Bisalta Blu – Part 1

Post by Patrick

This cheese is named after a mountain (Bisalta) in the Ligurian Alps of Italy (although it lies in the Piemonte region). It is similar to Bleu d’Auvergne and other famous French blues. For me it is a notable recipe for using both Mesophilic (mid-heat-range loving) and Thermophilic (high heat loving) bacterias, as well as Penicillium roqueforti (the mother fungus we find in all blues) and lots of agitation. Many of the pictures below correspond to the recipe that follows.

100 liters

adding the mesophiles

adding the penicillium

precious bottled liquid fungi

the rennet

this little disc stops the milk from moving after you add the rennet.

irene slices through curd with the lira

little curds

pouring out excess whey

agitating (matia often looks agitated)

prepping the molds

pouring the curd into the molds

curd settling in a form

1. We heat 100 liters of fresh cow’s milk to 65°C (Thermalization temperature). In her book “Milk,” Anne Mendelson does a good job of explaining how a light thermalization differs from the ultra-pasteurization method prevailing in the milk industry. Basically it means lower temperature for a longer period of time. It prevents the burned flavor of ultra-pasteurized milks and it leaves many more of the milk’s fats and proteins intact.
2. Now we allow the milk to cool to between 36° and 36.5°C, the temperature the bacteria like. (Although we haven’t added them yet.)
3. Now we add the Mesophlic bacteria (ferment) called ‘Flora-Danica’. This is a mix of Lactococus and Leuconostoc bacteria that we have cultured in milk. We add 1.5L of this yogurt-smelling milk to our milk batch. (Note: Normally we would add only 1/3 of this amount of Flora-Danica, but today we are compensating for not having two other kinds of mesophilic bacterias that play a role in the recipe.)
4. Now we add the Penicilium roqueforti. Just 10mL dissolved in some milk is enough to inoculate our 100 liters.We wait half an hour before adding our Thermophilic ferment (Liofilizzata??)
5. We wait another half hour, maintaining the temperature of the milk at 36°C, then add our rennet.
6. Hypothetically the time from the moment of adding the rennet, to first cutting the curd, should be three times the time of ‘la presa.’ La presa is the appearance of initial coagulation in the milk, and today that took 13 mins (so total time should be 42 mins.) However we made our first cut after half an hour. Cheese-making is not always an exact science.
7. We cut first with the spada (sword) into big squares, then immediately with a lira, the many fine wires of which quickly reduce the curd to the size of corn kernels or smaller.
8. Now we agitate (stir) the curd continuously until the temperature has dropped (passively) to 32°C and the curd has reached a nice firmness (like warm, small curd cottage cheese). This whole time the curd is expelling more and more whey.
9. With a ladle or small bowl we remove much of the expelled whey (it is probably too acidic to make ricotta from). We leave just enough so the curd is still submerged in liquid. Then we keep stirring. (Use your hands!)
10. When the curd feels just right (and is at a pH of about 6.4), we pour it into the molds (forms) using big ladles and filtering cheesecloth. The curd quickly sets together, and we assist in this by flipping the fresh cheeses in the molds, so they distribute their weight evenly. A quick test with the pH meter shows a pH of 6.41 and a temperature of 30°C.
11. The new cheeses are covered (put in stufatura) for a night to retain as much heat and humidity as possible.  The next morning it should reach a pH of 5 to 5.10 before being put in moist refrigeration for aging.

Hopefully a future post will explain the second part of this recipe. That will include the salting and the piercing of the cheeses, which lets in oxygen for the Penicillium blue fungus to feed on. The first piercing should happen after about a week.

Starling days

The days are getting longer. We haven’t posted in a while, although we have many stories to tell and continue to make meaty and cheesy discoveries. The flu has made its rounds, and we are all busy with projects in addition to school. Michael is hard at work finishing his salumi book, Aaron is leap-frogging towards utter pork proficiency, and I am collaborating on a collage book and staying up too late. We’ve also had a guest for the last two weeks. My friend Doug hails from Maine and does an awesome impression of an abusive grandmother at the end of a lifetime of smoking.

Doug and I went on a nice long bike ride this past weekend through the Piemontese flats. We pedaled our susies to and fro, high and low, left and right, day and night. Here is a poem the ride inspired and some pictures from along the way. We’ll be back soon with more meatncheese.

-Patrick

doug and patrick

find the egret

vines

wide open and frozen

Sycamore bark

Hens n chicks

Starling

Oh plague of one starling,
We are an egret.

We had the flu together.
We sweated through the winter.

My friend shows me the hens and chicks
Growing in pink pots on the gray steps–

Oh,
Today the white plain has a chorus.
It says, Oh, we are egrets
And there should be more of us and

Oh,
We are crows growing old, nothing less.
We are thistle, we are dandelion, we are pappus.
We are the wind blowing through the great bird’s crest.

