So, as part of learning some of the stuff I feel I need to learn to really get a handle on trying to make skyr, I did some experiments in maintaining a temperature.
A number of cheeses have a much quicker process time; higher acidity, and higher temps, may work to form a curd in a shorter time period. The recipes for skyr all seem to suggest a coagulation time of 12 to 24 hours. That’s a long time to maintain a temperature. Certainly 24 hours means going overnight, and a period of unsupervised sitting.
Up until now I had been following an idea I’d read somewhere of putting the pot in the oven with the oven light left on. (Mind you, I also had a less concrete idea of what temperature I was trying to maintain.)
Today I tried a series of tests.
First, a whole lot of reading had suggested that a good temperature to maintain during this process would be between 100 and 110 F. Apparently that’s an optimum temperature for rennet to coagulate the milk solids into curd. Even if it ends up not being the temperature I finally decides works best for skyr, it was still a good starting point.
So I tried a container of water at 110F in the oven. I had preheated the oven just a fraction, by turning it to it’s lowest setting for a few minutes only, then placed the uncovered container in the center and left the light on and door closed. Within an hour and a half the temperature had dropped to 96 degrees.
A second test had water at a temperature of 106 F in a wide-mouthed thermos. (I felt that I had better thermoses with narrow mouths, but didn’t fancy the idea of trying to get coagulated milk out of them. Certainly it wouldn’t work for anything that I’d hoped would form a firmer curd!) In the hour and a half, the temp had dropped to 96 degrees.
A third test had water of 109 F in a crockpot. Unfortunately, it’s a slightly older style slow cooker, and has only a low or high setting. I gather the new models also have a warm feature. In an hour and a half, the temperature ROSE to 126 degrees.
These had been my first and easiest ideas. And I guess I haven’t found an easy answer. I have a couple of other things to try next…
Showing posts with label skyr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skyr. Show all posts
Saturday, 10 January 2009
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Not Skyr
Yet again, I have been vanquished in the quest for skyr.
This time I again tried the skimmed milk recipe. I was hopeful, because early on I was seeing some curd separation, but in the end didn’t get anywhere near a useful degree of coagulation. (Is there a happier word one can use to describe the actions of rennet when making cheese products?) And to my sense of taste, there really wasn’t any kind of marked degree of change from the flavour of milk. It was ‘not milk’ in flavour, but without any of the tang or faint acidity I’ve come to associate with skyr.
I did get to try out the new piece of equipment my loving husband gifted me with for Christmas.
A nylon jelly strainer system from Lee Valley. Far simpler for clean up. Cheesecloth may really be washable, but I think I prefer to save it for theatrical costume uses, because it’s nothing but a pain for use in the kitchen. (Well, perhaps if I had a kitchen dedicated to culinary experiments that wasn’t also full of the rest of our lives…)
But I’m starting to think that some of the comments I’ve made about the iron-smelting experiments that go on outside our house also apply here. Too many unknowns and too many variables, and never working towards setting some constants.
I’ve had several recipes I’ve been playing with simultaneously. There are several possible types of milk I can use; some of the recipes specify, some don’t. I have two different kinds of rennet, both of which are vegetable-based, so are a variable in themselves. There are a couple of different methods suggested. There is the variable of quantity: do the reactions I’m looking for require certain quantities before they occur? Are the proportions for reaction a constant?
In many ways as with the iron smelting, some of the same questions occur, and I can just plug a different noun or verb into the question, and it’s just as valid when applied to my experiments with skyr. (Scary, eh?)
* To begin with, I’m trying to experiment to create a product I don’t have much familiarity with. There is almost no experience with skyr in Canada, other than in specific communities with a cultural heritage that has kept it alive. (As in so much else in my life, I had never particularly heard of skyr, or had any interest in its existence, when I was growing up in Manitoba, a stone’s throw from Gimli and its Icelandic community. Turns out my mother knew about it, and liked it, and used to be able to buy it in the grocery store when she was younger! Thanks to the whole new world of major grocery store chains, and countrywide supply lines, that’s no longer possible. And now I live a wide province away…) So all I really know of skyr is from other people’s descriptions, which are never quite the same, and recently, thanks to a friend’s importation of some from a small producer in Manitoba, or some commercially-produced skyr brought back from Iceland. And whether either of these is typical, true skyr, or the skyr one might expect to make from the few available recipes, is as much a guess as any other.
Even from the few tastes I’ve had of skyr, I can’t really describe to my own satisfaction how it tastes. Before I’d ever had any, my interpretation of other descriptions led me to think it would be a little bit like yoghurt meets creamed cottage cheese. (Again, I had to work with products I’d already tasted. I’ve never had Quark; so don’t know where it fits in the spectrum.) When I did taste skyr, I think I was surprised that it wasn’t tangier. Because I’d been thinking about yoghurt, perhaps like a yoghurt cheese, I was expecting the same amount of acidity. (One of the things that keeps me from really enjoying yoghurt in large quantities. Too sharp a taste.) It wasn’t. But it also wasn’t like clotted cream, though the texture wasn’t that far away. It was less ‘glossy’ and loose than sour cream. (Oddly, although much sour cream is “sour” in taste, I find it less acidic than yoghurt. I feel there’s probably science involved here, which I need to know more about.) And again sour cream is still too sharp a flavour. And skyr can be more dense-seeming.
