Strong Cheese Accident

There's already a lot of weird stuff in my fridge, so why not add a jar of fresh homemade cheese marinated in ramps and cider? Right, no reason not to, at all.

I've been thinking quite a bit recently about blogs that rely on "adapted" recipes from other sources, about originality and creativity in food writing and blogging, and shaping influences, inspirations; about where ideas come from and how to properly acknowledge our debts and the contributions of others to our own development.  I'm far from sorting it all out, but I think that this little experiment, no matter how it turns out, is a great example of how a whole slew of sources and influences, from across continents and even centuries (the fromage fort method being very, very old, indeed), filtered through a curious (and not very organized) mind, might produce something which, while not new in any sense, may turn out to be unique in its own way.  That's what I love about food, and the diverse community of people who are compelled, perhaps obsessed, by it.

 My kitchen processes seem to be bouncing off accidents these days, from burnt honey to abandoned cheese. Home cheese making isn't difficult, I keep hearing, and I believe it. I'm sure it's just like smoking meat and fish, or fermenting sauerkraut: ridiculously easy when you know how it works and have done it a few times; incredibly daunting when you're looking from the outside and have never done it before. Plus, it's a commitment. You turn milk into curds and whey, and then you have to deal with the product. And while I knew that milk is mostly whey and just a wee bit of curd, I wasn't quite prepared to confront the reality of that. It's like boiling maple sap down for syrup. You can read and perfectly well process the fact that it takes around 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup, but until you've done it, you can't possibly understand what's involved in getting rid of all that water.

Well, backing up a bit: I finally made cheese, the very most basic kind, simple set curds that we know from Indian cooking as paneer. I got the method from Tricia Cornell's nifty book Eat More Vegetables .  You just  bring some milk up to a simmer, stir in something acidic, and the solids congeal and separate from the liquid whey.  Pour the results through cheesecloth, which catches the solids.  Let that drain well, and you have basic white cheese.  From one quart of milk I got a half cup of cheese and 3 1/2 cups of whey.  I know there are things you can do with whey, from using it as liquid in pasta making to feeding it to your hogs.  I have no hogs, and was going out of town the next day.  I tossed the whey, feeling as if I was dumping perfectly good milk down the drain.  If any of you have clever uses for whey, I'd love to hear about them.

So, from my beautiful quart of whole raw milk I now had this rather paltry little sack of cheese, and obviously this swap which on one's first go seems like a pretty lousy deal is just something you have to get past if you want to make cheese.  Yes, I'm aware that milk is a liquid, and yes, at an intellectual level I realize that I shouldn't have expected a quart of milk to magically turn into a quart of cheese.  Just the same....  Sorry, don't mean to belabor the point.

But there's the set-up:  quart of delicious milk becomes sad-looking tiny sack of cheese, going out of town--bung it in the fridge, deal with it later.  And so today is later.  I peeled the cheese out of the cheesecloth.  It was a bit yellowed on the outside, and the cheesecloth stuck.  The texture was chalky, and it tasted like...nothing.  I was becoming depressed, and then, a lightbulb!

Dimly, from the addled recesses of my still somewhat jet-lagged mind, I recalled a preparation I'd been meaning to try, a variation on a marinated goat cheese recipe (which itself was a variation on the French fromage fort, or strong cheese) that I'd seen in one of Madeleine Kamman's books, In Madeleine's Kitchen .  My thought upon reading that recipe a while back was to try using Wisconsin white cheese curds, dry apple cider, and ramps in place of the goat cheese, white wine, and leeks that Madeleine uses.  And now I had my own homemade cheese to sub for the cheese curds--except, when it came down to it, I didn't have enough homemade cheese to fill even a very small jar, so I added an equal weight of cheese curds to fill it out.

The idea here is sort of double-fermented, or ultra-washed rind, cheese.  As Madeleine notes, the usual way to do this is to make a purée of leftover bits of cheese, along with wine, garlic, maybe some herbs, and let that sit in a crock until it becomes nice and...aromatic.  I wrote about that method here.  I can't really call this a recipe, this impromptu assemblage, but here's what I had:

2 ounces each fresh homemade cheese (unsalted) and white cheese curds, in 1/2-3/4-inch cubes
2 plump ramp bulbs, sliced thin
3/4 cup dry hard apple cider
2 generous pinches coarse salt
about 12 whole black peppercorns
1 sprig fresh tarragon
1 tablespoon sunflower oil

I combined the ramps, peppercorns, and cider in a small saucepan, brought it to a boil, and simmered for a minute.  When it was cool I added it to the cheese, along with the salt.  I spooned this mixture into a small jar, making sure the cheese was covered with rampy cider.  Then add the oil, put on the lid, shake it up, put it away in the fridge for a while.  Madeleine says to leave the marinated goat cheeses for three months.   I think I'll check mine in a week or so, and report back.

Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Cream of the Cream of the Trout of the 'Shrooms

Not to say that stream-caught brown trout, foraged morels, and farmers market asparagus couldn't have held their own quite ably on the dinner plate, but what took our Sunday night supper over the top was the cream.  Some of you are smacking your lips and murmuring, Amen, brother, amen, solemnly, and to you I need say no more than, "Bon appétit."  Others of you are cringing a little, but still eager to hear more, repelled by all that fat, cholesterol, artery-clogging stuff, and yet mmmm that does really look pretty good, but no, I couldn't....  To you people, let me me say a few words.

Cream is beautiful.  Do not fear it.  The reflexive revulsion that many people experience when they hear the words "cream sauce" is, for the most part, quite justifiable.  Whether it has its source in the gut-busting, gaggingly rich sauces that used to characterize classic French cooking, or their abominable ersatzes made with canned "cream of..." soups, the aversion to cream sauce often has a real and understandable basis.  But please note that I am not talking about cream sauce, a heavily reduced, butter-laden concoction that leaves you feeling bloated after just a couple of teaspoons.  No, I am talking cream, sweet gold from green meadows, the pure essence of pristine pastures, a gift from our gracious grazers.... Eh.  Right.  Sorry.  Let's try that again.

Cream is beautiful.  It is a wonderful ingredient, and when used properly--which usually means sparingly--it brings a quality to cooking that can be achieved in no other way.  Sure, you can blend some potato into your lo-cal soup, or achieve a creamish texture to a sauce via a flour roux or cornstarch, but in no case will the result be creamy.  For that, you need cream. (Cedar Summit cream is the best around, though available only in the Twin Cities area.  But the small-scale dairy movement is growing (is that an oxymoron?), so perhaps there's an excellent small dairy in your area.)

Because my cookbook doesn't shirk from employing cream, cheese, and excellent bacon in its recipes, I think some people have assumed that I'm a proponent of what we might call "The New Gluttony."  That's the approach to food that champions low-brow, high-fat eating as exemplified by "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives," "Man V. Food", and the like.  I'm brand new to pay TV, since we had to get a dish to get any television at all out here in the country, and I'm finding what passes for food programming, well, pretty appalling.  Why people keep tuning in to watch Guy Fieri shove yet another burger or piece of fried chicken into his plump, shiny face is beyond me, but there you go.  Obviously it sells, and I'm just an unknown food blogger with an oddball cookbook, so I should just shut up about it.  I won't even mention Paula Deen or Sandra Lee (whoops...), but the non-stop glorification of two-pound bacon cheeseburgers, doormat-sized pizzas, grease-soaked breakfast platters that would feed a Chinese family of eight for a week, at a time when roughly a third of the American public is clinically obese, that percentage expected to rise to over 40 percent in the next few years, well, where is your shame, you peddlers of slow, oily death, where, I ask is...your...shame?

Uh, so, where was I?  Oh yeah, I was telling  you to eat more cream.  Well, the point I was weaving towards was that while a lot of my recipes do call for cream, they rarely use more than a half a cup, nor do I reach for that bottle of liquid deliciousness more than once or twice a week.  Same thing with the bacon.  I smoke bacon three or four times a year, and do four pounds or so each time, but let's estimate on the high side and say that this household of two consumes 20 pounds of bacon a year.  That's ten pounds per person per year, or 13.33 ounces per month, or 3.33 ounces per week, less than a quarter pound--on the very high end.  I had bacon for breakfast this morning, by the way, from a batch I smoked up yesterday.  My day is off to a good start.

