Easy Cheese: Making Cream Cheese at Home December 29, 2008
Posted by pinchaque in 101 Things, Cooking, Food.Tags: 101things, cheesemaking, cream cheese
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Ingredients for Making Cream Cheese
For my unbirthday Amanda was kind enough to start me on my journey of cheese by buying me the Basic Hard Cheese Kit from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. One of my 101 goals is to make cheese at home. I’m not sure why other than it’s part of my DIY nature and I like things fermenting in my house. Anyway the easiest recipe that I could make with my kit was Cream Cheese.
I had personally never really considered that cream cheese was real cheese, but it does use the same mesophilic starter that real cheeses use, so I’m considering it a real cheese. Plus that means I get to cross it off my 101 things list!
Adding Starter to the Half & Half
The nice thing about making cheese is that it really doesn’t require many exotic ingredients. Cream cheese is just made from plain old half & half from Trader Joes, plus the starter that came with my kit.
Cheese Curds Placed in Cheesecloth
The first step is to bring the half & half to room temperature in a hot water bath in the sink, and then add the starter.
After 12 hours you have a smelly puddingsome goop that you put into cheesecloth to drain. The liquid that drains is called whey, and what’s left are the curds. In cream cheese the curds are really tiny so I doubled up the cheesecloth.
Creative Cheese-Draining Device
I was scratching my head for a while trying to figure out how to drain the cheese in a spot far away from the cats. Then I remembered I had my beermaking stuff at home and came up with this contraption: the draining cheese rests on my beer stirring spoon, balanced on my brew kettle. It worked wonderfully! Look Alton Brown, that spoon is no longer a unitasker.
Cream Cheese After Draining
Once the cheese has drained for 12 hours (or in my case, 18) then it starts resembling cream cheese finally. I pressed it into the plastic mold that came with my kit to form it into some kind of shape.
And look what resulted: a beautiful hunk of cream cheese! The taste was fairly good, but a little more sour than I like I think that may have been due to the extra draining time that I did because it was still soggy after 12 hours. But otherwise the texture was right on, and it tastes great on Panera bagels 
With one cheese down, I’m now planning on my next lacto-bacterial adventure. The entry-level hard cheese is “farmhouse cheddar”, so I’ll probably give that a whirl. It takes about a month to age, which will necessitate the purchase of a wine fridge (wafna!). I also want to make Mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses, in preparation for the Great Home Pizzamaking Adventure.
The Final Cream Cheese Product
Stuffed Burgers and European Lagers December 21, 2008
Posted by pinchaque in 101 Things, Adventures in Beer, Cooking, Food.Tags: 101things, beer, burgers, lager-showdown
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Stuffed Burger with the Fixings
One of my many fond memories of Portland, Oregon, was our trip to McMenamin’s Kennedy School, which included a very tasty stout and a burger stuffed with cheese. I had never had such a burger before, so it found its way onto my 101 Things List to see if I could faithfully reproduce it. I’m always up for a new burger challenge (the last being Jamaican Jerk Burgers), so this would be fun!
The next question was what to put inside the burger. Cheese, of course, had to be included. But I also gave a nod to one of my favorite Mexican dishes, Chile Relleno. These are chiles (usually Anaheim I believe) stuffed with cheese, battered, and deep fried. Well there wouldn’t be any deep frying of my burger (perhaps something to try another time) but I did choose a good-looking Poblano chile to blacken, skin, chop, and marry with the cheese. It was at this point that I decided I needed to come up with a good name for my burger. Given it’s slighly Mexican heritage and hidden cheese, I decided to call it the Queso Perdido Burger.
Creating a Stuffed Hamburger
Each burger started life as approximately 0.33 lbs of 80/20 ground beef. I split that into two parts and formed relatively thin patties. One patty is topped with the cheese and chile pieces, and the other is placed on top and pressed down in place around the edges.
Sealing the Stuffed Burgers
I seasoned the outside of the patties with salt, pepper, paprika, and ancho chile powder and grilled for ~7 minutes to create this oozing tribute to beef, cheese, and chile. It turns out these were quite easy to make and very tasty to boot.