I have had some cream cheeses that are more like skyr in taste than either yoghurt or sour cream. They seem to be less typical of cream cheeses though.
So, here I am, trying to make something I’ve only tasted occasionally, can’t happily describe, even to myself, and have only very intermittently had brief access to.
Good start!
*I’m also not finding a lot of concrete information about skyr. Mostly just the same stuff re-paraphrased elsewhere, or some vague descriptions. And not much by way of recipes. I have one recipe that came via a friend, and one cookbook of Icelandic recipes from the Lake Winnipeg area that has two or three different takes on it. There’s a bit of discussion on the internet, which I’ve gleefully bookmarked, but nowhere near the amount I thought I’d find. Which is odd, because I know I’ve talked about skyr and figuring out how to make it for years now, and only recently got down to seriously trying to do something about it. I am sure I’m not the only one. In fact, by the number of Google searches that have hit on this blog by the search word ‘skyr’, I KNOW I’m not alone in this quest!
*What recipes I can find, seem to have no consensus as to what milk to use, skim, partly-fatted, whole milk, buttermilk… Admittedly, in searching for information on Viking Age skyr, it’s not like there’s likely to be a recipe or archaeological evidence, so information from traditional practices would be a good starting point. But even that seems a bit vague.
[I should point out that I’m mostly working from my own culinary library, which isn’t totally sketchy, or what I can find on the internet. I live rurally and have no easy access to libraries anymore. Give me a lovely university library and I might make some more headway. Or not. Even if the information is really available and out there, sometimes it can be well hidden!]
Part of my brain says higher fat content milk would give more milk solids. And that maybe my lack of coagulation is because I was using skim milk. But common sense suggests that historically milk would be processed differently and separated into different components for different uses. Cream becomes butter. So it would be the thinner milks and whey that might be made into cheeses. And there are Scandinavian cheeses that are made from whey: Gjetost and Mysost. Some of the things I’ve read about skyr, say it is a low-fat cheese. But then some of the recipes don’t mention that at all. I may not be able to find a definitive answer to that, but some further experimentation may be able to tell me how I need to make it to have it work.
*I need to figure out what the differences are between animal- and vegetable-based rennet. I have no particular preference which I use, being a carnivore, but if I can get the vegetable-based version to work, then it will be suitable for my non-meat-eater friends and relations. In the long run, it will probably hinge on what’s available to me. But I do need to learn if there are variations in how well each work, and in the amounts that should be used. The recipe I was just trying asked for twelve drops per 4 quarts of milk. I noticed that the rennet bottle itself suggested five drops per 1 litre. Hmmm… Mind you, I based my amount of rennet on that 5drops per litre, and did NOT get any really tangible curd formation. It ‘looked’ liked it was working, but when I went to strain off the liquid, it was far more liquid than solid.
And I don’t think that just giving it more time is the answer either. I did that with one of the very first attempts, and by the time I’d developed some thickness that was strainable, the milk was somewhat past human consumption. Even our cats, who adore dairy in any way, shape or form, were completely disinterested!
*Temperatures. When they say heat to boiling, do they mean heat it till it IS boiling, or until it reaches that temperature? Or maybe even boil for a bit of time? And cooling to lukewarm… What is lukewarm exactly? Does it matter? Am I over analyzing?
Hmmm… I was just grubbing about in yet another cookery book, thinking about an offshoot from this project that would involve trying to make something else, where I can find more info, and lo and behold! Have come across some instructions to do with yoghurt making that say: Sterilize 1 litre milk by bringing it to the boil, and simmering for two minutes to kill off any undesirable bacteria.
Now, there is the first reason I’ve seen for heating to the milk to boiling. No other source has given a reason. Is this why I should be heating the milk? And this one gives the instruction about two minutes of simmering.
This same recipe also gives a temperature for ‘lukewarm’ of 38-43 degrees C, or 100-110 F. (which is different than what I’d been doing in this last experiment.) I’d found some other suggestions of 80 – 85 F.
Entirely possible that temperature is one of the variables that is contributing to the different results. Certainly I suspected that the temperature I’ve been leaving it to sit at might have an effect on coagulation and formation of a curd, and is a bit hard to control. It is winter here in Canada, and I live in a cold house (electric baseboards and a programmable thermostat to save on hydro costs.) At a different time of year, the ambient temperatures will be greatly different.
I think I also need to experiment with some other methods for maintaining a temperature, and maybe try a higher ‘lukewarm’ temp.
I do believe, though, that I need to put aside questing for skyr until I’ve learned a little more about the rennets I have available. If I can get a handle on the processes and results when I’m working with something a bit more obtainable, like making a yoghurt, where I can easily buy commercial yoghurt for a starter, and know what it should taste like, or some soft cheese, then I may be able to apply the experience again to trying for skyr. Though I may also be limited to the suggestions of how to make a skyr starter, since the availability of real skyr is extremely intermittent.
Sadly, all my previous experiences with cheese-making and the like are just too many years behind me now to be of use. I’m really starting at the beginning all over again. I just have to hope I’ve learned a bit of patience, and can approach this methodically, and solve the mystery!
This time I again tried the skimmed milk recipe. I was hopeful, because early on I was seeing some curd separation, but in the end didn’t get anywhere near a useful degree of coagulation. (Is there a happier word one can use to describe the actions of rennet when making cheese products?) And to my sense of taste, there really wasn’t any kind of marked degree of change from the flavour of milk. It was ‘not milk’ in flavour, but without any of the tang or faint acidity I’ve come to associate with skyr.
