Yoghurt making with cheese culture

Home made yoghurt is a deceptively easy thing to make. All you need is milk and a little commercial yoghurt to make a thick and creamy yoghurt.

 I've been making it this way for about a year but when I recently visited the Kappacasein Dairy 
www.ft.com/cms/s/2/6d712500-bdbe-11e2-890a-00144feab7de.html#axzz2TpVtR3P3

 I tasted Bill Oglethorpe's yoghurt made with the starter he uses to make his Comté like cheese Bermondsey Hard Pressed. Now I've started making yoghurt with a cheese culture, as it makes a very delicate French style set yoghurt.

 I got my culture as part of the excellent cheese making kit from London cheesemongers Paxton & Whitfield. This costs £45 but it contains everything (cloths, moulds, rennet, starter culture and thermometers) that you need to make both a simple soft and a hard cheddar like cheese. The soft cheeses I made with this kit were very good. Freezing the initial batch of starter means you’ll have enough for at least twenty attempts at a decent cheese or yoghurt after which you can easily buy more culture.

 Plain set yoghurt 

Take 1 litre of semi skimmed or whole milk (whole milk makes a creamier yoghurt)

100ml of pre prepared cheese starter

1 Kilner jar or large jam jar 

Heat the milk slowly, stirring occasionally until you see bubbles appear on the surface and as the froth rises, take it immediately off the heat. Remove from the heat and pour into a basin, allow the milk to cool (the temperature should not fall below 90F/32C. 

Get your jam jar ready by filling it with hot water, this way the temperature of the milk will be maintained when you pour in your yoghurt mixture.

Whisk the starter with a tablespoon or two of the warmed milk mixture then pour back into the bowl and whisk again. Pour the yoghurt into the jar, seal and wrap the yoghurt pot up in a towel or blanket and place in a warm spot for 8 –12 hours. Don’t jostle the pot if you do your yoghurt may not set.

I use an insulated cool box as I find this way guarantees success every time. Take a small ice box and heat it by filling it with hot water, pour the water out and put the jam jar wrapped in a tea towel inside the insulated cool box. This will make the yoghurt even snugger and imitates a commercial yoghurt-making machine. Also it’s harder to wobble a jar that’s held tightly inside a box.

After it has set you should refrigerate the yoghurt. It will keep in the fridge for about a week.

The Modern Peasant will be published by Chatto & Windus on 30th May 2013

This months sees the publication of my book about independent food producers, Lynn Hatzius has done some really wonderful illustrations and also made this beautiful cover. There will be an extract from the cheese making section of the book in the Financial Times on Saturday May 18th. I spent a very happy day yesterday watching Bill Oglethorpe make Bermondsey Hard Pressed and ricotta as his Kappacasein dairy in Bermondsey so that Jason Lowe could illustrate my words with photos of Bill at work. I look forward to seeing everyone at the launch party.

School gardening club

I'm so happy to be part of the group who help look after our local primary school's garden and run an after school gardening club. In the past two years our growing space has expanded to include 11 raised beds, chickens and now an orchard of heritage apples (planted just before Christmas). We now have a blog How Does Our Garden Grow? which is updated each week (sometimes by the children themselves) to show what the gardening club gets up too: 

lauristongarden.blogspot.co.uk

Chicory in the cupboard

Happy New Year and good growing to all in 2013

To celebrate the new year here is a bouquet of chicory dug up from the allotment a month ago, trimmed down to the root and stuck in a pot of earth in my kitchen cupboard. The darkness and warmth has accelerated growth. The ground is too wet and cold to work right now so a little indoor gardening helps to tide me over til the new growing season begins.

For me chicory is the winter crop. Not only are they beautiful to look at but the bitterness of the leaves is mildly addictive. For anyone who loves salad leaves they are essential (and undemanding). In this picture there are two different varieties (Grumulo Rosso and Rosso Treviso) both hardy and flourishing outside as well.

End of Season

This photograph is only a couple of weeks old but already frost has shrivelled the dahlias and turned tender foliage slippery and rotten. Its a good time to look back and consider what worked and what failed in a growing season that started with drought and ended with floods.

Most of the plot is sleeping. I won't be digging it over. Instead I have cleared and mulched empty ground with horse manure.

