Category Archives: nutrition

The search for real sucanat

nutrition

I was planning to order a 50 pound bag of sucanat today, so that I’d have plenty in stock to tide me over for a while.  I called the supermarket that was going to order it for me, and they gave me a choice of two kinds of sucanat.  Because I didn’t want to order the wrong one – I only want the true unprocessed sugar cane juice in granular form – I called the bulk supplier for the supermarket to ask about it.  The representative was very helpful and read me the ingredients on the packaging of each, which let me know that what was being sold as ‘natural sucanat’ is basically sugar with molasses added in, and it’s the organic sucanat that I’ve been buying in smaller amounts all this time (from Wholesome Sweeteners).

BUT – she told me they haven’t had received any shipments of it for months!  And they have no idea why they haven’t been getting it, or when they will get it.  This is a massive food bulk food distributor that supplies most of the health food stores within a several state radius, and I was quite dismayed to hear this.  Sucanat is the main sweetener that I like to use for baking, and I don’t know what I’ll use if I can’t find this that nutritionally will be as good, and I have less than ten pounds left.

So off I went on a search at my local health food store for sucanat.  No luck.  the people working there had never even heard of it!  I did find turbinado sugar, but wanted to research it before buying it, since most of the so called healthy sweeteners are heavily processed.  Many people say that rapadura, sucanat, turbinado, and demerara are interchangeable, but nutritionally there are significant differences.  So I went home and did some research to clarify this for myself, since it’s been a while since I looked into it all and the details are fuzzy.

As expected, raw sugar and turbinado are basically the same thing, and I don’t want to use either of them.  Even looking for sucanat can be misleading (as I personally learned this morning) since some things are labeled as sucanat but are basically glorified brown sugar.  The easiest way to tell if you’re getting the good stuff is to just look at it – if it’s grainy granules, then it’s rapadura or sucanat, and if it’s crystalline, then it’s  what I want to avoid.

So tomorrow I’m going to make some more calls and find out what local stores have rapadura, as well as if it’s possible to buy it in bulk.

Avivah

Making fruit leather

dehydrating, food preservation

These past several days, a couple of my boys have been motivated to make fruit leather and dried fruit.  Since we got the dehydrator, dehydrating has been the hobby of my oldest son, but this week, my 9.5 year old got involved as well.  He was feeling like doing something one afternoon, and asked if I would mind if he dehydrated apple slices.

Mind?!?  No, not at all.  I love when my kids do the work and think that I’m such a nice mother for letting them do it.  It’s a good strategy, don’t you think?  🙂  I actually needed bananas dried more than apples, but he wanted to do apples, so I agreed.  These apples are such an amazing snack when they’re dried (they’re the Honey Crisps I told you about before) – they become apple chips, with a very concentrated flavor. 

He also did a few trays of banana chips at the same time – they come out with a leathery consistency.  Also very tasty, but hard to compete with the apple chips. 

My ds15 is the fruit leather expert around here. This week I had about a case of bananas that I bought a couple of weeks ago that was getting very ripe.  We discovered the first time he made fruit leather that bananas are an important ingredient.  It adds a thickness to the texture, and a natural sweetness that goes well with other flavors.  I suppose you could use other things, too, but when he made plain plum fruit leathers, the consistency wasn’t smooth and they cracked.  So to use up the bananas before they went bad, he made plain banana, banana-orange, and banana-orange-apple fruit leathers.  He’s found a nice way to package them – he puts them between two pieces of parchment paper, cuts them into equal size pieces with a scissor, and then stacks them together before bagging them. 

