My love affair with Finland started a few years earlier though and I have my old choir conductor, Sandra Milliken to thank for this. She also took a study-tour to Finland to learn new choral techniques and instantly fell in love with the country. She has been back many times, mainly in winter, to spend time with friends and write a number of choral songs for choirs to sing. Since then she taught the choir and me a number of Finnish choral pieces and about the Finnish culture. We became well known for our Finnish language singing (one of the hardest languages in the world to learn) and had the great honour to sing for the former-Prime Minister of Finland Paavo Lipponen when he made a trip out here. He said our pronunciation was impeccable!

Finland holds a lot of good memories for me. The choir spent time in Helsinki in the heart of winter where I fell in love with the wide cobbled streets, the open air markets and the cold, frozen harbour. We sang a concert in the “Rock Church” , carved out of the rock, where initially I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience while singing one of the more beautiful songs – it turned out to be a heavy case of jetlag! We then skipped up to a village an hour out of town for another concert. This is where I encountered karjalanpiirakat for the first time, on a table full of sweet treats as a snack during the rehearsal with our host-choir.

They had made a number of spiced biscuits and sweets, and also these pastries. At first they look like a sweet too, but they are quite savoury, earthy but very moreish. The filling is made simply of rice and milk and the pastry is made from rye flour. It is served with a mixture of chopped boiled egg and butter. They are extremely tasty, but if you are a staunchly patriotic Finn, you may not want to read the next bit… these pastries beg to be meddled with. A sweet version of a rice custard with cinnamon and a mixed berry compote on top would be divine. Or perhaps a mushroom ’risotto’ with a piece of prosciutto sandwiched between the pastry and filling. Maybe curried egg instead of plain egg on top… I will definitely be trying these again and having a play.

I worked from a few recipes for this but this turned out to be my version

Rice Filling

1 cup Water

1 cup Rice (I used medium-grain, some recipes call for ’shortgrain glutinous rice’ but it shouldn’t matter too much)

1 Litre Milk (or Soy Milk)

Pastry

1 cup Water

1 cup Flour (and a little bit extra)

1 1/2 cups rye flour (it took me 3 shops to find rye flour! You can get it at Woolworths)

1 1/2 tsp salt

Glaze

1/2 cup milk

1/6 cup butter

Eggy mixture

2 hard boiled eggs

2 tbsp butter, softened

Method

1.  Put the water and rice in a saucepan and cook for about 5-10 minutes until the water is absorbed.

2. Add the milk (it looks like HEAPS but it will absorb!) and simmer for about 50-60 minutes, stirring every once in a while until the consistancy of thick porridge. Add the salt and let cool.

3. Mix all the pastry ingredients in a bowl until you get a thick paste. Roll out into a sausage shape the ‘thickness of your wrist’ and cut it into 16 equal sections.

4. Roll out on a well floured surface until it’s about 20 cm in diameter and quite thin

5. If you want to be a bit OCD (or if you are just as bad as me at creating perfect rounds of pastry) trim the sides of the pastry to a perfect circle. For the mums out there – I found using an old lid from a formula tin worked PERFECTLY!

6. take a large spoonful of rice and press it onto the pastry in a oval shape. This is sticky work, you’ll need a clean teatowel to wipe your hands after you do this. Then fold the edges of the pastry over just the edge of the rice in a crimped pattern. It doesn’t have to look perfect.

7. Heat the milk and butter in a pan until boiling. Brush this mixture over the entire pastry and pop in an oven at over 250 degrees celcius (one recipe said 290 degrees! My oven doesn’t get that hot!!)

8. After about 10 minutes brush again with the milk mixture, Then continue to cook until they look golden.

9. Take the pastries out of the oven and brush again with the milk mixture and cover with a clean tea towel so the pastry softens.

10. Boil the eggs until hard, then cool.  (I cannot recommend more highly the contraption pictured above - it’s an “Egg Perfect Egg Timer” and you can get it from homewares shops. As it heats up the edge will change colour and will tell you when it is soft, medium or hard boiled. I’ve never had any surprises (or nasty greeny-grey yolks) when using this product) So… chop up the boiled eggs and mix with the softened butter.

11. Serve warm or cold with a spoonful of the egg mixture on top.

These are great for a snack during the day. We had ours for dinner with a bit of ham and a salad. I served these at work for morning tea last week and they were a hit! I’ve had  few requests for the recipe. Perhaps they might be the next macaron?

“Oh, it’s not very nice, you wouldn’t like it.”

