dairy

Quick take: Yogurt (yoghurt) cheese with garlic and olive oil

maki — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:04:06 +0200

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has an article about how to make yogurt (or as they spell it in the UK, yoghurt) in the Guardian. I did not want to go to the trouble of making yogurt from scratch, but I had a big pot of plain yogurt that needed to be used up so I made a sort of variation on the yogurt cheese balls further down on the page.

Yogurt cheese, in case you are unfamiliar with it, is just plain yogurt that has been drained of much of its liquid. To make it, just line a sieve with some porous cloth like cheesecloth, muslin, a coffee filter or even a couple of paper towels, spoon the yogurt in, and put the sieve with a bowl underneath in the refrigerator for at least a few hours. The more you let it sit, the drier it will become.

I strained about 2 1/2 cups of yogurt mixed with 1 teaspoon of sea salt from Friday evening to Sunday morning, by which time it had become the consistency of whipped cream cheese. I put this into a bowl, grated one garlic clove over it and drizzled on some extra virgin olive oil and mixed it up. It was the perfect spread for freshly baked hot savory scones.

I’ve never been a big fan of very sweet yogurt, so this savory yogurt spread may make more breakfast appearances.

Heidi's hard goat cheese, perhaps

maki — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 16:24:49 +0100

One of my favorite books as a child was Heidi. Heidi, in case you don't know, is the story of a little Swiss girl who goes to live with her grandfather, the reclusive Alm Uncle. It is the most famous children's book ever written in Switzerland. The author Johanna Spyri was actually a resident of Zürich, who thought of the story of the simple Alpine girl while she was convalescing from an illness in the Grisons, which is the eastern part of the country.

Cheese figures quite prominently in the story of Heidi. Since the Alm Uncle keeps goats, it seems logical that he made cheese from the milk of those goats. But in actuality goat cheese is not at all common in Switzerland. The goat cheese that is the most familiar to most of us is the French style - creamy in texture and intense in flavor, but it's very unlikely that the Alm Uncle made that kind of cheese, since he was making cheese mostly for his (and Heidi's) consumption. It would have needed to be a long storing kind. In one passage in the book, he is toasting a hunk of cheese:

The kettle soon began to boil, and meanwhile the old man held a large piece of cheese on a long iron fork over the fire, turning it round and round till it was toasted a nice golden yellow color on each side. Heidi watched all that was going on with eager curiosity. [...]

Then he brought her a large slice of bread and a piece of the golden cheese, and told her to eat. After which he went and sat down on the corner of the table and began his own meal. Heidi lifted the bowl with both hands and drank without pause till it was empty, for the thirst of all her long hot journey had returned upon her. Then she drew a deep breath--in the eagerness of her thirst she had not stopped to breathe--and put down the bowl.

"Was the milk nice?" asked her grandfather.

"I never drank any so good before," answered Heidi.

"Then you must have some more," and the old man filled her bowl again to the brim and set it before the child, who was now hungrily beginning her bread having first spread it with the cheese, which after being toasted was soft as butter; the two together tasted deliciously, and the child looked the picture of content as she sat eating, and at intervals taking further draughts of milk.

The cheese he used has to be firm enough to put on a long fork and toast over an open fire. Was there such a thing as a firm, hard goat's cheese?

Then on Wednesday, when I made my weekly prowl through the main station market, there it was: a hard goat's cheese. Not from the Grisons, but from the Züri (Zürcher) Oberland, a mountainous rural region to the southeast of the city of Zürich.

With a distinctly blueish-grey, translucent color that is rather like pale moonlight, it's one of the most unusual looking cheeses I've ever encountered.

The taste, like its color, is mild, delicate and somewhat elusive. It is totally unlike any other goat cheese I've ever had. It reminded me the most of Manchego, a sheep's milk cheese from Spain. The texture is quite firm, and although it's a whole milk cheese it is crumbly rather than creamy. It's the kind of cheese I could nibble on for a long time without getting tired of it.

I'm not sure if the Alm Uncle's goat cheese was anything like this one, but it has opened my goat-cheese horizons. I only bought a very small piece, but next time I will buy a larger one and see if I can toast it over the fireplace.

Technorati Tags: cheese, switzerland

What Swiss cows produce

maki — Tue, 02 Dec 2003 02:16:28 +0100

Cows riding up and down an elevator in the Zürich main train station in 1999.