Now, what better drink to have with burgers than BEER! It was time for my next round of the World Lager Challenge (which changes name each time I blog about it I’m pretty sure). This time it was European Lagers Excluding Germany. And that meant:
Lagers of Europe
- Heineken (Holland)
- Baltika (Russia)
- Stella Artois (Belgium)
- Pilsner Urquell (Czech Republic)
- Czechvar (Czech Republic)
I was fairly sure that Pilsner Urquell would take this one and then be promptly disqualified because, while Pilsner is indeed a lager, it is more heavily hopped and therefore has a stronger flavor profile. It is a different style than the others. However, when the tasting was finished it was not actually my favorite: its bitterness was not particularly welcome and fell short of other pilsners, which I tend to like a lot. Another surprise was Czechvar, which I had high hopes for given that it’s the Czech version of Budweiser. However it came in dead last with tasting notes like “bad”. Heineken was also a shocker, given that I thought it’s mass producedness would land it in the bottom half and it came in second. Stella was “mild, inoffensive” which is a good thing in this group. But the winner was Baltika. Although it was still definitely a lightish lager, it had a great honey sweetness to it that made it pleasing to drink.
Decanted Lagers of Europe
The final rankings:
- Baltika
- Heineken
- Stella Artois
- Pilsner Urquell
- Czechvar
That means that Baltika moves on to the next round to face off against Coors, Tecate, and the yet-undiscovered winners from Asia, Germany, and UK/Italy.
Amanda had another good idea that I should include an “American Craft Beers” grouping. For example, I don’t have a Sam Adams on the list and I don’t have a good reason why. Most of the craft brewers do make their own lagers to go up against the Budweisers of the world, so why not add them to the fray? I feel another beer run coming on…
The Great American Turkey-Free Thanksgiving Dinner November 30, 2008
Posted by pinchaque in Cooking, Food.Tags: 101things, Cooking, cookthrough, redsage
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Starring (in no particular order): Amanda and Chuck
Red Chile Chicken Potpie
I don’t mean to be a turkeyday grinch, but as far back as I can remember I’ve never truly loved the bird! It’s not that I think turkey tastes bad, just that given the choice I’d typically rather eat something else. So when Thanksgiving rolls around I typically pass on the opportunity to cook up a gobbler, and instead focus my cooking efforts on something I’ll enjoy more!
(This, of course, disturbs Amanda to no end so she feels obligated to purchase off-season discount turkeys and cook them under the cover of night.)
With my ongoing cook-through of Red Sage underway, the natural choice was to find a dish from that to prepare. And with Amanda my co-chef I knew we could make it through a couple recipes this Thanksgiving week. To wit:
- Red Chile Chicken Potpie with Mashed Potato Crust
- Chipotle-Cumin Breadsticks
- Sour Mash Blackberry Cobbler with Burnt Sugar Ice Cream
The potpie was probably the biggest production, taking around 6 hours to prepare. It was more of a “Shepard’s pie” than a real potpie, but the roasted garlic mashed potatos were tasty. The preparation also involved boiling a 1.5 frankenchicken of parts, making a chile puree, creating a roux, and lots of vegetable dicing. It was excellent overall, with the only change I would make being the future omission of the zucchini and squash. They had a strange texture and didn’t add much in terms of flavor.
Amanda prepared the chipotle-cumin breadsticks, wihch served to be a wonderful complement to the chicken, soaking up sauce and adding their own delectable flavor.
Our desert served the double-role of Amanda cooking a recipe from another one of our cookbooks: The Ultimate Ice Cream Book. She made the “burnt sugar” ice cream which is basically like caramel (I’m not sure how it’s different, actually). It turned out a bit thicker and sweeter and didn’t freeze as well as usual ice creams, so I think we should have added more milk. Anyway she DID add some bourbon in there (which I always do to keep ice cream from freezing too much), which played against the Sour Mash Blackberry Cobbler.
Sour Mash Blackberry Cobbler
Now the cobbler was also a Red Sage recipe. This cobbler had a batter on top (contrasted with biscuit or pie crust, the other cobbler types). The baking time was off (maybe because I had refrigerated the cobbler beforehand) so I got worried the cobbler wasn’t browning and turned on the broiler to finish it. But then it was still liquid inside so it could have indeed cooked longer. Regardless it was quite delicious and paired wonderfully with the ice cream!
Ichabod Ale - Alpine Brewing Company
What thanksgiving meal would be complete without good beer? Not ours, certainly. We enjoyed a bottle of Alpine Brewing Company‘s Ichabod Ale, a dark, rich, spiced beer. I grow nervous whenever I see pumpkins on a beer label, but this worked really well. The pumpkin flavor was mild, and the spices made this beer a natural friend for our wintery baked meal.