“But Dad likes it, please can you make it?”

“Ok. How about I make it a bit fun?”

“Oh Yay! Thanks Mum”

10 minutes later after slaving away in the kitchen she hands me and my sister a bowl each of piping hot porridge. Gooey green-tinted porridge. Mum had put a few drops of blue food colouring in – you know, to make it fun, unfortunately it turned a vile shade of khaki. We were horrified. Years later I found out she was secretly very happy we never asked her to make it again. 

I can understand her porridge aversion. It can be pretty foul. But I think mum was on the right track to making it good. Porridge really needs additions. I think I may have found the secret formula to making pretty tasty porridge.

1 cup quick oats

1 cup milk (or Vanilla Soy Milk)

1 & a bit cups of water

a handful of currants

Pop all into a saucepan and start stirring. bring it to the boil and stir for a minute or so on a simmer.

While that’s happening chop up some raw almonds and pop them into a dry frypan with a handful of shredded coconut. Heat until nice and brown.

Slice up a banana.

Put the porridge into a bowl, add a tablespoon of brown sugar, the banana, the coconut and almonds.

YUM! This really fills you up for the whole morning and babies like it too (without the coconut and almonds of course!), it’s been really nice to cook this up and share it with my little one in our wintery house.

STEP TWO – Wait 2 – 3 hours and you’re done!

Now, of course, everyone talks about how DANGEROUS it is and how the pressure will build up inside the can and it will EXPLODE and shower your kitchen and the surrounding area in sweet, sticky, ooey-gooey debris.

 Firstly, I don’t see a major problem with this – if I feel peckish I can simply lean over and lick the couch. But secondly – it probably won’t happen.  As long as you don’t let the water in the pot evaporate it ’should be right, mate.’  Just keep topping it up every 20 minutes or so. Come on… Live Dangerously!!

This stuff is pretty powerful. After only 3 teaspoons my sister and I were talking way too fast and staring at the spoons we were using to eat our creamy dulce de leche; waffling about the science and physics behind why our heads appear upside-down in the spoon.

20 minutes later we crashed.

It’s great simply spread on bread, or eaten by the spoonful, or over icecream, and it’s great in little tartlets for dessert.

Ok, all jokes aside, a lot of people do say this method is dangerous, so please take care whenever you are doing anything in the kitchen. If you want to try other methods, have a look here, here and here.

Said, woman, take it slow

It’ll work itself out fine

All we need is just a little patience

Said, sugar, make it slow

And we come together fine

All we need is just a little patience

With lyrics like that it’s obvious the Gunners were hobbyist cheesemakers!

Patience… it’s a virtue, right? It shares a Latin root with the word ‘passion’ and no, not passion like we saw on Melrose Place in the 90s… the suffering kind.

I’m suffering at the moment. Today I spent several hours making the beginnings of what I hope will be a delicious camembert cheese. If I had made a cake today I would know by now whether or not my cake was a flop or a huge success and I’d know this because I’d have tried it. Maybe even eaten all of it. I haven’t eaten any of my cheese and I won’t for many, many weeks yet. It might be my finest culinary moment. It might be a biohazard. Literally. I’m suffering not knowing!

As I’ve mentioned previously I’m a Biology teacher so I have a special interest in the Science of cooking. Cheesemaking is an ancient biotechnology and the practice of making cheese predates recorded history. It probably started rather serendipitously around the time animals were domesticated, when farmers tried to store milk in a vessel made from the gut of an animal. The rennet from the gut would have caused the milk to set into curds and whey and the rest of course is history.

Hopefully soon my students will be attempting this ancient biotechnology and entering their cheeses (camembert) in a cheesemaking competition. They will be doing this in 6 stages:

• Making starter cultures
• Coagulating milk
• Cutting curd
• Hooping
• Maturing
• Wrapping

Using mostly household equipment:

In the last 24 hours I’ve completed steps 1-4 to trial the process before unleashing my students on it. The maturing of the cheese will take several weeks and during that time I will go out of my mind worrying about my cheese-babies I will document the progress of the cheese here.

I can’t share the exact recipe I followed because it’s been entrusted to me by a pro and I promised to keep it secret-squirrel but I will share the general process I followed. If you’re interested in making your own cheese there are plenty of books out there as well as several online resources where you can find recipes.

So without further ado… making camembert cheese!

