Our theme ingredient for the first week of the new year is olives! I played with a few ideas about what an olive-plate appetizer would be like other than just tossing some olives in a shallow bowl. :-) This is what I ended up with:
I made a fresh, young round of cheese with a ribbon of Kalmata olives, served it on green-olive and basil, rye crackers, and alongside a few oil-cured olives.
I'm going to make a separate post about the cheese, but I started it six days ago. There are some limitations on what one can do with cheese given a one-week contest, of course, but I figured it was worth giving a go. Here's a picture from last weekend of the curds draining in my sink with the blended olives:
In brief: I warmed a gallon of milk to around 35-40C (100F) and cultured it with a scoop of live yogurt and some propionic shermanii bacteria and held it there for a few hours before adding vegetable rennet, cutting the curd, letting it shrink, transferring to cheese cloth where it can drain and layering in the olives, and then pressing it in a mold for about a day. After several days of dehydrating, the cheese is as it appears here. It would have been better left for six months, but it's not bad and has a next texture, adding nuanced mouth-feel to this plate.
Then, yesterday, I made olive crackers by mixing up three cups of flour (half whole-grain rye and half all-purpose wheat), a bit of salt and sugar, with a cup of water and some olive and sesame oil. I stirred in the roughly hacked green-olive chunks after finding that many of the olives were too large to pit with the little tool I normally use for that. And I wanted some herbs for an extra layer of flavor but it had to be something that would stand up to the olive, so I used Thai basil.
After mixing it up and getting it to a manageable texture with little additions of flour, I pressed the dough out on my flour-sprinkled counter with my fingers, got it reasonably thin and then rolled it out flat. After this, it's just a matter of slicing it up a little irregularly and baking for around 20 mins at 450F.
Once the crackers were out (some were a little overdone, so I just picked the nicest ones for this), I put the plate together. I was also going to sprinkle some blossoms from another sprig of Thai basil, but my daughter needed help studying Algebra because today is her final exam, I forgot and left it like this:
This was a bigger hit than I expected. My family don't generally like "good" olives (the mild ones in a can are OK to them) but I guess being diluted by the cheese and cracker, it was just perfect. I did have to eat the cured olives all myself, but that's OK. :)