I did get to try out the new piece of equipment my loving husband gifted me with for Christmas.
A nylon jelly strainer system from Lee Valley. Far simpler for clean up. Cheesecloth may really be washable, but I think I prefer to save it for theatrical costume uses, because it’s nothing but a pain for use in the kitchen. (Well, perhaps if I had a kitchen dedicated to culinary experiments that wasn’t also full of the rest of our lives…)
But I’m starting to think that some of the comments I’ve made about the iron-smelting experiments that go on outside our house also apply here. Too many unknowns and too many variables, and never working towards setting some constants.
I’ve had several recipes I’ve been playing with simultaneously. There are several possible types of milk I can use; some of the recipes specify, some don’t. I have two different kinds of rennet, both of which are vegetable-based, so are a variable in themselves. There are a couple of different methods suggested. There is the variable of quantity: do the reactions I’m looking for require certain quantities before they occur? Are the proportions for reaction a constant?
In many ways as with the iron smelting, some of the same questions occur, and I can just plug a different noun or verb into the question, and it’s just as valid when applied to my experiments with skyr. (Scary, eh?)
* To begin with, I’m trying to experiment to create a product I don’t have much familiarity with. There is almost no experience with skyr in Canada, other than in specific communities with a cultural heritage that has kept it alive. (As in so much else in my life, I had never particularly heard of skyr, or had any interest in its existence, when I was growing up in Manitoba, a stone’s throw from Gimli and its Icelandic community. Turns out my mother knew about it, and liked it, and used to be able to buy it in the grocery store when she was younger! Thanks to the whole new world of major grocery store chains, and countrywide supply lines, that’s no longer possible. And now I live a wide province away…) So all I really know of skyr is from other people’s descriptions, which are never quite the same, and recently, thanks to a friend’s importation of some from a small producer in Manitoba, or some commercially-produced skyr brought back from Iceland. And whether either of these is typical, true skyr, or the skyr one might expect to make from the few available recipes, is as much a guess as any other.
Even from the few tastes I’ve had of skyr, I can’t really describe to my own satisfaction how it tastes. Before I’d ever had any, my interpretation of other descriptions led me to think it would be a little bit like yoghurt meets creamed cottage cheese. (Again, I had to work with products I’d already tasted. I’ve never had Quark; so don’t know where it fits in the spectrum.) When I did taste skyr, I think I was surprised that it wasn’t tangier. Because I’d been thinking about yoghurt, perhaps like a yoghurt cheese, I was expecting the same amount of acidity. (One of the things that keeps me from really enjoying yoghurt in large quantities. Too sharp a taste.) It wasn’t. But it also wasn’t like clotted cream, though the texture wasn’t that far away. It was less ‘glossy’ and loose than sour cream. (Oddly, although much sour cream is “sour” in taste, I find it less acidic than yoghurt. I feel there’s probably science involved here, which I need to know more about.) And again sour cream is still too sharp a flavour. And skyr can be more dense-seeming.
I have had some cream cheeses that are more like skyr in taste than either yoghurt or sour cream. They seem to be less typical of cream cheeses though.
So, here I am, trying to make something I’ve only tasted occasionally, can’t happily describe, even to myself, and have only very intermittently had brief access to.
Good start!
*I’m also not finding a lot of concrete information about skyr. Mostly just the same stuff re-paraphrased elsewhere, or some vague descriptions. And not much by way of recipes. I have one recipe that came via a friend, and one cookbook of Icelandic recipes from the Lake Winnipeg area that has two or three different takes on it. There’s a bit of discussion on the internet, which I’ve gleefully bookmarked, but nowhere near the amount I thought I’d find. Which is odd, because I know I’ve talked about skyr and figuring out how to make it for years now, and only recently got down to seriously trying to do something about it. I am sure I’m not the only one. In fact, by the number of Google searches that have hit on this blog by the search word ‘skyr’, I KNOW I’m not alone in this quest!
*What recipes I can find, seem to have no consensus as to what milk to use, skim, partly-fatted, whole milk, buttermilk… Admittedly, in searching for information on Viking Age skyr, it’s not like there’s likely to be a recipe or archaeological evidence, so information from traditional practices would be a good starting point. But even that seems a bit vague.
[I should point out that I’m mostly working from my own culinary library, which isn’t totally sketchy, or what I can find on the internet. I live rurally and have no easy access to libraries anymore. Give me a lovely university library and I might make some more headway. Or not. Even if the information is really available and out there, sometimes it can be well hidden!]
Part of my brain says higher fat content milk would give more milk solids. And that maybe my lack of coagulation is because I was using skim milk. But common sense suggests that historically milk would be processed differently and separated into different components for different uses. Cream becomes butter. So it would be the thinner milks and whey that might be made into cheeses. And there are Scandinavian cheeses that are made from whey: Gjetost and Mysost. Some of the things I’ve read about skyr, say it is a low-fat cheese. But then some of the recipes don’t mention that at all. I may not be able to find a definitive answer to that, but some further experimentation may be able to tell me how I need to make it to have it work.