Making Starter Cultures

The day before you plan on making cheese you need to make the starter culture. UHT milk is used for the starter and to 1L of UHT milk (pour out 100mL first) you add your lactic acid bacterial starter according to directions on the packet or in the recipe. Depending on the starter you may be required to just leave it overnight at room temperature or keep it in a warm water bath at a certain temperature. The bacterial starter I used was a thermophile (‘heat lover’) so I had to keep it at 38 degrees Celsius overnight. I used a water bath which I borrowed from school. Other people have used fish tank heaters, Bain maries, yoghurt makers etc for this same purpose (and throughout the process where gentle heat is required).

In the morning when you check on your starter you should be able to notice that the milk has thickened and smells sour, like natural yoghurt. This is because the bacteria convert the sugar in milk (lactose) to lactic acid. Lactic acid is responsible for the sour taste and characteristic texture of yoghurt.

Coagulating milk

A small amount of the starter cultures and a sprinkle of white mould spores are added to pasteurised but unhomogenised milk which has been gently warmed. Unhomogenised milk is available in most good supermarkets and delis e.g. Barambah organics make an unhomogenised milk as do Cooloola dairy which was recommended to me as an excellent milk for cheesemaking.

The milk is allowed to ‘ripen’ and near the end of the ripening period rennet is added. Rennet is a naturally occuring complex of enzymes produced in the stomachs of mammals to help them digest milk. The most important enzyme in rennet in terms of cheesemaking is a protease (breaks down proteins) which causes the coagulation of milk. This results in solids (curds) and liquid (whey) i.e. the stuff made popular by Little Miss Muppet!

Now if mammal stomach isn’t really your thing rest assured vegetarian rennet derived from either plants, fungi or genetically modified yeasts are available and this is what I used.

Coagulation starts occurring almost immediately after adding the rennet – the speed at which this occurred was quite a surprise!

The mixture is allowed to ’set’ for about half an hour after which the curds are cut.

Cutting the curd

Using a sharp knife the curds are cut into approximately 2cm cubes. This is done to facilitate the whey removal process by increasing the surface area of the curds (Surface Area:Volume ratio – another biological concept!). The curds are also rested, then stirred carefully a couple of times to allow sufficient whey removal.

Now this is where I think I might have gone a bit wrong… my gentle stirring was still a bit rough and my curds broke up. How adversely this will affect the taste of the final product won’t be known until it’s consumed I’m afraid… in 6 weeks or so… remember I said this was an exercise in patience? However given that  it’s the size of the curds that affects the firmness of the cheese (smaller curd cubes will produce a firmer cheese) I think it can be predicted that my cheese will be quite firm!

Hooping

The last step of the process was hooping the cheese. This involves separating the curds from the whey and placing them in a plastic ‘hoop’ which is inverted a number of times over several hours to remove the last of the whey from the curds. Even whey drainage will ensure an even shape.

The cheese is kept overnight in a humid environment and in the morning is floated in a brine (salt water + a little vinegar to acidify) solution, dried and finally kept in a plastic maturing container (a Decor brand microwave container is good) to grow a good covering of white mould which is the ‘rind’ of the camembert cheese.

So that’s where I’m up to on my cheesemaking journey. How am I feeling? Quite frankly, nervous. I’m going solo on this one having never been to a cheesemaking workshop before but I have been corresponding regularly with an industry expert which has given me some reassurance. And even if I don’t nail it this time I’m ready to give it another shot very soon. And I can because I’ve got enough microbes in my freezer to make about 30 kilos of the stuff!

One last but very important thing… hygiene and sanitation are absolutely paramount in cheesemaking. You want your cheese to be filled with the right kinds of microbes – not the bad food spoiling, food poisoning types! The recommended sanitiser for use in home cheesemaking is diluted household grade bleach (active ingredient hypochlorite). Bleach is the right stuff for the job because it doesn’t have an ongoing sanitising action i.e. it won’t kill off the good microbes in your cheese. All equipment needs to be sanitised in the bleach solution (6mL bleach per Litre) for a minimum of two minutes with the exception of anything that touches the rennet which will be boiled. This is because bleach will damage the rennet. Your hands should be sanitised before and during the cheesemaking process. Alcohol based sanitising gels are ideal.

Stay tuned for cheesemaking updates!

Want to know more or after specific recipes? These three online resources are bound to help:

• Cheeselinks – where you can purchase all your cheesemaking needs including kits for beginners and a cheesemaking recipe book. My kit came with a recipe for camembert and a heap of helpful hints!
• Home Cheesemaking – has a good step by step guide for camembert and a discussion forum attached
• Cheese Forum - several recipes listed and a  comprehensive forum for cheesemaking discussion