But I wonder if home-smoked bacon on sourdough wheatberry bread for breakfast can be linked to high levels of digressiveness.  What is wonderful about cream is that is makes dishes taste, yes, creamy.  But also, it brings flavors together in marvelous ways.  Using a couple examples from my book:  in Summer Lake Trout Chowder the cream--all of three tablespoons for two generous servings--marries the flavors of fresh and smoked trout and aromatic herbs and vegetables, and gives the broth a hint of richness that makes the dish; in Farmers Market Confetti Vegetable Sauce for pasta, a quarter-cup of cream in a dish that serves four enriches the broth that coats a market vegetable medley that would just be too...vegetal without it, and then brings together sauce and pasta, as well (yes, there's a little cheese on top, but cheese is another super flavor carrier that I use often and sparingly).

The trout dish served up here as an example of how large a flavor impact a little cream can have was inspired by one of Jacques Pépin's lesser known books, but one I reach for all the time: A French Chef Cooks at Home.  A French chef cooks at home rather differently from how you and I do, unless your daily menus run to dishes like Canard Montmorency or Cervelles de Veau Provencale, but it also has simpler dishes, such as Truites Grillées à la Crème--broiled trout with cream.

I usually do this on the grill, as Jacques suggests, but Sunday evening was rainy and blustery, and the broiler had to stand in for the grill.  Thanks to a little cream and a few morels, it did so admirably (and it kind of took me back a few years--why stop the digressions now?--because when I was a kid, broiling was one of my family's main ways of cooking.  We broiled everything, chicken, steaks, pork chops, bacon--those two aluminum broiler pans, one big, one small, scorched and dented from years of service, would go in a shrine if I had them here today.  My mom would broil chicken wings so hard, you could eat the whole thing, bones and all...).

Looking more closely at Jacques's recipe, I see that what I did was quite different from the original, where the trout is grilled over charcoal (back in 1975 Jacques was advocating for real wood charcoal over briquets), then placed "in a nice row in a gratin dish," the cream poured over, brought to a simmer, then served.  I did mine entirely under the broiler.  In the hopes of heading off further deviations, I revert to recipe style:

Broiled Trout and Morels in Cream
serves two

2  10-11" trout, brown, brook, or rainbow, bone in
2 tablespoons butter, divided
3 ounces fresh morels, quartered the long way (oysters, chanterelles, or hedgehogs would also be good)
1/4 cup dry white wine or dry vermouth
1/3 to 1/2 cup cream
salt and pepper

Make a couple of diagonal slashes in each side of the trout to help them cook more evenly and take up more of the sauce.  Season the trout with salt and pepper inside and out.  Heat your broiler with the rack six inches or so below the heat source--not too close.  Place 1 tablespoon of butter in a gratin or baking dish, and place this in the oven just long enough to melt the butter.  Remove the pan from the oven and add the trout to it, turning them to coat with butter.  Place the pan under the broiler and cook for 2 minutes on each side, until the skin starts to blister.

While the trout is cooking, prepare the morels:  heat the remaining 1 tablespoon of butter in a small sauté pan and when it is hot add the morels and a pinch of salt.  Cook over medium high for a couple of minutes, until the morels give off some liquid, shrink, and just start to brown.  Remove them from the pan and set aside.  Deglaze the pan with the white wine or vermouth.

Remove the trout pan from the oven once the trout are brown on both sides.  Add the morels and deglazing liquid.  Pour about half the cream over the trout, and toss the morels in it.  Place the pan back under the broiler and cook for a minute, bring it out, turn the fish and stir the morels.  Add a bit more cream to the trout and broil for one more minute.  Remove the trout from the oven.  Serve the trout and morels over noodles or rice.  Add a little more cream to the pan sauce, if you like, and nap it over the fish and morels.

We broiled some pencil-thin asparagus and boiled up some excellent thick Mennonite noodles, both from the  Menomonie-Farmer's Market.  We felt blessed by the abundance of this place.

______________________________________

I was thinking about veganism recently (in a purely academic way, don't worry), and while I don't dispute the validity of anyone's personal dietary choices, and while I could consider a return to the vegetarian life I practiced as a young man, I realized that the vegan life would never work for me, not least because of its banishing of dairy.  Beyond that, looking at veganism as a movement, eliminating dairy from one's diet for arbitrary reasons seems to me not a terribly defensible position, in terms of sustainability of our food supply.  Living out here in America's Dairyland, it is clear that the earth is very, very good at making grass, and while we can't eat grass (leaving aside the current high-end trend for cooking with hay, which I'm eager to learn more about), cows can, and they can turn grass into rich, wonderful milk that gives us cream, cheese, yogurt, sour cream--splendid products on their own, and part of a culture that has linked humans to the earth for as long as, well, as long as there have been people and cows, I guess.  I could imagine the world without slaughterhouses.  Without dairies? No.

