Cheese – Me on the net

Say Cheese!

Cheese – let’s see if I can come up with one thousand words on cheese. OK, that start is a bit of a cheat, so let’s get into it.

When humans started domesticating animals, my guess is that they would have started small, with goats or sheep. We can’t know why the first cave man or woman first milked one of them. Maybe it was a cave woman who could not feed her growing kids on her own milk and decided to steal some from the goat or sheep. Of course, if the child was too small it would not have worked because the milk would not be suitable for babies. It’s not the best thing for older children too, but it’s better than nothing.

Of course, there would inevitably have been milk left over after feeding the kids, and this would have “gone off”. It’s possible that cottage style cheeses were made from “gone off” milk, though the present day process for making cheese is more complex than simply allowing it to clot. Milk that is clotted is closer to yoghurt than cheese.

The cave man or woman who first tried eating the curds from clotted milk would have to have had a strong stomach. After all, most clotted milk smells terrible. As I understand it, it depends on the type of bacillus that gets into the milk and causes it to clot.

Proper cheese needs rennet to cause it to coagulate, and according to Wikipedia’s page on the history cheese, it was probably discovered by carrying milk in bladders made of ruminants’ stomachs due to their inherent supply of rennet. It would still have required some person who was desperate or brave to have tried it first.

Once the liquid is removed from the coagulated milk, the solids are processed into the myriad of types of cheese we have today. There was once a shop near us which sold the unmatured and unprocessed cheese as milk curds. They formed quite a nice snack.

There are thousands of types of cheese. France is known for her cheese and former President Charles De Gaulle once commented “How can you govern a country which has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?” In fact he was probably underestimating by quite a wide margin. There are apparently over seven hundred named British cheeses.

I presume that this doesn’t include those cheeses which are merely a named type of cheese with added herbs and spices. I’ve seen cheese with added nettles, of all things. If you are interested, it tasty OK. I think that this trend may have sprung from the small, often called boutique, cheese producers. If you are a small company, you will not have the facilities to produce more than one or two types of cheese, and an easy way to provide variety in your range is to create herb infused varieties.

Cheese types presumably fall into various broader types of cheese. There are the soft cheeses, some of which are almost spreadable, such as Brie. Others are denser and more solid, such as the various Cheddar cheese types, some are really hard, such as the Parmesan that is shaved and used as a condiment.

Some cheeses crumble easily and others are more easily sliced. Some supermarket cheese is so processed that it is almost plastic! In fact supermarket cheeses could be considered to be a separate type of cheese. It is almost always highly processed and formed into blocks, slices and spreadable wedges. Even the more conventional cheeses, such as Cheddar cheese, is sold in supermarkets as a block, which seem to me to be a long, long way from the original Cheddar cheese which came in the form of a wheel.

Sometime during the evolution of cheese some cheeses became infected with a penicillin mold and developed blue markings or veins. Once again, some brave person tasted it and liked it, and so blue cheese was born. Blue cheeses are among the tastier of cheeses, and to me, beat all other cheeses that I have tasted hands down.

Cheese is used in many recipes, one of which is Welsh rarebit. There are many variations of this recipe, which basically involves melting cheese with several optional ingredients on toast. I particularly like the one which involves soaking the toast in red wine before the cheese is added, although I’ve never tried it.

Cheese scones are another favourite. I always add more cheese than the recipe calls for, as I don’t think the standard recipes call for enough cheese. Cheddar cheese, grated, is the best cheese to use, I find. One thing is important, though. If you like cheese scones hot, it is best to eat them almost direct from the oven. At a pinch they can be reheated in an oven, but heating them in a microwave cooker turns them into something leathery and, to my mind, not particularly nice.

Macaroni cheese is a familiar dish from most peoples’ childhood, and even adults find it a tasty meal. It is essentially cooked macaroni, covered in a cheese sauce, covered in breadcrumbs and reheated. Some people put ham in it, some add herbs, and there are many, many other variations.

Speaking of cheese sauce, cheese and pasta go together. Pasta without cheese sauce is a bare gluggy mess. Pasta with a cheese sauce, with maybe some ham or sausage or even seafood can be heavenly. Some tomatoes or tomato paste make it even nicer.

Cheese also goes with pizza. What would pizza be without the stringy mozzarella cheese? Cheese producers around the world have spent large amounts of money, I’d guess in the millions, developing cheese which melts properly and has the requisite stringiness when it cools slightly, so that you can do that twirly thing with your finger to wind up the stings of delicious cheese.

One particularly tasty, but probably not good for you, use of cheese is in cheese straws. These are basically strips of slightly puffed pastry infused with cheese. the strips are twisted to make a spiral shape. The bit is crunchy, the biscuit a little flaky and delicious.

Just one more. Oh no, they’ve all gone!

Back to the beginning – Cheese Scones.