There are newly planted garlic cloves (Sultop and Christo) in the earth as well leeks and chicory and a couple of rows of hardy chicories (Rosso Treviso and Grumulo Rosso). If I look at the drawings I made of the plot in May I can see that although I planned to line my paths with plastic and then cockle shells I never did, that I forgot that the best time for pruning soft fruit trees was after fruiting in September. I see that most of my courgettes and pumpkins were eaten by snails and slugs, that black fly destroyed my broad beans. The garlic I planted amidst self seeded poppies just disappeared. The bed of corn, beans and pumpkins that I planted yielded dark red cobs of strawberry popcorn (the variety) drying on my kitchen window sill and lots of beans but no gourds. Potatoes cropped only poorly.

It was a good year for berries (blackcurrants, red currants and raspberries) globe artichokes and poppies. The borlotti beans were planted late but still cropped heavily as did rhubarb. My no dig approach yielded masses of self seeded rocket and red ribbed dandelions. My very rudimentary pond (a buried builders trug) has persuaded a frog on to the plot.

The rye grass planted as a green manure around my damson and green gage meant lots of scything and masses of cut grass for mulching.  In the spring it will be dug up to make way for raspberries and strawberries as companion planting for my fruit trees. Over the winter I will be reading Joy Larkcom's memoir 'Just Vegetating' hoping to absorb some of her expertise and to get some new planting ideas and planning a herb garden.

Berry soothing

When my mind starts to whirr in smaller and smaller circles I try and lose my self in therapeutic tasks. Picking black currants is perfect. Its not a job you can rush. Black currants hide their berries beneath aromatic leaves. You have to crouch down and hold up the branches to find the fruits. They are luminous, their swollen burnished sides glint even in the half light of this gloomy summer. It takes time to collect your harvest. A well covered bush produces a large carrier bag full of berries and takes over an hour to pick.
You have to be nimble, holding up the branch with one hand and picking with the other while trying to catch the fruits in your cupped hands before they tumble down. The berries resist for a moment then come lose with a satisfying barely audible snap. You also have to be selective not all the berries ripen at the same time. All of this takes concentration of the best kind. You lose yourself and your cares. Time stands still as the bag slowly starts to fill.
This year's crop is heavy but the rain has swollen the  berries so the flavour may not be as intense as on sunnier years. To get round this I roasted the fruits in a casserole so that the initial juice is more concentrated. Now to add to the calm of the hour I spent picking yesterday, I have the audible plink of the syrup dropping slowly down from the distended jelly bag, which hangs like a crime scene photo from my kitchen plate rack.
Blackcurrant jelly is a highly prized commodity in our house. I am sworn on pain of death not to give any away. 


Roasted blackcurrant jelly
Makes roughly 6 x medium (350ml) jars)

1kg blackcurrants (ripe but unblemished fruits)

granulated sugar (500g for each 500ml of juice you collect)

Preheat your oven to 150ºC/gas mark 2. Place the washed fruit in a large casserole dish. Bake covered for about an hour until it is soft. Remove the pan from the oven and using a wooden spoon or potato masher crush the fruit.

Having placed a large bowl underneath your scalded jelly bag pour in the pulp in and the juice. The jelly will run through very quickly at first and then slow to a dribble. Don’t be tempted to squeeze your jelly bag as this will make your jelly cloudy. When it has all dripped through, measure the juice and set aside.

Take the pulp and put it in your preserving pan, just cover with cold water and bring to the boil, let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Return the fruit and juice to the jelly bag and repeat the straining process above.

Combine the two juices and measure, allowing 500g sugar for every 500ml of juice.

In your cleaned saucepan combine the sugar and juice. Stir until the sugar has dissolved and then turn up the heat and boil rapidly, skimming off any scum that forms (if you keep the jelly half off the heat it will collect on one side of the pan, making it easier to skim off. The setting point should be reached within 10 minutes. To know when it is ready,you can use a sugar thermometer or do the flake test . Remove the jelly from the heat and skim off any last remaining traces of scum. Pour into hot, sterilised jars.

Cut out little circles of greaseproof paper and put one on top of each jar before sealing down by screwing on the lids tightly. Store in a coolish dark place. It keeps for ages but store in the fridge after opening. 

This year's plot is overgrown, rotten, slippery underfoot, over run with snails but still somehow productive. 

Rocket seed heads hung up to dry in the shed ready for sowing when the flea beetles have disappeared (August).

