Hadn't prepped this before but I'd heard great things. We cooked mapo tofu today for lunch. Freshly ground pork loin, silken tofu, dashi/soy/sugar/gochujang sauce, wild garlic and spring onions. Donburi style on some rice. Super simple and really delicious.
This is the follow up to the Caerphilly cheese. Looks and tastes pretty delicious: rich, a little funky, creamy. Super happy with it!
Fresh pasta making afternoon yesterday, these were busiate shapes. Sauce was puttanesca, it came out very rich and slightly over seasoned. The dough was the southern Italian style: 100g flour, 50g water per person. I made this in my food processor but it's a funny dough, starting off very crumbly, like sand, then coming together after a bit of a rest and some encouragement. I'd be tempted to mix for a few minutes in the processor then hand knead next time.
I bore the freezing cold and made myself a pizza. Turned out rather well! Probably didn't need so much on top, but apart from that, good stuff. Homemade mozzarella and feta-like cheeses, as well as some nice salami my buddy Evan made in Italy. Happy Monday folks!
My recent foray into cheesemaking. From top left in the cover photo: Bel Paese, Caerphilly, Marcellin. There's a nice book called The Art of Natural Cheesemaking that I started with. His approach is very much avoiding the sterile modern approach, also found in modern beer making, and using diverse microbial cultures found in raw milk and kefir to produce interesting and characterful cheese. I used my "house" amasi culture which I've had for 18 months or so now, a South African lacto ferment that has seemed to have survived better than any other I've used.
Salmon on offer as is often the case in the winter, so I picked up a couple, cured and smoked them. Beech, cherry and hickory smoke for 12hrs. We ate one for NYE and the rest will go in the freezer. I made cream cheese and some crackers (not pictured) to go with them. Once I'd stripped the rest of the flesh after filleting them, the head and bones were roasted (12 mins air fryer max) and made into stock with a slice of konbu for some extra umami.