Last night I asked him if he would be able to whip up another batch before he went to sleep, so we could get the last of the bananas out of the way before Shabbos (they need  about 15 hours to dehydrate, so we turn the dehydrator on before we got to sleep).  Even though it was late and he was planning to go to bed, he agreed – he’s such a good kid.  He knows that he could say no to something like this.  There are times I tell my kids to do things, and I expect it done without complaints or argument, but then there are times that I ask them, and that means that a yes or no is equally fine.  He whizzed up a bunch of bananas and some apple in the food processor, so it was pretty quick, especially for him since he’s got the process down.  We didn’t have this processor when he made the first batches a few weeks ago, so this definitely makes the mashing and preparing process faster and simpler. 

Oh – to do this, we spread the fruit mixture on special paraflex sheets that we purchased when we bought the dehydrator. I think you could probably fit pieces of parchment paper over the regular dehydrator rack and it would work fine, but I haven’t tried it so I can’t vouch for how comparable the results are to the paraflex sheets.

Avivah

Alternatives to sugar

Homemaking, nutrition

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t use any sweeteners of any kind for myself, and for my family I absolutely avoid white sugar.  So I’ve been asked a number of times, what sweeteners do I use, and why?

 I try not to use many sweeteners, even those that are healthier and have nutritional value, because I think that sweeteners are meant to be used in small amounts.  What I use the most of is sucanat – this is dehydrated cane sugar juice.  It is rich in minerals, and is very easy to use as a substitute for sugar in baking.  It’s granular and can be used in equal amounts and in the same way.  This is pricier than white sugar (I pay over $1.50 a pound, but that’s because I buy in bulk – usually it would be more), but it’s still the least expensive of the alternatives.

The next thing I buy is honey.  Raw honey is best, and I’m sometimes in an area where I can buy this at a price that is similar to regular honey, so that’s what I get then.  But generally I buy a large container of regular honey – 12 pounds for a little over $30.  I use this mostly for sweetener for teas (right now I’m using it a lot of homemade cough syrup to alleviate a cough that my littlest ones picked up – a couple of cloves of garlic, sliced into a container with equal amounts of raw apple cider vinegar and honey, the garlic flavor steeps into the mixture, they don’t eat the pieces – I give a spoonful every couple of hours). 

I also use agave nectar. I don’t use a bunch of this, but my kids can put it on pancakes, in plain yogurt for breakfast,  etc.  I bought a couple of kinds of molasses, blackstrap and regular, thinking they would be good to use for baking, but this wasn’t a hit in our family.  Consequently, they don’t get used often unless a recipe specifically calls for it.  Stevia is helpful to add sweetness to something, but is used in very tiny amounts.  I bought a small container of this a year ago and have hardly used it so far, so this is something I have around but can’t give many useful suggestions for what to do with it. 

I don’t use maple syrup, only because of the expense.  I have date syrup that someone in Israel brought, but have used it sparingly – probably because I know we can’t get it, so I never want to use it!  But nutritionally, they are both excellent.

There are those who will say that using alternative sweeteners are too expensive, but we’re able to include these regularly instead of turning to cheap and unhealthy white sugar because I’m frugal in other areas of my budget.  This is an area of frugality that is often overlooked – frugality isn’t about doing without, but allotting your resources in a way that is meaningful for you, and creating ‘space’ financially to do what is most important for you.

Avivah  

Kashering used glass jars

canning, food preservation

Several weeks ago, I got 16 dozen free canning jars, most of them quart sized.  I was thrilled, since this is the size I use the most often, and you can never have too many canning jars – especially when they are free!  Even if you can find them in the stores, they are pretty expensive and it takes quite a while to amortize that cost.

Some of you have asked me, knowing that I keep kosher, how I am able to use jars that may have been used for non-kosher food.  Firstly, glass has a status that is different from let’s say, china or plastic.   This is a very important factor, the most important factor.  We were told that we could kasher (the term for making kosher) these used jars after making sure they were spotlessly clean, regardless of what they had been used for, by doing hagolah (boiling).  They then have to be toiveled (ritually immersed) and can be used without any further steps.