*I need to figure out what the differences are between animal- and vegetable-based rennet. I have no particular preference which I use, being a carnivore, but if I can get the vegetable-based version to work, then it will be suitable for my non-meat-eater friends and relations. In the long run, it will probably hinge on what’s available to me. But I do need to learn if there are variations in how well each work, and in the amounts that should be used. The recipe I was just trying asked for twelve drops per 4 quarts of milk. I noticed that the rennet bottle itself suggested five drops per 1 litre. Hmmm… Mind you, I based my amount of rennet on that 5drops per litre, and did NOT get any really tangible curd formation. It ‘looked’ liked it was working, but when I went to strain off the liquid, it was far more liquid than solid.
And I don’t think that just giving it more time is the answer either. I did that with one of the very first attempts, and by the time I’d developed some thickness that was strainable, the milk was somewhat past human consumption. Even our cats, who adore dairy in any way, shape or form, were completely disinterested!
*Temperatures. When they say heat to boiling, do they mean heat it till it IS boiling, or until it reaches that temperature? Or maybe even boil for a bit of time? And cooling to lukewarm… What is lukewarm exactly? Does it matter? Am I over analyzing?
Hmmm… I was just grubbing about in yet another cookery book, thinking about an offshoot from this project that would involve trying to make something else, where I can find more info, and lo and behold! Have come across some instructions to do with yoghurt making that say: Sterilize 1 litre milk by bringing it to the boil, and simmering for two minutes to kill off any undesirable bacteria.
Now, there is the first reason I’ve seen for heating to the milk to boiling. No other source has given a reason. Is this why I should be heating the milk? And this one gives the instruction about two minutes of simmering.
This same recipe also gives a temperature for ‘lukewarm’ of 38-43 degrees C, or 100-110 F. (which is different than what I’d been doing in this last experiment.) I’d found some other suggestions of 80 – 85 F.
Entirely possible that temperature is one of the variables that is contributing to the different results. Certainly I suspected that the temperature I’ve been leaving it to sit at might have an effect on coagulation and formation of a curd, and is a bit hard to control. It is winter here in Canada, and I live in a cold house (electric baseboards and a programmable thermostat to save on hydro costs.) At a different time of year, the ambient temperatures will be greatly different.
I think I also need to experiment with some other methods for maintaining a temperature, and maybe try a higher ‘lukewarm’ temp.
I do believe, though, that I need to put aside questing for skyr until I’ve learned a little more about the rennets I have available. If I can get a handle on the processes and results when I’m working with something a bit more obtainable, like making a yoghurt, where I can easily buy commercial yoghurt for a starter, and know what it should taste like, or some soft cheese, then I may be able to apply the experience again to trying for skyr. Though I may also be limited to the suggestions of how to make a skyr starter, since the availability of real skyr is extremely intermittent.
Sadly, all my previous experiences with cheese-making and the like are just too many years behind me now to be of use. I’m really starting at the beginning all over again. I just have to hope I’ve learned a bit of patience, and can approach this methodically, and solve the mystery!
Friday, 22 February 2008
Adventures in Skyr, part 2
Carrying on with the skyr saga…
Two of the recipes I had on hand were pretty much word for word the same:
Take 4 quarts of milk. Bring to the boiling point. Cool until lukewarm.
Stir 2 tbsp. Skyr into ½ cup milk. (or use recipe for starter) Stir into lukewarm milk.
Add 12 drops of liquid rennet, stir well. Set aside in warm place for about 24 hours.
Drain off liquid through cheesecloth. Remove cloth, put in bowl, beat well. Chill. Serve with cream and sugar if desired.
So, definitely I was going to try this recipe, since it had cropped up twice. But…. 4 quarts of milk? That’s a lot of milk for a highly speculative venture. (Note my lack of confidence in the whole procedure! Perhaps it harks back to my adventures in brewing. You never know till it’s done if it will be what you want, so you never want to make five gallons. Of course, then it turns out perfectly, and you only made a small bottle!)
I decided I was up for playing with one litre of milk. (And of course, now we not only get to have fun with scaling recipes, I run into that wonderful dark zone of differing rules of measurement. Sigh.) And these two recipes did not make any comment about ‘type’ of milk. No mention of milk fat at all. It had only been from poking around on the web that I’d found mention of low fat at all. Hmmm…. Since both my husband and I have a strong aversion to skim milk, even on principle… (Maybe if it actually cost significantly less than 2% or whole milk?) I opted for 1%. (There’s something about the ‘blue’ quality of skim milk that just gives me shudders.)
And I had no rennet. (This was a sudden experimentation, brought about when Neil had sent me home after a visit, with a small container of leftover skyr from Manitoba.)
Now, you’re supposed to be able to make rennetless cheese by using an acid to curdle the milk. And this is a soft and creamy final product, not a firm cheese. So, would it be possible?
I divided my one litre of milk into two portions, one to try with vinegar, and one to try with lemon juice. I followed the instructions, and waited. And waited. Neither batch was giving me any sort of coagulation at all. I waited. Maybe the kitchen was too cold? Or the entire house? (This was winter in Ontario, in the Snow Belt, with wretched electric baseboard heaters and a programmable thermostat and a thrifty husband, after all!)
The recipe had said to leave it sit for 24 hours. I left it for 36. And a bit longer. Never the slightest hint that my milk had ever heard of the concept of curds. And then it started to smell a bit squiffy, so I cried ‘uncle’. (And when all four of the cats said ‘thanks, but no’, cats who will normally knock you down in a rush to get at anything that even looks like it might be a milk carton, I knew I did NOT have a winner!