Oh plague of one starling,
The day is round and white without you.
I flew it all the way through.

We had the flu together.
Do you remember?

You are the cold gust in summer.

Puncheon (when punch was in)

some nice puncheons

the recipe source

Here is a recipe for a ‘company’ punch taken from American Regional Cookery (1946) by Sheila Hibbard (quoted in M.F.K. Fisher’s notes in Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste).

1½ gallons green tea
2½ pounds light brown sugar
juice 3 dozen orange and 1½ dozen lemons
1 quart Gordon gin
1½ gallons catawba wine
1 quart Cognac
½ gallon St. Croix rum
½ pint Benedictine
1½ quarts rye whiskey
1 pint brandied cherries
1 case champagne

The tea, sugar, and fruit juices are well mixed, and everything else is added except the cherries and champagne. The whole stands in a closely covered crock for one week. Just before serving, the last two ingredients are added and the whole is poured over a block of ice.

Grappa maker

The grappa drips from a copper still, young clear spirit

Eagerly dripping through the jug’s glass lip.

Day draws on like a sweet burning sap.

We go walking in the rain past palm and old persimmon,

Nettle patches, little cleavers, sodden olive groves.

Moonlight distills to silver in the shimmering leaves.

Ancient olives are gnarled but fruiting. The grappa maker

Keens to the sound of the sap collecting.

In the wolf’s mouth (nuts)

view of Carife

view from Carife

Peace boughs

Seiji and Patrick a-collecting

collecting wood in the olive orchard

Posting by Patrick

They say here that if you put a chestnut in your pocket in the fall, it will give you good luck all winter long. Last Saturday Aaron and I left Bosco Merrone, a somewhat challenging agriturismo in the region of Campania (read Aaron’s hilarious brochure parody below) where we scurried around cleaning in the kitchen and cabins for a few days. There was a big New Year’s party, a couple subtle scuffles, celebratory kisses, and way too much food (ask the pigs, they ate most of it). We also cleared thorny brush with a perilously jerry-rigged hedge trimmer and tried to go to the circus or nearest house of exorcism (no luck there). Speaking of luck, when two people part in Italy, they wish each other well by saying ‘in bocca a lupo,’ which means ‘in the wolf’s mouth’ (not too far from ‘break a leg!’). Somehow we ended up in Carife, another sub-mountainous town in Campania among rolling verdant vineyard hills and pine-strewn bluffs. It could almost be Ireland. Speaking of lucky.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it gives you lemonade, sip, sip, pass.

So we have followed the Tao of the WWOOFer, which is to take the good with the bad and stay light on your feet. We arrived at Hirpus, a small azienda run by Michele Minieri. Hirpus, I just learned, is a pre-Latinate word for ‘wolf’ used by the pagan mystics who once populated these hills. Michele is a bit of a mystic himself, which I gather from his statements on fire. Fire is a recapitulation of the sun, he says, and that which burns does so because it is close to the sun. Thus oil and wood are close to the sun. At first I baulked at his logic, but later Aaron helped me understand the pagan mind with a scientific reading: It is indeed true that substances like oil and wood store the sun’s energy in packets of hydro-carbon, the breaking of which releases the energy we know as fire. In a sense, then, they share the nearest possible proximity, the complete absorption of one into the other.

In any event, Michele makes the best olive oil I’ve ever tasted, as well as jams and various delicious vegetables conserved in oil (sott’olio = under oil). Michele’s rustic rendition of bruschetta is a freakin’ revelation: toast slices of hearty bread quickly over an open fire (scrape off any burn with a knife eagerly), rub with a raw garlic clove while still piping hot, douse liberally with buttery olive oil, perhaps a sprinkling of homegrown oregano, and eat. Ambrosial.

On our first full day we visited the laboratorio up the street where the fresh oil is transferred into large tanks, later to be filtered and aged. After that, we cut and gathered wood from the closest olive grove to bring back to the house, with the help of Seiji, a Japanese expat who has been working at Hirpus for the past few months. We were the picture of Peace itself with our shoulder-loads of olive boughs bouncing in the fresh breeze. It wouldn’t be bad to live here, I thought. The wars could never touch us. Lunchtime arrived. A meal was prepared for us by Michele’s mum, a feisty 82 year-old who is just as concerned with spirits (and just as loud) as her son. “Then what idol do you pray to when you have need!?” she asked Aaron and me after we had divulged that we are not Catholics. I said I didn’t have an idol, though I wish I’d told her that these days I pray to wolves’ mouths and chestnuts. She has a boatload of them drying on a sheet on her patio. I’m keeping the one she gave me in my pocket.