Because some of you have asked your rabbis and were told it wasn’t permissible to use second hand jars, you wanted to know who I asked.  I don’t generally share this kind of info, because I think everyone has to ask their own rabbinical authorities who they know and trust.  But because I don’t want people to think I’m relying on lenient interpretations of Jewish law which makes it possible for me to get inexpensive jars but puts it out of their budget, I’ll share that we asked Rabbi Moshe Heinneman of the Star K in Baltimore, and this was what he told us to do. Anyone who knows him knows that he is not lenient at all, and is very, very knowledgeable about Jewish law and particularly the field of kashrus. 

So this is what I’ve been doing today, kashering dozens of glass jars.   I’m satisfied with the number that I finished today, and will toivel them tomorrow.  It’s more work to do them all at once in some ways, but makes keeping track of what state of usability each box of jars are much easier!  I might have finished kashering all of them before going to sleep tonight, which would have been very nice, but I have some late night canning to do. 

This afternoon I took several packages of turkey pieces from the freezer to make room after ordering a bunch of chicken wings  (they’ll be here tomorrow).  At 99 cents a pound and with kosher chicken prices being what they are, I couldn’t not get some, right?  I ordered 40 lb (using all but the last dollar I had left in the food budget until the 15th :)) and will pick it up tomorrow.  Even though canning the turkey pieces means more work for me now, I really appreciate having the ability to take advantage of sales that I would have passed on for lack of space in the past.  I chose to can the turkey pieces instead of chicken wings, because the pieces are meant to be stewed or sauteed, so the canning process is perfect for them.  Canned chicken wings didn’t sound appetizing to me, though. 🙂

Avivah

Boosting immune function for kids

home remedies, nutrition

Although I have the ability to, I don’t do much tracking of my blog traffic.  I periodically glance at the numbers, but since my intent when starting to blog is share things I’ve found helpful with other moms, whether the numbers are staggeringly huge or staggeringly small, as long as someone is helped by something, then to me it’s worth my time here.

Sometimes I wonder, though, about when I see huge spikes in traffic, like today, how did you find this blog?  There are currently blog readers from all over the U.S., as well as the U.K, Canada, Israel, Brazil, Colombia, and Australia – isn’t that nice?  I don’t know how people find their way here, but however it happens, it’s nice to have you all there! 

With the winter quickly approaching, if not already here for most of us, I thought you might find it helpful if I shared some ways to boost immune funtion for children.  Winter too often is a time of non stop visits to doctors, sniffles, coughs, if not worse.  We can’t always ward off everything, but there are ways to strengthen our children’s systems so that they are less susceptible, or if they do catch something, to help it run its course faster or for a shorter intensity.

There are two aspects to this: what you do before your child is ill, and what you do once his is feeling unwell.  The biggest thing I think a parent as regards to prevention is to boost the nutritional quality of the child’s diet, and limit sugar consumption.  Sugar lowers the immune function for something like thirty minutes after eating it, and is connected to a host of other bad things.  Along with this I’d suggest taking out as many artificial preservatives and additives that you can.  None of these do anything positive for your health. 

Here are some more specific suggestions that we’ve found helpful:

Chicken soup – this isn’t just an old wive’s tale – it’s been tested in laboratories and found that there’s a natural penicillin like quality about chicken soup.  Not only does it taste great, it’s warm and soothing, and makes a person pychologically feel better after drinking it.  It’s also a great way to get some solid nutrients into a child who doesn’t feel like eating anything. 

Echinacea – echinacea is great to take when you’re feeling unwell, but shouldn’t be used as an ongoing health support.  I prefer not to use chewables because of the sugar content, but I do use the echinacea leaves in the Supertonic tincture I make (look in recipes category if you missed it and are interested), and have more loose leaves to brew into a tea if I feel it would be helpful. 

Liquid Advantage concentrate – grapefruit seed extract – I have a friend who swears by this – she gives her daughter four drops every morning before she goes to school.  She told me that whenever she forgets it, her daughter gets sick.  I have another friend who is extremely knowledgeable about natural healing, who also uses this all the time – when she sent her daughter to stay with us for a couple of days several years ago, she sent along a bottle of this with her.  The taste is pretty strong (horrible, my kids would say :)) so either drink it with some juice or be prepared to kill the flavor left in your mouth with a cracker or something like it afterwards. 

Vitamin C – I prefer to use sodium ascorbate (SA), and since almost all of the kids (and adults) vitamin c tablets or chewables are in a different form I don’t use them.  I buy the powdered form and put it in some juice for them.  They are best taken with bioflavanoids for ideal absorption, but my kids don’t like the look or taste of the powdered bioflavanoids that I bought (neither do I!) so the bioflavanoids have ended up sitting in my cabinet, mostly unused.  I use very large doses of SA as soon as one of the kids is feeling under the weather, but don’t use it much otherwise.  There’s no problem with taking it daily, it’s just that I don’t do it. 

Garlic – I sometimes think the smell alone of garlic could drive away germs, but seriously, it’s a powerful antibiotic and can be easily used in cooking to a health advantage.  It can be added to chicken soup, roasted, or sauteed, but is most potent eaten raw – chopped up and added to a salad or some yogurt is the easiest thing (I remember having yogurt, raw chopped garlic, and honey when I was a kid).  I have to confess that although I like the taste and smell of garlic, once it’s on my child’s breath I can’t stand it.  I literally have to turn my head away when they come too close to me.  I would use this with caution only as a point of sensitivity to those around you.  So around here, I stick to cooked garlic, and again, it’s one of the Supertonic ingredients. 

Apple cider vinegar – by this, I only mean raw, and the only one I know of that fits the bill is Bragg’s.  You can find it in your local health food store, and I’ve seen it recommened for a variety of things.  A tablespoon of this vinegar added to a warm cup of water with a tablespoon of honey, first thing in the morning, is the perfect way to take it. 

Cod liver oil – this is something that has been used for many generations, and there’s a good reason for it!  Fish oil is also good, but cod liver oil is the best.

Probiotics – if your child has been on antibiotics at any point, it’s killed some of the beneficial bacteria in the gut along with whatever the disease killing bacteria there was.  Probiotics are crucial for healthy immune systems – yogurt and kefir are great sources and are easily purchased in the store.  Make sure it says it has acidophilus in it. 

Many moms are scrupulous about hand washing and keeping their kids out of germy places.  I’m not one of them.  Being homeschoolers, they aren’t exposed on a daily basis to all the stuff kids in schools are, but even before we homeschooled, our kids were sick much, much less than their friends.  If someone tells me before a playdate that their child or one of the child’s siblings has a cold, it usually wouldn’t concern me enough to keep the kids from playing with him.  Usually – unless I already saw that one of our kids was feeling sick, in which case I wouldn’t be rushing to have my kids playing with other children and spreading germs.  I’m not picky about others spreading it to me, but I do try to be careful about not spreading anything to others. 

I think that anti-bacterial cleansers and hand wipes sound like a better idea than they are, and don’t use them.  We need to have a certain amount of germs in our lives, or we wouldn’t have a chance to develop immunity!  I remember reading several years ago that there was a link between asthma and kids growing up in very sterile environments – to which I laughed and said that wouldn’t be a problem in our home!

By the way, all of these are helpful for adults, too!  I hope some of these suggestions give you a starting point for this winter.   May this be a winter of health for us all!

Avivah

Dehydrating herbs

dehydrating, food preservation

Last week, I finally turned my attention to the herbs that were still waiting to be harvested from my garden.  Honestly, I am such an irresponsible gardener – I plant things like herbs with no plan how to use them, no idea when to harvest them, and just let them sit there for weeks.  After doing some reading on herbal healing these last couple of weeks, I was inspired to pick them, since I realized that unbeknownst to me, I had medicinal herbs growing right in my garden all this time!  It’s so true what Hippocrates said, about, “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food” – particularly with herbs, they are one and the same.  I got them picked just in time – later that night, we had our first snow.

