At the beginning of this month I made a double batch of Feta. And I wrote about it here.
I was very excited. I love Feta. And making it was nice – it was similar, a bit, to making hard cheese like Cheddar, but shorter. Not so much pressing and air drying and all that.
Half of the curds were tossed with salt and left in the fridge to cure for about 5 days.
The other half went into a brine and would be soaking in that brine for a month....
Here’s where I unveiled the salted feta. It was pretty cool. Very salty if you ate it plain, but it mixed wonderfully in Kale pie and was good on pizza.
We liked the Kale pie so much, I made another 4 of them and froze them. Plus, we had a lot of kale.
Still do.
So much, that I thought I’d make another kale pie or two some time soon. And hey! The brined feta would be ready later this week!
I had put that bowl of brining feta toward the back of the fridge so no one would take it out and eat the chunks of cheese or accidentally spill it all (of course, I seem to be the only one who dumps and spills things from the fridge, so maybe I was just protecting the cheese from myself). I hadn’t even peeked at it once.
So on Saturday, when all these ideas were bubbling in my head, I decided to take a look at the feta and see if maybe the cubes had shrunk, from all the salt in the brine, or who knows what.
So I pulled the bowl out.
And I don’t remember, but it is very possible I gasped in horror.
Because here’s what I saw:
Yep. Feta in Brine. ! . But…why does it look cloudy? Maybe some sort of film on top…
Looks like…like yuck, frankly.
Oh no.
Oh NO.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
It completely dissolved.
I shouldn’t have brined it. Moron. (Me, not you, my lovely reader.)
The book said “Use this method (the brine) only if your goat’s milk comes from a farm; store-bought goat’s milk tends to disintegrate in brine.”
Well, my goat’s milk WAS from a farm.
The small amount of cow’s milk I used to bring the starting quantity up to 2 gallons, however, was not.
And so…my curds dissolved.
Well…lesson learned, right?
No use crying over dissolved feta curds.
Right?
