Cheese

Yes, cheese. It’s among the first photos we posted as #chezthorburn in 2013. We were recently thankful we had this adventure in 2013 when we intended to make pizza earlier this month, but discovered our leftover mozzarella ball had rotted. The dough and everything else were already prepped so…what to do? Thankfully, a half-empty carton of whole milk saved the day.

CHEESE RECIPE:
story link here

Ingredients:

Whole milk
An acid*

1. Pour a bunch** of whole milk into a large saucepan on stovetop. Heat on medium heat until just starting to boil.

2. Add acid, 1 Tbsp at a time, until the milk curdles and the curds separate from the whey. The whey will be unmistakably green-ish and you will see lots of small white curds, everywhere.

3. Pour into a cheesecloth-lined sieve. Save whey for smoothies if you’re thrifty. Cheese curds can be squeezed and wrung out in cheesecloth.

For fresh ricotta: You’re basically done.

For paneer: Drain curds in cheesecloth for a few hours. Press the cheese for additional time (like tofu) to really get liquid out. Chop in cubes, sautée in ghee for Indian dishes. ***

*Acids can include vinegar (not the best); lemon juice (better choice); or buttermilk. Lemon juice has always worked best for me.

**Most recipes call for a gallon of whole milk, and that it not be pasteurized. I used maybe a quart of milk last time. It was super highly pasteurized (generic Food Lion brand), but it turned out fine. Just yielded less cheese, with less special artisanal flavor. Still totally acceptable.

***We really like this recipe, which calls for fresh Swiss chard. But, you could probably equally-effectively use a bag of baby spinach, or maybe a even few boxes of frozen spinach. Use whatever you have, improvise, and see what happens!

And finally, the story:

In March 2013, we were living in southwest Virginia. Having only lived there for 6 months, we were still in some amount of culture shock. Compared to our graduate school days in New Haven, which boasted countless independent restaurants and a gourmand/foodie culture often likened to New York City’s, our much-smaller town in Virginia did not have restaurants in *every* cuisine imaginable. (Shocker.) So, we were slowly cooking our way through Mark Bittman’s The Best Recipes in the World, gifted by a particularly prescient friend when we moved.

One of the cuisines we especially missed was Indian food. In New Haven, we’d been able to regularly gorge ourselves on the Sunday afternoon buffet at Sitar, which was 2-3 blocks from our church. In our new town, there were remnants of an old Indian restaurant near the remnants of an old Kroger store, but it was clear the restaurant hadn’t been operational for several years. We soon found a delicious Indian restaurant in Blacksburg, but that was a 1-hour-20-minute drive away.

Hence, the adventure of making cheese — draining it and pressing it to make paneer — and then making the best greens-and-paneer dish ever. We have continued to make this recipe, sometimes with tofu instead of paneer, whenever we want a really good, really fresh vegetarian Indian dish at home.