Avivah Werner

Category: nutrition

  • What are healthy fats?

    I think that almost everyone knows that margarine is bad for you, though most people probably don’t know just how bad.  In the kosher kitchen, women often feel that whether it’s healthy or not, they don’t know what else they can use for baking.  Others argue that the cheapness of margarine justifies its use, but I don’t agree. It is cheap – and I’m always up for a good deal – but it’s a false economy.

    By shopping carefully for the bulk of your groceries, you’ll be able to create room in your budget for the expensive high quality ingredients you can’t get cheaply.  We got rid of margarine and all so called healthy substitutes (eg. Earth Balance spread) a long time ago. The fun part is that it’s really easy and the healthy alternatives work just as well but taste better. thumb.gif

    We use butter for dairy meals (I stock up when it’s $2 lb), and coconut oil for baking for meat meals. We buy two kinds of coconut oil – a) extra virgin raw, which still has coconut flavor – because of the flavor it is harder to use in cooking/baking; b) organic but with the coconut flavor removed – I use this for all baking. I buy it by the five gallon bucket, and it’s not cheap (though it’s lots cheaper than by the little containers in the store), but I think it’s worth the price for our health – it’s a major factor of why I can now consider the baked goods we eat to be in the ‘good for us’ category.  It seems we keep going through this faster and faster all the time. 

    We use extra virgin olive oil for salads, not much else. When I roast a chicken, I save the gravy in a container in the fridge, and the fat at the top that congeals is shmaltz – great for frying veggies for a meat dish, and the gravy that congeals below the fat is a delicious addition to grains or stews. I do the same thing with lamb and beef, but I use those less often.

    Several months ago, an email friend who follows similar nutritional guidelines that I do recommended another high quality oil to me – palm oil.   I started to look into it, discovered that there are actually two kinds of palm oil – palm kernel oil, and palm fruit oil.  The palm fruit oil has a stronger flavor and color, and I was looking for something that would be a good substitute for the regular coconut oil – specifically, with a bland flavor for baking.  Palm kernel oil was the solution.  I began researching buying it in bulk quantity (it seemed pretty expensive to me to buy in the 24 oz tubs in the health food store) but didn’t see it through – the company that had it certified kosher didn’t answer their phones, and the emails I received in response to my pricing queries weren’t clear.  So I put it on the back burner.

    But then I finished my bucket of regular coconut oil, and was dismayed to find a huge price increase when I went to place my order.  So when I went to the health food store (somewhere I rarely go into), I bought several containers of palm oil.  If I hadn’t been tipped off about this by my friend, I would have walked right by it, because of the way it’s labeled.  It’s made by Spectrum, and marked as Organic All Vegetable Shortening – and to me, shortening is a word with only negative nutritional connotations.  But in spite of that, it really is just pure palm oil.   It’s pure white and flavorless, so it’s perfect for non dairy baking.  I went to the health food store on their 10% discount day, so it was a little under $7 for a 24 oz container.

    Some of you may be reading and cringing at the thought of all that saturated fat.  Doesn’t everyone know that saturated fat bad for you?  Actually, it’s not.  If you want to start learning more about fats, what’s good, what’s not, and why, start with this link: http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/index.html.  It’s very helpful in dispelling a lot of the nutritional miseducation out there surrounding fats.

    Avivah

  • Dehydrating pickled fruit

    This past autumn, I shared with you about the wonderful free fruit that we picked and preserved.  When I started canning fruit, I stuck to the basics: fruit of one kind in it’s juice, and applesauce.  But there were so many appealing looking recipes to try that I finally succumbed, wanting pantry shelves filled with all of those beautiful looking jars, and made a number of interesting looking things.

    Well, it’s several months later, and I can say that was a mistake.  We really like just plain fruit – not chutneys or pickled fruit.  Plain boring applesauce, compote, or stewed fruit.  We have hardly touched any of the other stuff.  I hate all the work that went into it being wasted, but I don’t want to compound the situation by wasting the food and not eating it, too.  And the jars are taking up space that could be taken up with something useful.  So yesterday it occurred to me that we could try to dehydrate the many quarts of pickled apples and pickled pears, and see how that turned out. 

    My son did this today, and so far, the jury is still out on how they like the dehydrated pickled fruit slices.  Only three kids so far have tasted it, and two think it’s great, one thinks it’s terrible.  I tasted it and thought they were fine – different from the plain dried apples and pears we preserved, but still tasty.  The consistency is more chewy (the others were crispy), but fine.  They would probably also be good in some kind of pie or cooked, if I wanted to do that, but I probably wouldn’t.  It’s the keeping things simple thing, again.  🙂  

    One immediate advantage is that dehydrated fruit takes a lot less space than all of those full jars – I didn’t count how many jars there were that are now empty (17 or so??), but however much it was, it will all fit into two quart sized jars by the time it’s all dried. 

    Edited to add: my son discovered that when blended up, the pickled fruit makes fantastic fruit leathers!  Now I don’t feel all that time and effort was wasted, since everyone is enjoying these so much!

    Avivah

  • The search for real sucanat

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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

    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!

    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