Milk, Butter, Cheese & Brioche

Milking the cow has been going well still. I now have lots of milk in the fridge I need to do something with.

I have been drawing off about half the cream from each days milking and holding it aside in the fridge. Today I finally had time to make some butter with it. I don't have an old fashion paddle butter churn (although I would love to have one someday) so I made do with what I have. I poured the cream into the blender, replaced the top and turned it on until the cream broke and I could see the buttermilk and butter separate. I poured off the buttermilk into a bowl for another use. The butter I placed into a separate bowl. I now needed to wash the butter to remove the last of the buttermilk trapped within, this allows the butter to last longer. I poured ice water into the butter bowl and smashed the butter against the side of bowl. I drained the water into the sink and repeated several times until the water remained clear and no more buttermilk remained in the butter. I added a bit of salt, mixed it in and then a taste test... yumm!

Once the butter was in the fridge I took a recipe out of my cookbook, "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day", for Brioche dough. I mixed it up using the buttermilk leftover from my butter making in place of the water called for in the recipe. Once mixed up it needed to set out to rise for 2 hours and then into the fridge until later tonight.

Next up, I attempted to make some mozzarella cheese with a gallon and a half of Cherry Blossom's milk. It was the first time I have tried mozzarella and it was an utter disaster! I think it was mostly caused by trying to make such a time/temperature sensitive cheese while also doing the normal "mom" things that still needed to be done. Anyway, the chickens seemed to like the soft mush that resulted. I will try again when I have enough extra milk in the fridge.

The last task this evening was to take the brioche dough from the fridge and make it into sticky buns to bake off in the morning. I rolled them up, sliced them into rounds, placed them into baking dishes and stashed them back in the fridge to slowly rise overnight. 40 minutes in the oven in the morning and we will have fresh sticky buns for breakfast!

Night...