The joy of making your own

Who can resist the smell of bread in the oven wafting through the home?

Or for the adventurous aardvark, the thrill of transforming milk and lemon into soft cheese?

Taking a break from our road trips, Steve the CloudChaser kitchen meister put some recipes to the test and whipped up a couple of treats – with amazing results.

Homemade bread and cheese is a great excuse to spend a spare afternoon creating something special in the kitchen.

Sourdough Bread

“Patience in baking is not a virtue: it is a necessity.” – Paul Allam and David McGuinness from their book Bourke Street Bakery: The Ultimate Baking Companion.

It tastes yummy and has a wholesome texture, yet sourdough bread is not something you make in a flash.

There is something satisfying about your own handmade loaf.

You first need to cultivate the starter dough from scratch, unless you are lucky enough to inherit some starter from a baker friend.

This is made from a flour and water mix that is left to sit in a warm place to develop wild yeast.

The mix is fed daily with a flour and water batter, a process that could take days or weeks to get the natural fermentation process going.

What we nickname ‘The Beast’ (left) is dough that has rested and risen until doubled in size, ready to be shaped into bread. It began life as a humble flour and water sourdough starter (right).

When he was ready to roll, Steve used the River Cottage Everyday cookbook recipe for its easy-to-follow breadmaking method.

Minus the aid of a breadmaker, imagine how excited we both were to see rustic loaves take shape in our tiny kitchen’s dodgy oven.

Goat Cheese

Our son Mike rocked up one day with a bottle of goats milk for a gag, not anticipating this would lead to another “first” in our kitchen adventures.

“Are you sure? It could be a bit tricky,” was my immediate reaction when Steve announced he was going to have a go at making a simple goat cheese using the gifted milk.

A homemade goat cheese recipe was plucked from the internet. The rest, as they say, is history.

Start off with a few must-haves such as cheesecloth, a cook’s thermometer and lemons.

Heated goat milk mixed with lemon juice, then left to drain for a few hours, transforms into gorgeous cheese. I lightly stir finely chopped herbs  through the cheese to pimp it up.

Ta-dah! O little pot of joy.