I think that the first thing that I ever cooked was cheese scones. They are an ideal project to start cooking on as they are so simple. I’m not going to mention the actual recipe that I used since there are probably millions of them and they all work pretty well. Basically cheese scones are made from flour (usually self-raising), some shortening (butter, margarine, oil), a small amount of liquid (water or milk), some baking soda (to give the typical scone ‘tang’), salt and a little mustard to taste and of course cheese, usually a fairly strong variety.

They are simple and quick to make and cook and equally simple and quick to eat! I like them hot with butter and apparently so do most people, and in fact I doubt that many scones get to cool to room temperature! If you fancied it, you could add a touch of chili I guess, or some ham or prosciutto. Of course, they don’t have to be cheese scones – I’ve always liked date scones. I suspect that with sweet scones you’d need to reduce or remove the baking soda though.

Anyway my efforts are shown above and below. The pictures don’t really show how toasty brown they were. They look a little pallid in the pictures. I can assure you that they tasted great!

(I intend to try to post to this blog at least once a week – I haven’t posted since the end of last month and that is not good!)

Silver Beet Quiche

I had a couple of large bunches of silver beet and while I love silver beet I wanted to try something a bit different. I haven’t yet made much pastry so I thought I’d give it a try. I went looking for a quiche recipe and came across this Bacon and Leek Quiche recipe which I used as a basis.

So, first of all I made some pastry, using the food processor, and put it into the fridge for 30 minutes. Then I started on the filling. I put the silver beet on to cook, in salted water. I cut the silver beet into length of 10 – 15 cms. I know that there are people who slice it up small and maybe add it to a stir-fry, but I very much prefer it cooked by itself. Silver beet cooks very quickly so it is also very easy to cook it this way.

A little butter, some milk, cheese and eggs were called for and I used the proportions as in the recipe. However I should have read the recipe more closely – the butter was used to cook the leeks in the original recipe, so I should have melted it before adding to the milk cheese and eggs. Instead I blended the whole lot and it didn’t look too nice, sort of curdled. I reasoned that the cooking process would sort it out. I had no option, apart from ditching the lot!

I retrieved the pastry from the fridge and rolled it out and lined the dish with it. I put some paper in the dish and put some lentils in the paper, I then put the pastry on to cook blind for 10 minutes as instructed in the recipe. Well, it took a lot longer than that to cook, probably because I’d rolled it out a little thickly, I suspect. I’d say about 30 minutes before the pastry was lightly browned at the edges and not too soft in the middle. I’ve looked at various recipes for baking pastry blind since, and they vary tremendously. Some people recommend up to 30 minutes, and some say that it is not necessary to use lentils or beans while baking pastry blind.
So I took the lentils and paper out and filled the case with layers of silver beet and milk cheese and eggs mixture, topped it with some more cheese and put it back in the oven for the recommended 30 minutes. I was a little worried that the pastry edges would burn, but they didn’t and the quiche browned up nicely! Here it is, straight from the oven!

IMG_20130304_133417 — Straight out of the oven

When I took it out of the dish it came out fine and didn’t break up, thank goodness.

Here it is plated up with a rustic salad!

IMG_20130304_133944 — Plated up with a rough salad!

Cheese straws

OK, I ran out of snacks for Hamish and Duncan so I decided to try some cheese straws. I used the recipe here. The Guardian’s recipe promised “perfect Cheese straws”. Sounded good. The article actually goes into the topic of cheese straws in some depth quoting various chefs, but has its recipe towards the bottom of the main article, above the comments.

I made half quantities again, but even so, it only took a few minutes before my hands started to ache as I rubbed the butter in. I abandoned the manual approach and used a food mixer. This was the first time I’d seriously used a food mixer, so I’m not sure if I used the right blades or not. They were sharp-edged metal things.

I discovered a couple of things about processing stuff in food mixers.

Firstly, if you have to add a lot of an ingredient, a quantity of cheese for example, it’s a lot easier to add bulk ingredients by stopping the mixer and taking the top off and dumping it all in. Shoving it through the tiny hole at the top doesn’t really hack it! Doh!

Secondly, the recipe says to add water slowly until the dough ‘comes together in a firm dough’. What this means is that the dough suddenly goes from a breadcrumb-like consistency to a single sizeable lump and the mixer leaps about the work surface.

Anyway, here’s the dough in cling film ready for the fridge.

straws4 — The dough ready for putting into the fridge for 30 minutes

After the dough had been in the fridge for 30 minutes, it was just a matter of making the straws and cooking them.

Making them was simple enough, but I misread the instructions and cooked them for only 5 minutes instead of 20 minutes! So I put them in for 5 minutes at a time until they were cooked. Actually they tasted a bit doughy so perhaps I should have cooked them longer. Here’s the finished product.

The end result. They are a little pallid as I misread the recipe!