Cream is beautiful.  Therefore: you should eat more cream.  Just, not too much.


Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Tasty Food in Little White Pots, Part Deux: Fromage Fort

I suppose there must be people in the world who buy a piece of cheese, eat it up, then buy another, eat it up, and so on. That would surely be a practical, economical approach to cheese consumption. It is not ours. I'm certain we are not alone in this. Lured by the siren song of the gouda, the enchantment of the chevre, cheddar's sharp summons, we find ourselves frequently over-cheesed. And so the cheese drawer fills up with little bits of not-so-appealing fragments of fromage in tatters of cellophane, and mold starts to set in, and we despair. I hate to throw out food.

In this case, there's a very delicious way around that: get out the FP and whip up a batch of fromage fort, "strong cheese." I came to this preparation thanks to Jacques Pépin, who made it on the series that came out around the time his memoir, The Apprentice, was published. In the old-time, authentic version of this dish, the odds and ends of cheese were submerged in vegetable stock (the water from poaching leeks, which I guess the old-time Lyonnaise did a lot of) and white wine, and left to molder away a good little while. I'd have to think that another round of fermentation occured, resulting in du fromage bien fort, indeed.



With this version we don't get quite that funky. You can let this mellow in the fridge for a couple of days, or use it right away. For the cheese, it is truly a potluck approach--hard or soft, blue or goat, washed rind, whatever you have that needs to be used up. An assortment is nice. Of course, the stronger the cheese you start with, the stronger your end result will be. For the batch I made this week, it was mostly fairly mild cheeses--some cheddar, gouda, gruyère, fresh chevre, even a few curds. If your cheese has gone moldy on the outside, just trim that off.

A food processor makes short work of this. If you don't have one, I suppose you could grate the cheese and work it well with a spatula to beat the wine or cider in. That sounds tiring, though, and this really is a lazy man's method of taking stuff that's a couple days away from the garbage can and turning it into un délice.

Keeping it local, I used some of our hard cider where the original calls for white wine. All the cheese was from Minne'sconsin. I had a little more than twelve ounces of cheese, to which I added a half cup of cider, which was almost too much. It seemed a bit runny just after I blended it, but it set up fine in the fridge. The amount of liquid required will vary somewhat--I had a decent portion of the quite soft chevre, for instance, which contributed to the softer texture. Add less liquid to start; you can always add more.

To serve it, either just spread it on toasts, crackers, or slices of baguette; or, for something insanely delicious, put on your broiler and brown those baguette slices on both sides, spread with some of the cheese, and put them back under the broiler to brown. If I ran a wine bar, these grilled fromage fort toasts would be on the menu at all times. You wouldn't be able to keep enough sauvignon blanc in the joint to keep up.


A couple of those bubbling brown babies alongside a frisée aux lardons salad (I grew the lettuce, smoked the bacon, baked the bread, made the vinegar in the dressing, laid the egg...oh, wait, what the hell am I saying...) makes for a fantastic summer supper.

White wines from Bordeaux, which are mostly sauvignon blanc with perhaps a bit of semillon mixed in, are a great value. Crisp, clean, grapefruity, sometimes carrying hints of tropical fruits, many are available for less than $10 a bottle--and some even come with screw caps, for your picnicking pleasure!
Fromage Fortto fill two ramekins with perhaps a bit leftover
8 ounces cheese bits and ends, trimmed of mold and rind
1 large clove garlic, chopped
a few good grinds black pepper
1/4 to 1/3 cup hard apple cider or dry white wine

First, fit your food processor with the grater attachment, and grate all the harder cheeses--this is an optional step, but I prefer the texture when I first grate the cheese, then blend. Omit any softer cheeses like chevre or brie at this point.

Now combine all the ingredients--holding back a bit of liquid--in the processor bowl. Blend for about 30 seconds, until the mixture is quite smooth. Pack into ramekins or a lidded crock. Use right away, or refrigerate. The taste and aroma will become stronger the longer you keep it--in The Cuisine of the Rose Mireille Johnston says to cache it away for 15 days. I'm not sure I'm that brave....
Here is Jacque's recipe, from the Food & Wine site.

Joyeux fromage, everyone.


Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw