NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Making food from scratch from local ingredients is supposed to be an environmentally sound choice. It saves gasoline by reducing the transportation of separate ingredients from manufacturers and warehouses to local stores.

For some reason that escapes me now, I wanted to serve homemade goat cheese as an appetizer for a “Celebrate Local Foods” feast, which I’ll write about next week. I should preface this escapade by pointing out that every grocery store in town sells a nice assortment of cheeses. Some of them are stamped as “California cheese,” so you know it’s reasonably local.

Nevertheless, I decided to make my own goat cheese to serve as an appetizer at this dinner. The recipes I found on the Internet stated that making fresh cheese was fun and easy. Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

After perusing a number of recipes for farmer’s cheese, queso fresco, and paneer, which are all pretty much the same thing, I thought I had a handle on what needed to be done. I decided to make an experimental batch of cheese with less expensive cow’s milk. I chose milk from Alta Dena, a local dairy, scrubbed out my biggest stockpot and began.

Step 1. Sterilize pot. I put a small amount of water in the pot, turned on the heat and went into my office to check e-mail.

Step 2. Scrub out burned pot.

So far, the experiment wasn’t going well. I decided that because the milk was going to come to a boil anyway, the pot didn’t need to be sterilized first. I poured a half-gallon of milk into the newly-cleaned pot and started over. This time, I stayed with the pot, stirring constantly as the milk heated up.

The recipe called for heating the milk to 82 degrees Centigrade. Being a retired biochemist, I had a Centigrade thermometer available. Thank goodness I didn’t have to convert Fahrenheit to Centigrade. Having to perform calculations was one of many reasons why I retired from biochemistry and medical research.

Some recipes called for a wire whisk, and some called for a wooden spoon. It didn’t seem to matter as long as you didn’t use anything aluminum to stir. Adding the acid (this step comes later) will cause too much aluminum to dissolve into the cheese. Either that isn’t good for you, or it turns the cheese green, or both. I forget. In any case, I stirred and stirred and stirred the pot, keeping the heat fairly low so as not to scorch the milk. After it got to 82 degrees, I was supposed to slowly add two tablespoons of white vinegar according to one recipe, or a quarter cup according to another recipe. I went with the lesser amount.

Lo and behold, the milk curdled. I checked the recipe quickly. It was supposed to do that. I kept stirring for another 10 minutes over the heat, holding the temperature at 82 degrees. I now had white curds and some putrid-looking greenish whey. I wondered how green it would have been if I’d used an aluminum pot.

The next step was to separate the curds from the whey. I poured the mix into a colander lined with multilayers of a good grade of cheesecloth. Cheese recipes call for butter muslin, whatever the heck that is. They say that grocery store cheesecloth is too holey. I used cheesecloth from Wild Oats Market. It looked pretty good to me. I boiled it first to sterilize it, but I don’t know why since one of the next steps was to squeeze it with my decidedly non-sterile hands. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Being a good chemist, I drained the curds over a bowl to catch the whey. Good thing. I hadn’t curdled the milk enough, and the whey was too milky. It was supposed to be fairly clear at this point. Other recipes called for adding more vinegar and boiling the milk. I figured that I must have needed more heat or more acid or both. I poured the whey back into the pot, added two more tablespoons of vinegar to equal a total of ¼ cup vinegar per half-gallon of milk. I heated the whey to a simmer, which turns out to be only 86 degrees Centigrade. Why the heck didn’t they just say to bring it to a simmer? The fun and easy part of making cheese was escaping me.

After a couple of minutes, I got an additional precipitate. Oops, that’s the biochemist in me talking. The curds are a precipitate of milk proteins. I poured the whey and the newly formed curds back over the curds in the colander, capturing a lot more of the solids. The whey was reasonably clear this time.

After adding all that vinegar, I worried that the cheese would taste like vinegar. Although no recipe called for it, I decided to wash the curds with boiling salt water to wash out any remaining vinegar and to add a bit of saltiness to the cheese.

I let the curds cool for 20 minutes. I gathered up the cheesecloth into a bag-like structure, and tucked it between the lid and pot to hold it there while it drained for a couple of hours.

After that, I gave it a good squeeze to get out more whey.

The next step was to pack the cheese into a cheese mold, which I didn’t have.

I innovated by washing a plastic strawberry basket, and packing the curd-containing cheesecloth into that. I put the cheese — because that’s what it was now — into the refrigerator to chill.

The next day, I sliced some of my freshly made cheese and tasted it on a cracker. It had essentially no flavor.

Apparently you’re not supposed to wash the curds. You should salt the curds like the recipe says, not just pour some salted water over it. Fine. Next time.

I cut the cheese into cubes and used it in an Indian dish called palak paneer. It was fabulous.

The cheese browned up in butter very nicely. I added some steamed spinach to the browned cheese cubes along with some cumin, coriander, and paprika and: viola!

I used the rest of the cheese the next day to make sag paneer, which is the same thing only with mixed greens like chard and kale instead of spinach.

At this point, I was ready to try making goat cheese. Vic wanted to help.

To avoid a taste that was too “goaty,” we used one quart of goat milk and two quarts of cow’s milk. We added six tablespoons of vinegar and held it at a simmer for 10-15 minutes, then drained it through cheesecloth. Bingo, we had cheese. It was fun and easy.

Maybe next time we’ll try our hands at making mozzarella.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.