Now that it is winter up north, I bought some grapeseed oil for its lower smoke point during cooking. When a pan starts to smoke in the winter in Minnesota, opening a window is a cold option to air things out.
The smoke point is when the oil fat starts to break down and forms a gas. For grapeseed oil that happens at 485 degrees, but every oil has a different point at which it begins to smoke. Extra virgin olive oil has a relatively low smoke point at 375 degrees, and it is for this reason that many cooks don’t use olive oil when frying, sauteing, or roasting at high heat.
In the past, I used canola oil when heat was an issue, but in the December Bon Appetit the ‘BA Foodist’ recommended grapeseed oil, so I thought I would give that a try. A lot of foodies like to use grapeseed oil as it has a very high smoke point and offers flavor neutrality, which means you can add it to dishes without imparting a strong flavor. If you want olive flavor that is fine, but not every food is enhanced by such a prominent flavor.
Some common high-heat oils that cooks use include: grapeseed, peanut, safflower, and canola. There are also more exotic options such as avocado and rice bran oil.
With that said, some cooks don’t care for canola as much as other products as they detect a fishy aroma. I had never heard this before, but when I compared the aromas of grapeseed and canola oil, there was a noticeable difference between the two. I can’t say canola oil was exactly ‘fishy’ but I could see how someone might smell it that way. The grapeseed oil, on the other hand, was very neutral and had almost no aroma at all. Peanut oil is also high-heat and often used for frying, but is tends to be less flavor neutral than other seed-based oils.
Another good thing about grapeseed oil is that because it has half as much saturated fast as olive oil, your salad dressing won’t solidify in the fridge. Of course, you also lose the olive oil flavor if that is what you want. I guess it all depends upon what flavors a person wants to come through.
With that said, I now must caveat this post, as I have oversimplified the oil discussion quite a lot. Opinions run high with oil especially concerning health issues, and many Italians use olive for all types of cooking regardless of heat, except maybe deep frying. There are also many variations of olive oil, so you can still get high-heat olive oil too. And then there is the difference between refined and unrefined oils, with unrefined oils smoking at much lower temperatures. For instance, and unrefined olive oil will start to smoke around 320 degrees, so save that oil for finishing dishes and don’t cook with it.
Lastly, when storing cooking oils, try to keep them in a dark, cool place as heat, air, and light are the enemies of oil. Basic cooking oils should be consumed within six months as they will start to become rancid and break down — even if you can’t smell it. Extra virgin olive oil keeps longer as it has less acidity and more monounsaturated fat, but even olive oil after a year will start to lose many of its healthful benefits and break down.
When buying cooking oil, don’t buy dusty bottles, and try to choose oils in non-clear or metal containers as they let in less damaging light. Also, pick bottles that aren’t at the front of the shelf as these too will be exposed to less light. A good idea overall would be to simply replace your standard cooking oil every six months. You won’t get sick from old oil, but why use it in your food?
I tried a couple of different dishes this week. The first was from Fine Cooking and it was an orecchiette pasta with Brussels sprouts, Gorgonzola, and brown-butter pecans. It was very good, and a nice hearty, rich pasta for a cold evening. Here is the recipe.
In the future, though, I might make some adjustments to the recipe. First, before roasting the Brussels sprouts I think I would add a bit of sugar along with the oil when coating them to enhance the browning and give it a slight sweetness.
Also, I wouldn’t add the pasta back into the same pot that it cooked in as the heat dried it out somewhat, and with all the Gorgonzola it became a bit ‘gummy’. There was no real need for a hot pot, and mixing it in a serving bowl would have been just fine.
I also forgot to reserve some pasta water, which I would make sure to do in the future. Instead I added some water to the cheese mixture pan, heated it, and used that for extra moisture. For the leftovers, I also added about a half cup of this water.
And though I liked the pecans in the dish, the next time I might try rendering the fat from a few slices of bacon and make some crispy bacon instead. Then I would use the bacon fat to saute the onions and the crumbled crispy bacon for a garnish instead of the pecans. If I did this, I would also probably reduce the Gorgonzola a bit. Bacon makes so many things better, but this dish is already rich with the cheese and cream.
