Sunday Gravy with yeah right: Baked Ziti or Blessed are the Cheesemakers.

Hey everybody! Welcome back to Sunday Gravy. I’m going to try and make this a semi-regular feature again now that the NFL season is over. Results may vary but I will try.

Today I’m going to bring you something both delicious and absolutely clinically insane to make, baked ziti but this time I’m going to…wait for it…

Make my own motherfucking cheese! That’s right kiddies I’m going to attempt to make my own mozzarella and my own ricotta cheeses and for some reason the idea is terrifying to me.

Very quick aside: well as quick as my asides get anyway, you can skip the whole cheese making insanity and use store bought whole milk mozzarella (buy the whole ball not the shredded shit in a bag) and a container of ricotta and you will be just as happy with the outcome as I always have been in the past. Here you go, just make the mother sauce, just make the Mother Sauce he says. That’s pretty much a 2-day sauce but it’s not too challenging. You may want to “Trow a coupla two tree extra sausages in there” since we’re making ziti. Cook some meatballs, I’ll get to the recipe below, cook you’re dried pasta. If you can’t find ziti shells just use rigatoni or mastaccioli and cook to al dente. Combine the ricotta with one egg, some freshly ground black pepper and a pinch of nutmeg(!) and mix. Ladle some of the sauce into a baking dish, mix together your ricotta mix and your pasta and a spoon or two of sauce and add that to the baking dish. Top with your sliced meatballs, more of the sauce and add layers of sliced mozzarella over the top, then grate some fresh parmesan, maybe a few bits of fresh basil over the top. Bake in a 350 oven for about 45 minutes or so until the cheese is melted and just starting to brown. Serve with a green salad, if preferred, some garlic bread and a glass of red wine or your favorite beer. Enjoy!

This was my actual dinner on Sunday.

See how easy that shit is? Easy, right?

Goddammit I’m going to do this the hard way.

A little structure to how this shit is going to go down. I’m putting together the concepts on Friday, I will spend Saturday making the cheeses and Sunday is for assembly, cooking and serving and drinking. Oh yes. We will be drinking after this adventure. Hell we will be drinking DURING this adventure. The good news is I made a large batch of sauce a few weeks ago, including extra sausages, since I knew this was on the horizon. This takes the whole “2-day sauce preparation” out of the equation which makes the entire task a LITTLE easier.

Cheeses!

Holy shit do I love cheese. All of the cheese. Hard cheese that needs to be grated, soft runny cheeses that need to be scooped up, smelly cheese, fresh cheese, aged cheese. I love the cheeses. If I have leftover ricotta I will spread that shit on a cracker. Lots of folks I know swear that I’m the only one that does that.

But I’ve never made cheese before. That’s going to change because daughter #1 gave me this for Christmas:

She knows that I love to cook and she is more than aware of my affinity for the cheese. I told her that I would use it and make a ziti or a lasagne out of it. I have not done so to date and was reminded of that during our Superb Owl party. So goddammit it’s time.

SATURDAY.

A little background about this kit.

CONTENTS: Dairy Thermometer (E3), 1yd re-useable Butter Muslin, Citric Acid (C13), Vegetable Rennet Tablets (R4), Cheese Salt (S1) and Recipe Booklet.

Having never made cheese from scratch before I was unfamiliar with the process. I looked at the various packages first and wondered, “Rennet, I’m not sure what that does.” The following is from the Wikipedia description of rennet:

Rennet /ˈrɛnᵻt/ is a complex of enzymes produced in the stomachs of ruminant mammals. Chymosin, its key component, is a protease enzyme that curdles the casein in milk. This helps young mammals digest their mothers’ milk. Rennet can also be used to separate milk into solid curds for cheese making and liquid whey. In addition to chymosin, rennet contains other important enzymes such as pepsin and a lipase.

