Posts Tagged Gouda
Home made Gouda
Making hard cheese at home can be quite a lot of work but in the end not only do you get a great cheese, you get the satisfaction that you just made it from scratch. I will be eating this cheese after the 25 day aging period to see how it turned out. If its good I will be making another block and aging it longer then smoking it for the Macaroni & Cheese from scratch challenge in the works.
So for now here is the recipe I used and photos of the steps I’ve taken so far, the finished product will be revealed in 23 days from today.
Today I make Controversial cheese
Posted by Cmac in Other Stuff on September 21, 2009
I have always wanted to make home made hard cheese but never had the time or motivation. After hearing about a possible Macaroni & Cheese from scratch challenge in the works I decided now was the time to really go forth with my home dairy. What I learned and created much controversy in my mind was that most cheese is not vegetarian unless its specifically labeled, and the price tag is much higher. You see an important part of making hard cheeses is the enzyme Rennet which alone takes cheese from the vegetarian circle right into the slaughterhouse. This enzyme is obtained from slaughtering an animal and processing its stomach. There are vegetarian versions of rennet which can be obtained from fungi or genetically engineered in labs but these are harder to find and carry a big price tag (not to mention the whole genetically engineered food fears).
Even if we skip the real rennet and go for the vegetarian version will the cheese still be truly vegetarian? In my reading I stumbled across a post on Serious Eats about whether Cheese is Vegetarian. They really brought forth the facts that make dairy seem almost equal to eating butchered meat. In order for a cow to lactate it must first give birth to a calf, now unless these cows are somehow genetically engineered some of there offspring will be male. Unless you have a farm that likes to keep around an equal stock of studs to entertain the milk producers they will be sending the males to the slaughterhouse. So to make a long controversial story short, for us to obtain our vegetarian dairy there are many cows slaughtered in the process.
In short this is how I decided to make my cheese with real rennet, and not genetically engineered. I have a few projects I want to make before I take the dive into full blown Veganism and this is one. I am in the process of making home made Gouda and I will be posting the beginning steps with photos this week then weekly updates until it is ready to be smoked in 25-30 days. Of course if it fails I will tell you all about that and what I think went wrong.
Anybody have any input on this Vegetarian Cheese controversy feel free to post a comment.
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