Bush Food - Farmers Cheese

Davy has been giving off saying we don't put enough recipes on the blog and I sort of agree, food is one of the 4 essential elements after all. So we are going to do a series on bush food. The theme will be that the recipes will be tradtional mountain man/pioneer recipes or they will incorporate a wild ingredient somewhere or just be plain simple campfire cooking, we will spread them out over the year.

I remember reading about this method of making cheese in a book on mountain men many years ago in which it said they often used goats or buffalo milk and I wondered how they actually got to milk a buffalo?

because of this I sort of neglected the idea until I saw Tam Wendel on Bushcraft on Fire doing it and I thought I'd better give it a go!

so essential ingredients are

Milk

Vinegar

(that's it! although it's a bland cheese so I flavoured mine with wild garlic and black pepper)

put the milk in the pan and heat it till it's nearly boiling (but don't let it boil!)

Take it off the heat and add about 50ml of vinegar to every 2 quarts of milk, stir it as it separates

Strain it through one of Cody Lundin's bandanas

after half an hour you have a ball of lovely soft spreading cheese, if you want a firm cheese then there's one more step after adding any flavours

the most complimentary flavours I find are wild garlic or tri-corn garlic and freshly ground black pepper

mix it well into the cheese

press the cheese into a mold or a bowl , cover with the bandana and add a weight on top to compress it and refrigerate for 2 hours, and there you have it, home made Bushcrafters Wild Garlic and Black Pepper Cheese. Goes lovely on crackers or just as a snack..if  this is pioneer food, then I like it!