All you really have to do to dry herbs is tie them together loosely and hang them upside down, but with eight kids home all day, I have enough visual clutter I’m constantly trying to keep at bay without having little bundles all around my kitchen, dropping little pieces all over my floor and counter!  Since I now that I have a dehydrator, I have a neater solution!

The Excalibur dehydrators come with a setting for drying herbs, and after instructing the child picking the herbs to be very careful to keep them all separate, I asked another child to rinse them off and put them in the dehydrator.  Sometimes I kick myself for forgetting to give a child a reminder that would have saved time and aggravation, and the next day was one of those days.  Because I neglected to mention to the child putting the herbs in the dehydrator that each kind should go on its own shelf – it seemed self explanatory to me, but that’s because I’m an adult.  🙂

So when I removed everything from the dehydrator, I saw four or five kinds of green leafy herbs mixed together on the trays.  Do you know how similar herbs look when they’re dried to the untrained (read: my) eyes?!  Anyway, we sorted them through as best as we could, leaving all of those that we couldn’t figure out in a pile, and after crushing that pile, called it Italian herb blend.  🙂

It wasn’t a huge amount of spices, but it’s nice to have our own organically grown parsley, basil, thyme, oregano, and sage on hand!

Avivah

Natural wart remedies

home remedies, nutrition

I mentioned in passing a couple of weeks ago that I bought thuja, a homeopathic wart remedy, because my 2.5 year old has several very small warts that I wanted to take care of.  But thuja actually wasn’t my first choice of remedies; it was more like a back up because I ran out of what I really wanted to use.

I’ve read a number of idea to take care of warts, and they all seem to be based on the same principle.  Cover the wart with the substance of your choice, cover it with a cotton ball or bandaid, and repeat daily until wart is gone.  The ideas I’ve seen suggested range from those I wouldn’t be interested in using – cover it with nail polish or duct tape (ouch!), to other ideas that seem like much better options.  They include covering the wart with: oil from vitamin E caps, raw apple cider vinegar, or a slice of cut onion.  But what I used and was very impressed by was vitamin C, in the form of powdered sodium ascorbate. 

We made a paste of the powder with a tiny bit of water, covered two warts with it to test it, and then covered it with a bandaid.  That night, when we peeled the bandaid away, the warts were almost entirely gone!  It was really amazing.  Okay, they weren’t huge warts, but they were warts, and I didn’t expect anything that fast.  One more application and they would have been entirely gone.  But we used the last scrapings of sodium ascorbate (SA) that we had to do this (and I don’t recommend using the commonly found form of vitamin C, citric acid- I think it would be too acidic), and since I buy the SA online, I knew I couldn’t just run out and buy more.  (I buy the medical grade sodium ascorbate from Bronson Lab, in the kilo container – I don’t know if they have smaller containers or not.)  Hence my purchase of the thuja. 

When I was about eight years old, I had a wart on my foot, and my mother got rid of it by applying nightly poultices of hot cornmeal.  I don’t know where she got the idea from – I thought she told me years ago that she saw it in Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss, but when I looked it up there recently, I didn’t see it.  Anyway, wherever she got it from, it worked.  I seem to remember that she heated the cornmeal with some water, until it was very hot, and then put it inside a bag.  She put a towel over my foot, then put the hot cornmeal poultice over the towel (it would have burnt the skin without the towel there), then covered it with a towel again.  She left it on for a few minutes, until it started cooling down, I think.  Amazing how so many years later I can remember it.  Anyway, I don’t remember how many applications it took, but the wart disappeared and there’s absolutely no sign to show there was ever anything there. 

On the other hand, my sister had warts when she was about ten or eleven, and used over the counter wart medicine which was supposed to burn it off; it was painful for her to use.  I remember it leaving white marks on her skin, and after it all, the warts came back.  I definitely would try any and all of the above natural remedies before using any over the counter wart medication.

