Under the Hill is part of the Narratess indie authors’ sale for $1.99 on Amazon. This sale features many, many hundreds of scifi and fantasy books by indie authors and runs through Monday!
This is the third fantasy romance in my Goblins & Cheese sequence, and it follows the ancient wizard of the goblin court, Ildar, as he carries important information about fairy incursions into the human lands back to the goblin king, only to be suddenly derailed in his mission by a young priest, Bo, who demands that he help her rescue a small dragon trapped in a hedge.
Through what I would describe as tired incompetence on my part, you can also get this book for $0.99 on Kobo.
Back to the cheese.
I was prompted into an early batch of Camembert by the imminent departure of a coworker. My dude is working his way through college and has one semester of classes left. He is of distantly Quebecois extraction (they of the extravagantly sharp cheddar) and has been extremely gracious about trying even my gnarliest-looking blue cheese (sigh, it was supposed to be a blue camembert, and while it was delicious and creamy inside, the rind looked like sewer sludge.) Other coworkers who were up for trying my cheddar or my brie begged off that one, but this guy is a valiant cheese explorer. Thus, I felt obligated to send him off in cheesy style.
For reasons of “oh god it’s hot,” I had been planning to put off any more cheesemaking until a little later in the fall. Cheesemaking is the stuff of deep cellars and mountaintops; our little fungal pals get excessively frisky (and funky) when allowed to party down at temps higher than 70 degree Fahrenheit. In combination with a wet curd, this can ripen the layer of cheese curd directly under the rind too quickly, causing a runny layer that surrounds an otherwise stiff paste. Under these conditions, the rind can simply roll off the cheese, preventing the enzymes from the bloomy fungal molds (Geotrichum candidum and Pencillium candidum, for this make) from moving to the center of the cheese for a full maturation.
I decided to make two batches of cream-enriched Camembert two weeks apart. (I added ½ cup cream to each gallon of milk; a triple cream cheese would use two cups.) I chose to age the first in the fridge, after a week drying off in my hot kitchen (phew, mistakes were made) and the second in a cooler in the basement, which I attempted to keep at a nice cave-like temperature using glasses of ice water.
Given how quickly other creamy cheeses age, I decided I was going to chop into both of these cheeses early a couple nights ago. The results: mixed!
Would you like pictures? Of course you would like pictures.
Here are the respective cheeses. You will notice that one cheese is significantly taller than the other; this is from the second batch. After trouble-shooting my process, I believe that the set time given in the recipe (90 minutes after adding the rennet) is not enough for this cheese, or at least not enough when adding as much cream as I did; for the first cheese, I accidentally let it set for another hour, and I got a much better separation of curd and whey. In the second batch, the curd was even wetter than desired, and when that extra water drained, it left holes in the curd. I think I may have also allowed it to acidify for a few hours too long before adding the salt, giving it a somewhat more sour taste than I prefer.
They are both very strong cheeses, which I think is a testament to exactly how hot it is.
Best regards to all, and I hope your summers are wrapping up with optimism and delicious dairy products!
Sharon