Not only were there no curds, in either batch, there wasn’t even the suggestion of thickening. Instead I just had to lots of thin smelly milk to offer up to the septic system gods.
Disappointed, but not vanquished, I turned again to the collected recipes. The Culinary Saga of New Iceland had three different recipes. The second one didn’t even require rennet. So I thought I’d give it a try.
This one, Lyla Thorarinson’s Skyr (An Alternative Method) only wanted 1 quart of buttermilk. It didn’t even ask for a dollop of skyr.
Pour buttermilk into baking dish. Cover and place in a preheated 325-degree oven. Bake for 30 minutes. Shut oven off.
Leave dish in oven overnight, for at least 12 hours, after which the whey should be visibly separated from the curd. Separate the curd from the whey as much as possible and drain curd for about 4 hours or until fairly firm. Put curd into bowl and beat until smooth. Add sugar to taste and serve with cream and/or fruit.
I DID add a bit of the skyr to this, since I wanted to encourage the correct flavour development.
Now this experiment did actually go somewhere. I don’t think it was towards skyr, though. I did develop curds. I was able to separate the whey and the surds and put the curds to drain. However, my suspicion is that I was too successful. My cheesemaking book includes a recipe for buttermilk cheese. For a dry buttermilk cheese, you go through exactly the motions I’d gone through, heating the buttermilk and then draining the curds. And what I’d ended up with was a fairly dry curd. No way did it resemble skyr. And it wasn’t just a case of whisking it up to creamy…
(Mind you, as a dry crumbly cheese product, it wasn’t totally awful. I added some herbs, and used it on some foccaccia, and with some pasta, and eventually my husband blended it with some sour cream and finished it off in a sandwich. But it wasn’t skyr.)
The cheese book suggests that you can achieve a wet curd buttermilk cheese without heat, and I may look into that.
I did eventually have some rennet, thanks to another friend, though it’s a vegetarian version, and I’m not sure how that changes the process. And there was another, even weirder recipe to try from the New Icelandic cookbook.
So stay tuned.
v
Two of the recipes I had on hand were pretty much word for word the same:
Take 4 quarts of milk. Bring to the boiling point. Cool until lukewarm.
Stir 2 tbsp. Skyr into ½ cup milk. (or use recipe for starter) Stir into lukewarm milk.
Add 12 drops of liquid rennet, stir well. Set aside in warm place for about 24 hours.
Drain off liquid through cheesecloth. Remove cloth, put in bowl, beat well. Chill. Serve with cream and sugar if desired.
So, definitely I was going to try this recipe, since it had cropped up twice. But…. 4 quarts of milk? That’s a lot of milk for a highly speculative venture. (Note my lack of confidence in the whole procedure! Perhaps it harks back to my adventures in brewing. You never know till it’s done if it will be what you want, so you never want to make five gallons. Of course, then it turns out perfectly, and you only made a small bottle!)
I decided I was up for playing with one litre of milk. (And of course, now we not only get to have fun with scaling recipes, I run into that wonderful dark zone of differing rules of measurement. Sigh.) And these two recipes did not make any comment about ‘type’ of milk. No mention of milk fat at all. It had only been from poking around on the web that I’d found mention of low fat at all. Hmmm…. Since both my husband and I have a strong aversion to skim milk, even on principle… (Maybe if it actually cost significantly less than 2% or whole milk?) I opted for 1%. (There’s something about the ‘blue’ quality of skim milk that just gives me shudders.)
And I had no rennet. (This was a sudden experimentation, brought about when Neil had sent me home after a visit, with a small container of leftover skyr from Manitoba.)
Now, you’re supposed to be able to make rennetless cheese by using an acid to curdle the milk. And this is a soft and creamy final product, not a firm cheese. So, would it be possible?
I divided my one litre of milk into two portions, one to try with vinegar, and one to try with lemon juice. I followed the instructions, and waited. And waited. Neither batch was giving me any sort of coagulation at all. I waited. Maybe the kitchen was too cold? Or the entire house? (This was winter in Ontario, in the Snow Belt, with wretched electric baseboard heaters and a programmable thermostat and a thrifty husband, after all!)
The recipe had said to leave it sit for 24 hours. I left it for 36. And a bit longer. Never the slightest hint that my milk had ever heard of the concept of curds. And then it started to smell a bit squiffy, so I cried ‘uncle’. (And when all four of the cats said ‘thanks, but no’, cats who will normally knock you down in a rush to get at anything that even looks like it might be a milk carton, I knew I did NOT have a winner!
Not only were there no curds, in either batch, there wasn’t even the suggestion of thickening. Instead I just had to lots of thin smelly milk to offer up to the septic system gods.
Disappointed, but not vanquished, I turned again to the collected recipes. The Culinary Saga of New Iceland had three different recipes. The second one didn’t even require rennet. So I thought I’d give it a try.
This one, Lyla Thorarinson’s Skyr (An Alternative Method) only wanted 1 quart of buttermilk. It didn’t even ask for a dollop of skyr.
Pour buttermilk into baking dish. Cover and place in a preheated 325-degree oven. Bake for 30 minutes. Shut oven off.