Believe it or not, I keep forgetting to order the sodium ascorbate, which is an important anti-cold ingredient around here – I must order some more!

Avivah

Made mozzarella today!

cheesemaking, food preservation, Homeschooling

This morning my 13 year old daughter made cheese for science.  :))  Gotta love the fun and flexibility of homeschooling!

She actually tried to make it yesterday afternoon, but I didn’t yet  have citric acid, and I told her to use lemon juice instead.  Generally the principle I follow is to make something the first time the way the recipe is written and only adapt after that.  I should have stuck to that yesterday, because the cheese never curdled.  LOL – it was a good way to learn that there’s a reason for each ingredient in cheese making.

But no harm done, because she used the same milk this morning for another try at mozzarella, and this time was immediately successful!  All of the other kids were crowding around to watch her (it’s good the baby and toddler were napping or she’d never have been able to move), and I told the other kids that anyone else who wants to make cheese can have their own turn to make a batch, too.  She even braided it – it looked really nice.  We had fresh cheese for lunch immediately when she finished – there was no way kids were going to wait after watching and salivating over it.  🙂 

Then she used the whey to make mysost, a Scandinavian whey cheese.  This turned out well in all regards but one – it was much too salty.  That was because she had added extra salt to the whey when she was dipping the mozzarella cheese in it, because she wanted it to have it be more flavorful than it was initially.  And when the salted whey was boiled down to make the mysost, the saltiness became too intense. 

But as I always tell my kids, making mistakes is part of learning, so now we’ve learned not to add more salt to the whey if we want to use it for something else afterwards.  Even if we hadn’t wanted to make whey cheese, we would have kept it to use as an acidic medium for soaking oats (to break down the phytic acid), so I still wouldn’t want it to be salty.

By the way, the recipes we’re using are from a book called Home Cheese Making, by Ricki Carroll – there are 75 recipes of all sorts and we’re planning to just follow the recipes.  We were able to borrow it from the library, so I suggest you check there before rushing to buy any books if you’re interested in learning about cheese making. 

Avivah

Watching the rennet disappear!

cheesemaking, food preservation

Here’s the amazing story of how my fifteen available bottles of rennet are getting quickly snapped up since just yesterday. 

So you already know that I bought that big bottle of rennet, and my hope was to recoup my costs by selling small bottles to fifteen other families.  When I initially placed my rennet order, I was really hoping that I wouldn’t be forced to take a big loss on it.  Yes, I wanted to make cheese, but if I end up in a year having to throw away 15/16s of a container because I couldn’t use it (the rennet is perishable), then that’s not only wasteful, but very expensive cheese!

Anyway, I posted on a parenting list I’m on about it, and three people said they were interested, which was a good start, since that was four or five bottles between them all.  But it still left eleven bottles.  Today I called a couple of women locally who I thought would be interested (we’ve discussed raw milk and gardening in the past), and they both wanted a bottle.  Not only that – here’s the amazing thing: one of the women is hosting a cheese making workshop in her home this Sunday, and has spent the last few weeks researching all of the things I told you about in my last post.  She’s not giving the class, but is the one organizing it all, and is the one responsible to get hold of kosher cheese making supplies for this workshop.  She has literally been one step behind me all this time (she called the OU less than three hours after I called, and the rabbi asked her, “Didn’t I just speak to you about a little while ago?”  LOL – I’m not surprised he thought it was me again, since it sounded like he had never been asked about the products I was asking him about).

 So she’s buying some for herself, and told me that probably the other 4 or 5 women who keep kosher who are attending might be interested in getting some, too, and offered to make them available at her workshop and collect money.  I’m so amazed by how G-d makes everything happening  – the timing is so incredible!   Right now I have 8 or 9 bottles spoken for, and am hopeful that Sunday the rest of the bottles will be sold.  When that happens, all of my costs will be recouped (it’s not a moneymaking venture – I’m selling them at what it cost me), all within a few days of first making the rennet available!  Isn’t G-d’s timing amazing?