Also this:

Calf rennet is extracted from the inner mucosa of the fourth stomach chamber (the abomasum) of young, unweaned calves as part of livestock butchering. These stomachs are a byproduct of veal production. If rennet is extracted from older calves (grass-fed or grain-fed), the rennet contains less or no chymosin, but a high level of pepsin and can only be used for special types of milk and cheeses. As each ruminant produces a special kind of rennet to digest the milk of its own species, milk-specific rennets are available, such as kid goat rennet for goat‘s milk and lamb rennet for sheep‘s milk.

Did you just toss out the contents of your refrigerated cheese drawer? I didn’t either but it is enlightening. The good news today is that this is a vegetable rennet so you can ignore the previous statements and hopefully your gorges will go back to where they were. Bet you ask your cheese monger which type of rennet is in your next batch of cheese though.

It’s Saturday so it’s happy happy cheese time! I’m going to document all of the hijinks, heartbreak and general fuck-ups as we get into this cheese making thing. I’m certain that I can become an accomplished “fromager” as the French say or a “Käser” for German,  sản xuất pho mátor in Vietnamese or a “Fabricante de Queso” in Spanish!

I’m stalling aren’t I?

At the grocery store I purchased 2 full gallons of whole milk. This is the first time I’ve done that since I was married with kids. Each one of the 2 cheeses requires a full gallon of milk. This is a great test to find out if you are lactose intolerant. Alright, let’s open up this kit and see what we got.

That’s a recipe book, some citric acid, cheese salt, a dairy thermometer, rennet tablets and a whole yard of butter muslin cloth. Nobody told me there would be muslin! That is also the first of two gallons of milk that I sacrificed to the cheese gods.

OK let’s do the mozzarella first. I’ll just get my big ass dutch oven, which barely holds a gallon of milk as it turns out. I take 1/4 of a rennet tablet, dissolve it in 1/4 cup of cold water, mix some citric acid with a cup of water and add it to the gallon of milk that is in the dutch oven. Stir, stir, stir, stir and bring to 90 degrees. Basically what I’ve learned about cheese making is it involves a lot of stirring and a lot of temperature taking. A lot. I was worried since it felt like I was stirring a big pot of slowly warming milk but about 3-4 minutes in the strangest thing happened, the milk was starting to resist the spoon as I stirred. Curious!

Once the pot reached 90 degrees, I put a cover on it and let it rest, the recipe said let rest for 5 minutes or maybe longer. I found it needed to rest about 10 minutes total to thicken up. Put the pot back on the stove and heat to 105 degrees. Stir, stir, stir, stir, stir. Once it reaches temp, remove from heat and guess what?

Stir, stir, stir….about 5 more minutes. Finally I get to the point where there is a clear understanding of what curds and whey are. There is a dazzling amount of whey in a gallon of milk, probably about 3/4 of the milk turns to whey and the rest clumps up into curds. Discard the liquid whey and you will have something like this:

Then we put the curds into the microwave and heat for a minute, we are trying to get up to 135 degrees a temperature that will allow us to start stretching the mozzarella, it takes about 2 full minutes. I would like to state that gooey cheese balls heated in a microwave are, how do you say? HOT AS FUCK to handle. The recipe book says you can wear rubber kitchen gloves. The box of cheese making stuff said it had everything you need but the milk. WHERE ARE MY FUCKING RUBBER GLOVES RICKI? After burning my fingers and flinging cheese curds everywhere (important note: this is messy as fuck to do, you’ve been warned) I finally arrived at this: The finished product.

Holy shit! I’m a motherfucking maker of cheese! Woo-hoo!

The ricotta was a lot easier. Dump gallon #2 of milk in the pot, add a teaspoon of citric acid, some cheese salt and heat up to 195 degrees. You know what else we will be doing? Do you? Stirring! A lot of fucking stirring, this took about 20 minutes to heat to 195. After it warms up you will see a clear separation of the curds from the whey.

