We bought two 25lb bags of organic popcorn for a snack. We’ve tried growing it dry farming (without watering) and it didn’t do too well. It would likely do pretty well with some light irrigation which we may do someday but for now in the garden we have switched to a sweet corn that dries out well for milling. Anyways, for now we are buying bags of popcorn as a fun snack. We try to avoid toxic food including foods laden with glyphosate which many corn products are guilty of, so we bought organic to avoid that. We ran into a problem though, the popcorn didn’t pop – it had like 20% pop rate, which is horrible. I dug around on the interwebs and found someone mention that it is likely because they were over dried. I guess they need some level of moisture in order to pop well, which these did not have. So I added about 1tsp of water per cup of overly dried popcorn and shook it up in a jar. I left them to absorb the moisture for about 18 hours and tried it out. It worked perfectly, out of 1 cup of popcorn there were 6 seeds left unpopped.
I don’t know if this is really a thing anywhere, but it probably should be. I’ve never seen “loaded popcorn” before anywhere. There is caramel popcorn, sweet kettle, spicy, ranch, powdered cheese, and things like that – but where is the gourmet smothered popcorn that you eat with a fork or spoon? I’ve seen loaded french fries, polenta style, nachos, potato skins, and things like that. So we’ve tried it a couple different ways. The way I tried first was with store bought cheese a couple years back and it was pretty good. But I just found a new style that is delicious. That is why this is being written, it’s my second time making it and I just gotta share.
There is a cheese called shankleesh which is very easy to make if you have a milking animal. It’s a very early form of cheese. If you are used to pasteurized milk you may be disgusted by the process. You either make yogurt which is the traditional way, not so gross, or make clabber which is what we do as we don’t have awesome middle eastern yogurt cultures. Clabber is taking raw milk and letting it sit at room temperature till it naturally separates. You get a yogurt like substance that floats up and the whey is at the bottom. This works best if you never refrigerate or cool the milk, you will get the best strains of bacteria at room or slightly warmer temps. The colder it is (like a refrigerator) you will be promoting the not so great cold-loving macrophages. After you have your clabber or yogurt, strain it in a cheese cloth. After about 24 hours add salt and let it sit one more day. Then you take that thicker cheese, form balls, and roll it around in a bowl of spices. I forget the traditional shankleesh spices that make up za’atar but we always just make up our own spice blend. It’s often dried onion, garlic, and random others (dill, thyme, pepper, cayenne, etc.) Let the balls air dry for a while then put them in a half-gallon or whatever sized jar and cover the cheese with olive oil. Then you let it age 1-3 months and it’s ready to eat. Leave about 1 inch of room at the top, as it ages the oil expands and it does need to be opened (or burped) once in a while because of CO2 while fermenting. One of the reasons we started making this cheese is because we don’t have our cellar yet to use as a cheese cave.
I've mentioned this book in another post, but it's worth repeating. If you want to learn more about natural cheesemaking this is the best book available as far as we've found: 'Milk Into Cheese' - by David Asher
Back to the loaded popcorn. The shankleesh cheese balls are awesome broken up and spread throughout a bowl of popcorn with the oil from the shankleesh drizzled over the top with a little extra salt. Our youngest son danced around spinning his arm around (his latest sweet move) while gobbling this up with me. It’s best eaten with a spoon in my opinion, and it’s pretty top notch. The oil left from the shankleesh is great used as a popcorn oil drizzle, as a dressing, with rice, and much more. If you have a milking animal I’d recommend playing around with it. It’s an easy cheese that doesn’t need rennet, cooking, cheese presses, or a cheese cave. An easy beginner cheese. It reminds me of feta, just a little softer.
Thought I’d share a little about the homestead and food. One of the big reasons people get into homesteading is for the food it seems. Our bull was out at a friend’s place for the last month or so, it seems their main milker is now pregnant so now it’s our turn to get our milker knocked up. Pretty funny stuff, we have a cow brothel.
I’d like to give a notice to anyone reading this blog. If anyone is viewing this on Mataroa.blog and desires to continue reading jump over to the Bear.blog or Write.as versions of this. I have nothing against Mataroa; it is a fine enough blogging platform in my view. I’ve been playing around with all three of these and have narrowed in on Bear.blog and Write.as for a couple of reasons. One is the discovery feed on Bear and the read.write.as feed on Write.as. Another reason is that the Mataroa markup language is just enough different than Bear.blog that I can’t just copy/paste it over. So with all the reformatting needing to be done it is just too much work for the very limited readers on that site. If it had the same amount of readers as the other two I would likely continue. But for my own time saving efforts I’m going to drop it. It is especially painful to edit the long posts with lots of links. Dunno if I'll delete the account anytime soon or what - but if you want to continue reading move over to the other sites linked at the bottom of this post.
Have a good one.