The Swiss are obsessed with cows.

The cow is a popular motif everywhere. People actually wear cow-print vests, children play with stuffed cows or wooden cows. Ordinary people - not just tourists - collect cow bells.

A few years ago, the whole city of Zürich was taken over by cows. Artificial ones, that is. Cows in various designs were placed everywhere. (Later on, the cow idea was copied by the city of Chicago, with the cooperation of the people who had done the original cow thing in Zürich. The city of New York also did a cow thing, but had a falling out with the Zürich people.)

It's not surprising though. The Swiss Cow gives so much goodness, in the form of dairy products, to the people. Cheese, of course is well known, and I hope to describe some of the best Swiss cheeses I've encountered while living here in the future. But it's not just about cheese.

Butter. When you live in the States, butter is just..butter. You barely think about it. If anything, you try to avoid it, since it is saturated fat, and if you can substitute something healthier that is tasty, like a good olive oil, why not?

Swiss butter is something else though. The first time I melted some butter in a pan in a Swiss kitchen, I couldn't believe it. It smelled so good, unlike any butter I'd ever encountered before. Perhaps it's the quality of the food the cows eat (most cows are still allowed to graze freely outside in small family farms). Perhaps it's the freshness of the butter - since most butter sold here is unsalted, it is very perishable and has to be sold quite quickly compared to the salted butter that's common in the U.S.

There are fancy butters here, which come with promises of the essence of the Alpine herbs and flowers on which the cows fed. These are expensive though, so we stick to the plain old Die Butter. Die Butter is still a wonderful thing. It contains more water than U.S. butter, so it spits and sputters in the pan, giving off those marvelous smells. In the spring, it has a very faint taste of the wild garlic that the cows eat.

Milk also is somehow different. Although we no longer go to the local dairy farm with a pail to buy milk, the milk here is somehow much richer tasting. It's so rich in fact that when my sister Mayumi visited here she couldn't drink it straight up - to her, it tasted too creamy. We usually have Milchdrink (low-fat milk, about 2%) rather than Vollmilch (whole fat milk) around, but it still tastes much more like Milk than what I was used to drinking in New York.

And then there's cheese. There are many varieties of Swiss cheese, which is sort of amazing considering how tiny this country is. Cheese is an integral part of life. It's both an everyday food item, and something for a feast. Some time ago, we invited some friends who were visiting from the States, and we served them a cheese fest - 6-7 different kinds of cheese, a plentiful amount of good bread, a bit of dried meat, lots of fruits, and of course some good red wine. They were rather surprised - they'd never even thought of just serving cheese for a meal, and afterwards they were very, very happy.

Finally, there are the two great warm-cheese dishes, usually served right about now during the cold winter months. Fondue is cheese melted in a wine-kirsch mixture, into which you dip chunks of bread. (I've never encountered other dipping stuff here like apples and so on.) And there is raclette, a big chunk of cheese held close to the fire until it starts to melt, and then the melting cheese is scooped off with a knife onto a plate, and eaten with bread, boiled potatoes, cornichon pickles, and sometimes some dried beef.

Following is Max's mother's recipe of sorts, for fondue. She doesn't follow a recipe since she's been making fondue for many, many years now.

Fondue

A good amount of cheese, half sharp aged Gruyère, half Vacherin-Fribourgeois. For 4 people it's about 200g (5 oz. or so) of each, shredded. (Here they sell a pre-shredded vacuum sealed fondue packs, called "Moitié-Moitié" or Half and Half. However Max's mother always shreds her own.)
About 2 cups of a young white wine. It should not be sweet, but rather a bit sour. Lemon juice can be used to accentuate the sourness (but just a squeeze)
A healthy amount of kirschwasser (kirsch). About 1/2 cup will do, or more.
A lot of coarse peasant-type bread, cut into chunks
Additional kirsch, for dipping (very optional)

In an earthenware fondue pan, or regular saucepan, heat up the wine. Put in the cheese and mix mix mix until it's all melted and bubbly. Add the kirsch and cook some more.

Put the pan on a burner or tabletop cooking range thing, to keep warm while eating. Skewer the bread on long fondue forks and dip. Optionally, dip the bread in kirsch before dipping into the fondue.

For dessert, serve grapefruit and blood orange wedges.