After removing from the stove and letting rest for about 5 minutes, you line a colander with the muslin cloth and tie the whole thing into a bag. I used a twist tie from my weekly apple purchase to tie the bag. Then the instructions said to hang the bag and let drain for 30 minutes. I had to get all MacGyver to accomplish this. I used a rubber band twisted a few times around the top of the bag and tied it to the faucet of my kitchen sink.

Pretty goddamn clever, huh? The box of the cheese making kit proudly claimed “Make cheese in only 30 minutes!” THEY LIED! THAT’S A GODDAMN DIRTY LIE!!! Well it was my first time but it was about 3-4 hours of work start to finish to make the 2 cheeses and like I mentioned before, be prepared to get cheese curd all over the place. Drying cheese curd is pretty sticky and funky to clean up too. You’ve been forewarned.

Once completed I had this:

And I have to admit I was pretty damn proud of my accomplishments and you know what else? This shit is really tasty. Super fresh and, obviously, very milky and clean tasting. This should be really fucking good with the ziti I’m going to make on Sunday. Time to drink drink drink.

SUNDAY.

Guess we better make some meatballs. I just came up with the meatball idea a few years ago when it comes to the ziti making. If you cook the meatballs and cut into slices and layer on top of the ziti before you add the last bit of sauce and the mozzarella, it gives a lot more depth to the ziti and it stretches it that much further. In all seriousness, I’m making enough ziti for probably 6-7 people today and there will be just 3 of us eating. My employees at work usually get the leftovers and I have converted a few of them to being big fans of my cooking. At the end of every week they always ask me “So what are you cooking this weekend?” We had a big Christmas pot luck party and everyone brought something. Oddly enough, most of the dishes were cold or room temperature. I made a fresh pan of ziti, brought it in steaming from home and it was gone in about 45 seconds. Love this stuff.

Meatballs:

1 pound of ground pork

2 eggs

1/2 cup of panko bread crumbs

1 teaspoon of salt

1/2 teaspoon of ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon of red pepper flake

1/2 teaspoon of onion powder

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon of thyme

1/2 teaspoon of fresh oregano, chopped.

Mix all ingredients together in a bowl. Roll up about 10-12 meatballs. You want these a little larger than a golf ball. Place into a greased baking dish and cook in a 400 degree oven for about 28-30 minutes. When done you should have something like these:

Yes, the missing one was the “test” meatball and I am happy to admit it was fucking delicious.

Now let’s get to warming up that sauce.

For the uninitiated, baked ziti is just lasagne without the discipline. It’s easier to assemble, easier to serve and less messy to eat. Have you ever built a lasagne? Pain in the ass with the big noodles and shit. This one has all of the same elements but it’s just an easier product to make. As mentioned before, you start with a ladle of sauce in the baking dish then you toss together an egg, some ricotta some nutmeg and black pepper along with a spoon or two of sauce. This goes in the baking dish next, followed by slices of our just made meatballs, followed by more sauce, then topped with the homemade mozzarella and some grated Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Toss a few shreds of fresh oregano and fresh basil on top of everything and you are ready to party Sopranos style. That’s a lot of cheese but it’s so so good. Here it is pre-cook:

As with everything I make I step up the flavor profiles to 11. This has a heat kick, a creamy cheesy element, savoriness from the wine and the herbs and it will satisfy every non-vegetarian in the crowd. Provided they aren’t lactose intolerant. Here it is post-cook:

Ahh, it’s good to be back in the kitchen. Actually I’ve never left the damn kitchen, last week I made Asian sticky wings and I grilled a New York strip steak on President’s Day. The tricky part about doing these posts is to create original content, I ain’t giving you guys recycled shit here, I’m giving you life, love and the pursuit of cheesiness! Now that I reflect back on the weekend, I think I’m going to give this cheese making thing another go. Because there are many cheesy worlds out there. You got your cheddar, and your brie and your farmers cheese and your aged cheese and your…

See you all next time.

Cheers!