Leave dish in oven overnight, for at least 12 hours, after which the whey should be visibly separated from the curd. Separate the curd from the whey as much as possible and drain curd for about 4 hours or until fairly firm. Put curd into bowl and beat until smooth. Add sugar to taste and serve with cream and/or fruit.
I DID add a bit of the skyr to this, since I wanted to encourage the correct flavour development.
Now this experiment did actually go somewhere. I don’t think it was towards skyr, though. I did develop curds. I was able to separate the whey and the surds and put the curds to drain. However, my suspicion is that I was too successful. My cheesemaking book includes a recipe for buttermilk cheese. For a dry buttermilk cheese, you go through exactly the motions I’d gone through, heating the buttermilk and then draining the curds. And what I’d ended up with was a fairly dry curd. No way did it resemble skyr. And it wasn’t just a case of whisking it up to creamy…
(Mind you, as a dry crumbly cheese product, it wasn’t totally awful. I added some herbs, and used it on some foccaccia, and with some pasta, and eventually my husband blended it with some sour cream and finished it off in a sandwich. But it wasn’t skyr.)
The cheese book suggests that you can achieve a wet curd buttermilk cheese without heat, and I may look into that.
I did eventually have some rennet, thanks to another friend, though it’s a vegetarian version, and I’m not sure how that changes the process. And there was another, even weirder recipe to try from the New Icelandic cookbook.
So stay tuned.
v
Thursday, 21 February 2008
Adventures in Skyr
Ah, so what is “skyr” you are asking? Well, now, that’s a very good question, and so far I haven’t found an answer of only a few words. It’s kind of like cheese, or yoghurt, or cottage cheese, or sour cream, or maybe Quark (having never yet met Quark face to face, I’m not sure.)
It’s supposedly a traditional and well-loved foodstuff of the Norse. Dating back, at least, to the Viking Age. Still favoured (and modernized) today in Scandinavian countries, and now being imported into select areas of North America.
It’s one of those things I’ve known about for ages, but never really thought about. It wasn’t till recently that I’ve actually tried to find out some more concrete info, and realized just how hard it is to define.
So, let’s turn to some references. I’ll start with the old-fashioned kind: books.
From The Cooking of Scandinavia, one of the Time-Life Foods of the World series:
“If fermentation sounds like an exotic way to preserve food, bear in mind that the same process also yields wine, cheese, anchovies, olives, sour cream, yoghurt and buttermilk. Without the blessing of fermentation, the Scandinavians would never have been able to turn the greater part of their spring and summer milk supplies into storable dairy products. Nor would they have become the important cheese and butter makers they are today.
“Some milk had to be kept on hand to drink, and inevitably it soured. A virtue was made of this, and in Viking times, as later, it was considered fit food to offer company. One of the sagas tells of a man called Bard who served his guests bread and butter and ‘large bowls filled with curds.’ As they were very thirsty, they swallowed the curds in large draughts; ‘then Bard had buttermilk brought in, and they drank it.’
“What those curds may have been is not certain. Perhaps they were nothing more than skyr, or curdled milk, which used to be a common food of Scandinavia. Today skyr is found under that name only in Iceland, and there it is eaten fresh, as a kind of yoghurt.”
[Actually, this article goes on to talk about a whole bunch of weird dairy products that may also bear some investigating and experimentation…]
Another book, The Culinary Saga of New Iceland [thanks, Karen] by Kristen Olafson-Jenkyns, says of skyr:
“The seafaring Vikings brought this ancient dish with them when they settled in Iceland. Skyr is a smooth curd with a creamy texture and is classified as a cheese. It is made from 2% or skim milk and is very low in butterfat content. Protein rich, skyr was for centuries one of Iceland’s most important staple foods and in earlier days was made from sheep’s milk and preserved all winter in casks.
“The traditional way to eat skyr is with milk or cream and a little sugar. It is also delicious with fresh fruit. On farms in Iceland, it was also served mixed with porridge, which is called ‘Hraeringur’. It was served with milk and accompanied by the traditional ‘black pudding’ and ‘liver pudding’ which were made at the slaughtering time in autumn.”
Okay, then. Some kind of thickened milk product. Dare I say, “curdled”? Our connotations of the word ‘curdled’ aren’t great, although by definition it merely means ‘form into curds’ or ‘thicken’, which doesn’t sound so bad. Cheese is made up of the curds of milk. Cheese curds themselves are a great thing, and poutine wouldn’t be poutine without them!
Googling, good ol’ Wikipedia, imperfect though it may be, says:
“Skyr is an Icelandic cultured dairy product, a type of fresh cheese that has been strained, not unlike Greek yoghurt. It is said to have originally come from Norway, brought to Iceland by the Norwegian Vikings, but is currently unique to Icelandic cuisine.
“Traditionally, skyr is made with pasteurized skimmed milk and live active cultures such as Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus. Then, "skyr condenser" — good skyr, used to ignite bacteria growth, and rennet was added, and the milk was left to coagulate. The skyr was then strained through fabric to remove the whey, called "mysa" in Icelandic, a by-product that Icelanders used as a thirst-quenching drink. Today it is made from non-fat milk.”
***
Anyway…. What happened is that a friend discovered a supplier of skyr in Manitoba, and managed to mail order some. He’d tasted it several years back on a trip to Iceland, and had been searching for a North American source ever since. Gimli, Manitoba is a major Icelandic community, and a logical direction to be looking for Icelandic delicacies.
