[Photo: Fall Colors Reflections. Gabe Popa, Flickr, 2015.]

By Elizabeth Anker
Source: By My Solitary Hearth

Elizabeth Anker

This weekend I discovered that if you accidentally pick up a quart of buttermilk and use that to make yogurt, you get a delicious cottage cheese and lots of whey.

The funny thing about this mistake is that the kid at the check-out spent a long time trying to figure out how to ring up the quart. He kept muttering “buttermilk” repeatedly. I thought this was odd, but since I was tired, having spent most of the day in the garden, I didn’t pay much attention. In fact, I put it away when I got home and still didn’t notice. It wasn’t until this morning when I looked for my quart of cream that I found buttermilk instead and realized my mistake. I plowed on with the yogurt making process anyway, thinking that the richness of the buttermilk would be approximately what I needed in fat content to turn milk into yogurt.

Well, the fats are sufficient, but the buttermilk curdles the whole thing.

I quickly corrected course. I went ahead and heated the milk mixture at about 200°F for the full twenty minutes to remove any unwanted critters in the milk, but I stirred minimally, allowing the curds to form. I set up a quick-and-dirty filter to remove the whey, consisting of a large colander set in a bowl and lined with a wet basket-weave towel. (The wet matters for reasons I don’t understand… probably just because water makes everything flow better.) When the twenty minutes were up, I cooled the curds and whey for a little bit, bringing the temperature down to 150°F, not the full cool to yogurt-critter temperature. I figured, rightly it turned out, that running the curds and whey through the sieve would cool it further, and I needed the curds to stay at yogurt temperature, about 115°F.

I set the whey aside for other uses and transferred the towel-full of curds into a bowl. Then I gently mixed in the yogurt starter saved from last week’s batch. It made for a creamy cottage cheese texture, but with more flavor, yogurt flavor. I then put this stuff into the usual jar and set it near the oven to ferment for 6 hours, wrapped in towels. It makes much less yogurt-cheese but it’s much richer, so I don’t have to use that much in the morning oatmeal.

I hope to repeat this mistake…

After making the yogurt-cheese, I had over 8 cups of whey to use or freeze. I decided to use it. I had been roasting butternut squash with the intent of freezing it and maybe using a bit as a base for a spiced butternut soup. I made squash silk, instead.

I cut up the usual mirepoix and softened the vegetables in olive oil. (This consisted of 8 small carrots, 6 smallish stalks of celery, 2 red onions, and 4 Big Jim chiles, all with the parts I don’t like removed and chopped fine.) Then I added the whey and let it simmer for a while until everything smelled good.

When all the veg was soft and the onions were translucent, I added approximately 6 cups of the roasted squash — which left me with 6 more cups to freeze. Butternut squash is so food-dense, I got 12 cups from three modest-sized squashes. I’ll have dinner for the week, and I can bake about 12 loaves of bread out the stuff in the freezer. Or I can make more soup later.

I added a couple quarts of veg stock and the remainder the buttermilk, since the yogurt recipe only needs a pint of cream. (I usually stretch the cream over two batches of yogurt.) I also added cumin, turmeric, allspice, thyme, grey salt and chipotle powder. I use liberal amounts of spice and very little salt. If you try this happy mistake, start with a half teaspoon or so of each thing and add more until you get to a flavor you like. Then write that amount down so you don’t have to repeat the teaspoon exercise — you can just dump in the amount you like.

I used my immersion blender to purée the whole thing, while bringing the soup to a gentle boil. I did not let it boil for more than a few seconds before turning down the heat to low. I didn’t want more curds. I wanted a thick, silky-smooth texture, about like heavy cream.

Then I set it to simmer on low for a while to make sure all the flavors were blended (and all the unnecessary critters were removed…).

It was delicious!

While this was going on, I also made my hummus with a similar spice mix, dropping the allspice and adding coriander. I also put a whole small bulb of garlic in the hummus and used squeezed lemon for the acid.

To finish up the week’s dinner menu, I made focaccia, substituting sourdough starter for half of the flour and water in my usual focaccia recipe (which usually uses 4 cups flour, 2 cups water, 2 Tbs each olive oil and active dry yeast and no salt in the dough) and then adding another cup of flour. Instead of my usual rosemary, I used winter savory because I wanted a more thyme-y flavor to echo the soup, but not thyme itself. This was just pure improv, but it turned out wonderful.

Elizabeth Anker is a mother, musician, geologist and logician; book-seller, business-woman, and home-maker; baker, gardener, and chief bottle-washer; historian, anthropologist, philosopher, and over it all, writer. You can also follow her at her site, or her Facebook page. She writes under the pseudonym Eliza Daley. She states in her “about” page (which I recommend you read):

“I am writing for them, the young people — for my sons, for my nieces and nephews, for their children. They absolutely must have hope. This hope is placed not in progress, improvement, a brighter future. I’m not saying hope should be rosy and not clear-eyed. But our children need to know that there are good reasons to endure. They deserve to know that they will lead worthy lives. They deserve to believe that there will be love, joy and dignity interlaced with the challenges they face. This hope is in small things maybe, but it is hope and it is needful. And these small things are, even in this time of relative plenty, the true things of worth in a life.”