Artichoke time

They are immune to slug damage and impervious to the rain. The bad weather may be battering poppies and blowing over trees (my greengage among them) but the artichokes are thriving.

They arrive all at once and with the same dilemma, be extravagant and use only the hearts or eat them plainly leaf by leaf with butter?

I collected a whole bag full of tightly furled green artichokes on the weekend so I can afford to be profligate. Now all I have to do is decide how to cook them: in a frittata with chorizo? seared with onglet? stuffed with rice and tomato? in a sloppy soup with peas and a poached egg?


photo Stephen Brierley

Irises, three sisters and a long awaited gage...

Not being able to get down to the allotment as often as I might has some advantages. One of them is surprises. A clump of irises in full bloom greeted me this morning when I went down to water and there were plenty of other blossoms too. A few days of hot sun works like a magic wand on flower buds; self seeded blooms of borage, corn and welsh poppies as well as fat red heads of crimson clover all made a welcome sight.

I was only there to water but couldn't stop myself from digging a small patch over and planting a 3 sisters  bed. This is a Native American Indian planting technique. Squash, corn and beans are all planted together, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil, the spreading squash leaves shade the earth and suppress weeds and the corn acts as a support for the beans.

To make this traditional approach my own, I have planted speckled borlotti beans, a steel blue pumpkin called blue ballet and a rather unusual sweet corn called strawberry popcorn. The cobs are dark red and small and apparently they make brilliant popcorn. We'll see. I might just hang them up in the kitchen. This year's late cold snap could have been fatal for fruit tree blossoms but thankfully both my apples have tiny fruits (a russset and a spartan) and after five years my greengage has finally fruited. It's been a long wait.

There was just time to scatter a few seeds from an Italian salad mix (rocket, basil, oak leaf lettuce, broccoli raab and red dandelion) and pick herbs, chard and salad leaves for my paella party tonight. Not forgetting  3 big heads of cabbage for making kimchi in my new fermenting crock.

                    Three sisters bed planted.

Ruskin's poppies and Rossetti's May

May is the month of the poppy on my allotment but all this rain and cold means things are a little behind this year. I have always thought of poppies as crumpled silk hankerchiefs, balled into a tight green pocket when wet and then unfurled. Ruskin, however had other, darker ideas on the subject:

Gather a green poppy bud, just when it shows the scarlet line at its side; break it open and unpack the poppy. The whole flower is there complete in size and colour - its stamens full grown, but all packed so closely that the fine silk of the petals is crushed into a million of shapeless wrinkles. When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from torture : the two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground; the aggrieved corolla smoothes itself in the sun, and comforts itself as it can; but it remains visibly crushed and hurt to the end of its  days.

This is last year's sea of red and pink. A quick visit yesterday revealed lush green growth of every kind but not many flowers. The small meadow of rye grass I sowed as a green manure around my fruit trees (one damson and one greengage) was scythed right down a month ago during the drought. I used the cuttings to mulch broad beans and strawberries. Now there is no need of mulch, the beans are a metre tall and the strawberry patch a carpet of small white flowers (and couch grass). There are poppy buds fat and swelling everywhere ready to burst when the sun comes out.

In an effort to tidy up and suppress weeds I have spread wood chippings around my shed gleaned from the municipal tree surgeons. The ancient vine that curls up and over the roof of my shed now has a smart little flower bed around complete with mini picket fence. In it I have sown purple poppies alongside the black hollyhocks, two Mexican cup and saucer vines (cobaea scandens) and a scattering of sky blue Morning Glory. Potatoes are up and earthed and the garlic has been hoed.  To suppress the weeds I scattered a packet of Nigella amongst the garlic. The patch of rocket I sowed in late summer is a mass of flowers. Self seeded salad is everywhere. Compared to my neighbours' plots my patch looks overgrown, with hardly any earth showing but I will clear space as I need it and hope that the growth locks in moisture when these wet days are behind us.

Here is a poem from Christian Rosetti's marvelous collection of verses for children 'Sing Song' that seems to fit these unsettled spring days perfectly:

There is but one May in the year,
And sometimes May is wet and cold;
There is but one May in the year
Before the year grows old


Yet though it be the chilliest May,
With least of sun and most of showers,
Its wind and dew, its night and day,
Bring up the flowers.