But this means that suddenly we have some skyr on hand, and I now have some first hand experience with “what is skyr?” (Though Neil says it seems different tasting than he recalls.) And because making skyr seems to require some skyr to make more skyr, along the lines of making sourdough, I’m now in a scramble to figure out how to make it.
A number of the bits and pieces I could find out there on the interweb, remarked on how ‘skyr keeps forever’. Hmmm…. Not my experience. Mind you, there seem to be a multitude of different descriptions of what sky is actually like out there, so perhaps there’s also a wide range of opinions on how it keeps. It is a dairy product, so I’ve got it in the refrigerator, but I’m still thinking there’s a time limit on these experiments.
I started my experiments by tracking down recipes. Neil had one, given to him by a friend from Gimli, that was supposedly what her mother made. The Culinary Saga of New Iceland cookbook has several, one of which seems word for word like the Neil gave me. And I googled up several others.
Some mentioned that you use low fat milk.
Stephanie Zonis, of Whey to Go! wrote, in an article from July 2006:
“From everything I’ve read, skyr, by tradition, was a product low in fat. I found it strange that a traditional farmstead cheese (“farmstead” means a cheese is made from the milk of animals raised on the same farm where the cheese is produced) would be low in fat. However, it was explained to me that the Icelandic word for skim milk is “undanrenna,” literally “running from underneath.” Milk from cows or sheep would be placed into a container and allowed to stand for a day, sometimes on ice (the separation process was dependent on the milk’s temperature; colder milk meant faster and better separation). The next day, the milk was separated from the cream via a bowl with a hole in the bottom, out of which ran the skim milk. Milk separated in this fashion would retain a slightly higher percentage of fat than milk separated by more modern methods, but evidently skyr has been low fat for centuries. This isn’t just a modern fad we’re talking about, after all!”
This, at least, gives some logic for the lower fat. Not all the recipes I found specified a lower fat milk. Because I think of this as a ‘cheese’ of sorts, it confuses me a little to be thinking of low or no fat. I mean something has to turn into curds, right? The milk solids. And I guess I’ve assumed that milk solids are synonymous with milk fats.
Checking my book on cheesemaking, I see that milk is about seven-eighths water, and the rest of it is made up of proteins, minerals, milk sugar (lactose), milk fat, vitamins, and trace elements. Those are the milk solids.
It is casein, the protein part of the milk solid that forms curds. “When milk is converted to cheese, most of the fat remains in the curd, with very little going off in the whey. Homogenizing breaks up the fat globules into very small particles, and then distributes them throughout the milk, so they do not rise the top as cream. It is more difficult to make a cheese from homogenized milk because it forms a curd less firm than one made from whole milk.”
Hmmmm… In today’s world, it’s getting much harder to buy unprocessed milk. And of course, I started this whole adventure in the middle of winter in Ontario, when tracking down accessible sources of anything is difficult. While in summer, I might be interested in hying myself off to a farmer’s market for non-grocery store milk, or down to a local cheese maker for ingredients, in winter I tend to stick close to home.
Anyway, before I bore everyone to tears, let’s recap what’s happened thus far with this whole project.
I had some skyr to use as starter. (Apparently the starter works as the bacterial culture to tell your dairy experiment which flavour-way it wants to go.) I had some recipes. What I didn’t have, at that point, was any rennet. Excitingly, I did now have thermometers, too! New-fangled stuff in my kitchen. Whee!
Anyway, to make a long blog short, here’s the preamble. Next installment is the first round of experimentation.
v
It’s supposedly a traditional and well-loved foodstuff of the Norse. Dating back, at least, to the Viking Age. Still favoured (and modernized) today in Scandinavian countries, and now being imported into select areas of North America.
It’s one of those things I’ve known about for ages, but never really thought about. It wasn’t till recently that I’ve actually tried to find out some more concrete info, and realized just how hard it is to define.
So, let’s turn to some references. I’ll start with the old-fashioned kind: books.
From The Cooking of Scandinavia, one of the Time-Life Foods of the World series:
“If fermentation sounds like an exotic way to preserve food, bear in mind that the same process also yields wine, cheese, anchovies, olives, sour cream, yoghurt and buttermilk. Without the blessing of fermentation, the Scandinavians would never have been able to turn the greater part of their spring and summer milk supplies into storable dairy products. Nor would they have become the important cheese and butter makers they are today.
“Some milk had to be kept on hand to drink, and inevitably it soured. A virtue was made of this, and in Viking times, as later, it was considered fit food to offer company. One of the sagas tells of a man called Bard who served his guests bread and butter and ‘large bowls filled with curds.’ As they were very thirsty, they swallowed the curds in large draughts; ‘then Bard had buttermilk brought in, and they drank it.’
“What those curds may have been is not certain. Perhaps they were nothing more than skyr, or curdled milk, which used to be a common food of Scandinavia. Today skyr is found under that name only in Iceland, and there it is eaten fresh, as a kind of yoghurt.”
[Actually, this article goes on to talk about a whole bunch of weird dairy products that may also bear some investigating and experimentation…]
Another book, The Culinary Saga of New Iceland [thanks, Karen] by Kristen Olafson-Jenkyns, says of skyr:
“The seafaring Vikings brought this ancient dish with them when they settled in Iceland. Skyr is a smooth curd with a creamy texture and is classified as a cheese. It is made from 2% or skim milk and is very low in butterfat content. Protein rich, skyr was for centuries one of Iceland’s most important staple foods and in earlier days was made from sheep’s milk and preserved all winter in casks.