Avivah

Kosher cheesemaking supplies

cheesemaking, food preservation

I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching what is needed for cheesemaking, as well as where to buy the supplies for kosher cheesemaking, which is a lot more involved.  So I thought I’d share it with you since if any of you are interested, it will save you hours of research.  🙂

Firstly, you need rennet.  Most rennet are made from animal sources, but there are vegetarian sources of rennet.  However, almost none of these are kosher.  I finally found one source of certified kosher liquid rennet, Chr. Hansen in WI, but they sell only to large companies.  The company I found that sells this particular rennet, Chymax Extra, was Kelley Supply.  However, Kelley Supply only sells in industrial sizes, and though I found a company that buys large containers of this rennet from Kelley and repackages it for their customers, there’s no kosher supervision on the small containers that they send out.  I called that company (New England Cheesemaking Supply) to speak to them in detail about their repackaging process, hoping that there would be some way we could use the repackaged smaller container of rennet.  No luck – rennet has the status in kosher laws of not being nullified to the sixtieth (botel b’shishim), and because they also repackage animal rennets there, there’s no way to know that you’re getting something untainted.  The only remaining solution that I could see was to order the smallest industrial container size available (enough for over 1000 gallons of milk), and hope that I could afterwards find others to buy some of the rennet from me.

The next thing is bacterial starters, mesophilic and thermophilic.  I was really hoping this wouldn’t need kosher certification because I was already tired of the researching process, but no luck – it definitely does.  After calling the OU to speak to them, I was given the source of the only OU certified starter products in the US – DSM Food Specialties.  I wasn’t having fun trying to get hold of them – they are an extremely huge company, and as I called back for the I don’t know how many-eth time trying to get someone to speak to, I said to my kids, “This is why no one makes kosher cheese on their own; it’s just too hard to get the kashrus information and supplies.”  BUT -I did more research, and found a source of OU certified bacterial starters, and the owner, Cathy Potter, with whom I spoke, was an absolute pleasure to deal with.  http://www.dairyconnection.com/cultures.htm  Not all of their starters are kosher, just those in the MM and MA line, marked EZAL – these come in packages each marked with OU certification.

I wanted to order both thermophilic and mesophilic starters, since different recipes call for different ingredients.  I wouldn’t have known that there are two different thermophilic starters, from the TA and LH series, or what the purpose of them was.  Fortunately Cathy isn’t a sales representative impatiently waiting for you to quickly tell them your order so they can get off the phone, and when she asked what kind of cheeses I wanted to make, she pointed me in the right direction and gave me helpful information.  I ordered one of each – when making Italian cheeses, you use a mixture of both, in a ratio of 2 parts TA: 1 part LH.  I was also told that The New England Cheesemaking Company sells these with kosher certification, but after my first conversation with them several months ago and a very unhelpful representative, I didn’t feel like calling back to go through more questions about the starters.

Citric acid – I was able to buy this in the regular supermarket, also labeled as sour salt.  I happened to get mine by Liebers, but probably most spice companies carry this.

Calcium chloride – I was so happy to find something on the list that didn’t need kosher certification, and that was this.  I’ll pick this up tomorrow at a small pharmacy near the post office.

Lipase powder – of course I didn’t realize that I needed this until after I did all of my other research.  🙂  This also needs kosher certification, and I believe that The Dairy Connection sells this also; I’m going to call first thing in the morning and check this.  If they have it, I’ll ask them to tack it onto my order (I ordered the starters this afternoon and she told me would go out tomorrow so hopefully that will work).   ***Update – I called them about this, and the certification on the lipase is a Tablet K, which we don’t use.  I’m going to skip buying this – it doesn’t affect the consistency of the cheese, just the flavor.

Avivah