“The traditional way to eat skyr is with milk or cream and a little sugar. It is also delicious with fresh fruit. On farms in Iceland, it was also served mixed with porridge, which is called ‘Hraeringur’. It was served with milk and accompanied by the traditional ‘black pudding’ and ‘liver pudding’ which were made at the slaughtering time in autumn.”
Okay, then. Some kind of thickened milk product. Dare I say, “curdled”? Our connotations of the word ‘curdled’ aren’t great, although by definition it merely means ‘form into curds’ or ‘thicken’, which doesn’t sound so bad. Cheese is made up of the curds of milk. Cheese curds themselves are a great thing, and poutine wouldn’t be poutine without them!
Googling, good ol’ Wikipedia, imperfect though it may be, says:
“Skyr is an Icelandic cultured dairy product, a type of fresh cheese that has been strained, not unlike Greek yoghurt. It is said to have originally come from Norway, brought to Iceland by the Norwegian Vikings, but is currently unique to Icelandic cuisine.
“Traditionally, skyr is made with pasteurized skimmed milk and live active cultures such as Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus. Then, "skyr condenser" — good skyr, used to ignite bacteria growth, and rennet was added, and the milk was left to coagulate. The skyr was then strained through fabric to remove the whey, called "mysa" in Icelandic, a by-product that Icelanders used as a thirst-quenching drink. Today it is made from non-fat milk.”
***
Anyway…. What happened is that a friend discovered a supplier of skyr in Manitoba, and managed to mail order some. He’d tasted it several years back on a trip to Iceland, and had been searching for a North American source ever since. Gimli, Manitoba is a major Icelandic community, and a logical direction to be looking for Icelandic delicacies.
But this means that suddenly we have some skyr on hand, and I now have some first hand experience with “what is skyr?” (Though Neil says it seems different tasting than he recalls.) And because making skyr seems to require some skyr to make more skyr, along the lines of making sourdough, I’m now in a scramble to figure out how to make it.
A number of the bits and pieces I could find out there on the interweb, remarked on how ‘skyr keeps forever’. Hmmm…. Not my experience. Mind you, there seem to be a multitude of different descriptions of what sky is actually like out there, so perhaps there’s also a wide range of opinions on how it keeps. It is a dairy product, so I’ve got it in the refrigerator, but I’m still thinking there’s a time limit on these experiments.
I started my experiments by tracking down recipes. Neil had one, given to him by a friend from Gimli, that was supposedly what her mother made. The Culinary Saga of New Iceland cookbook has several, one of which seems word for word like the Neil gave me. And I googled up several others.
Some mentioned that you use low fat milk.
Stephanie Zonis, of Whey to Go! wrote, in an article from July 2006:
“From everything I’ve read, skyr, by tradition, was a product low in fat. I found it strange that a traditional farmstead cheese (“farmstead” means a cheese is made from the milk of animals raised on the same farm where the cheese is produced) would be low in fat. However, it was explained to me that the Icelandic word for skim milk is “undanrenna,” literally “running from underneath.” Milk from cows or sheep would be placed into a container and allowed to stand for a day, sometimes on ice (the separation process was dependent on the milk’s temperature; colder milk meant faster and better separation). The next day, the milk was separated from the cream via a bowl with a hole in the bottom, out of which ran the skim milk. Milk separated in this fashion would retain a slightly higher percentage of fat than milk separated by more modern methods, but evidently skyr has been low fat for centuries. This isn’t just a modern fad we’re talking about, after all!”
This, at least, gives some logic for the lower fat. Not all the recipes I found specified a lower fat milk. Because I think of this as a ‘cheese’ of sorts, it confuses me a little to be thinking of low or no fat. I mean something has to turn into curds, right? The milk solids. And I guess I’ve assumed that milk solids are synonymous with milk fats.
Checking my book on cheesemaking, I see that milk is about seven-eighths water, and the rest of it is made up of proteins, minerals, milk sugar (lactose), milk fat, vitamins, and trace elements. Those are the milk solids.
It is casein, the protein part of the milk solid that forms curds. “When milk is converted to cheese, most of the fat remains in the curd, with very little going off in the whey. Homogenizing breaks up the fat globules into very small particles, and then distributes them throughout the milk, so they do not rise the top as cream. It is more difficult to make a cheese from homogenized milk because it forms a curd less firm than one made from whole milk.”
Hmmmm… In today’s world, it’s getting much harder to buy unprocessed milk. And of course, I started this whole adventure in the middle of winter in Ontario, when tracking down accessible sources of anything is difficult. While in summer, I might be interested in hying myself off to a farmer’s market for non-grocery store milk, or down to a local cheese maker for ingredients, in winter I tend to stick close to home.
Anyway, before I bore everyone to tears, let’s recap what’s happened thus far with this whole project.
I had some skyr to use as starter. (Apparently the starter works as the bacterial culture to tell your dairy experiment which flavour-way it wants to go.) I had some recipes. What I didn’t have, at that point, was any rennet. Excitingly, I did now have thermometers, too! New-fangled stuff in my kitchen. Whee!
Anyway, to make a long blog short, here’s the preamble. Next installment is the first round of experimentation.
v
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