The other dish I cooked was a beer-braised roast with onions that was featured in Gourmet magazine. Here is the recipe from epicurious.com.
I followed the suggestions from the website comments and added some carrots, smashed garlic, and then I also put in some leaks instead of a third onion.
The meat turned out a bit dry in my opinion, but that was my fault and I used the wrong type of roast and pan. The sauce, though, was absolutely wonderful. I wish I would have had a 5-1/2 quart Le Creuset dutch over for this dish.
Anyhow, it was a fun cooking week with some good results.
The other day I was at the grocery store and avocados were on sale. After picking out five for $5, a lady asked me how to tell if they are good or not. I told her that unfortunately most of them were too ripe. They were squishy to the touch, and not worth buying.
So how does one pick out avocados at the grocery store?
I eat an amazing amount of avocados, and now I can just touch them and tell if they are perfectly ripe or will be ripe in a day, two days or longer, so I usually just choose the ripeness according to when I think I will use them. If you want one that is ready to eat or close to it, you should try to buy an avocado that gives slightly when lightly squeezed. You want a firm tenderness; not rock hard or too squishy. But don’t squeeze them too hard or else they might bruise.
An avocado that is rock hard will probably take more than three days to ripen, but you can speed up the ripening process by sealing the avocado in a paper bag with a banana or apple. These fruits release ethylene gas, which is a ripening agent. If an avocado is already ripe and you are not ready to eat it, you can store it in the fridge for up to a week.
For instruction on how to cut avocados, I found three internet videos useful. All three are good, but I have only embedded the Epicurious.com one in this post. You can also check out Chowhound and Rouxbe for their videos on how to pit and cut an avocado.
Since avocados can be rather expensive, especially when not in season, preservation is also a key. Avocados, once cut, will quickly start to brown, so when I make guacamole, I squeeze a bit of lemon juice over the top so the leftover guacamole doesn’t brown.
If you are only going to eat half an avocado, you can also store the side with the pit in it in the fridge. A lot of people first squeeze lemon juice on it to prevent browning, but the Chowhound video below uses onions in a plastic container. It’s a good tip, and one which I will try the next time.
Avocados are often used to make guacamole, which is very easy to make in its most basic form. It is simply ripe avocados, salt and garlic, but a lot of recipes add other ingredients. Rick Bayless, the acclaimed chef and restaurateur, gives his recipe in stages so you can add different flavors as you see fit. Bayless also has his signature chunky guacamole that he serves at his restaurant, and you can find that version at The Recipe Link. If you search the web, you will no doubt find dozens of other guacamole recipes to suit your taste.
As for me, I often take the easy way out. I use Rick Baylsess’ Frontera Guacamole Mix
If you want to know more about Rick Bayless and how he came to be one the premier chefs for Latin cuisine in the US, you can listen to this story on NPR. The NPR website also gives his recipe for roasted tomatillo guacamole.
This is the third and last part of my truffle series. Over the past month, I have written a couple times about truffles. The first post talked about the rise of the domestic truffle industry and the second simply elaborated on what exactly a truffle is.
But now as French black Périgord truffle season is upon us, it will be good to give some online resources for buying your truffles. It is time to try that risotto with truffle shavings on top.
First of all, truffles appear during set months of the year depending upon the type of truffle and region. For instance, the black Périgord truffle from Australia starts arriving in late May and continues through August. During the summer you will also have the milder Italian black summer truffle available. After that comes the white Alba truffle from September through December, which you can buy right now. And there is also a milder black Burgundy fall truffle available right now too. Lastly, the French black Périgord starts arriving in December and goes until March — both in the US and Europe.
Of course there are other varieties too such as Oregonian white and black truffles which also appear in the winter and spring, but if you’d like to know more about the common culinary varieties, Tartufi Unlimited has a good description of each type along with the season.
One of the great things about New Zealand and Australia now producing black Périgord truffles, is that due to their winter months being reversed, we now have black Périgord truffles another 3-4 months out of the year. And the recent domestic farming start-ups in the US also ensure a better, fresher truffle supply. Who knows, but in 10 years truffle prices may even start to drop.
At the present time though, domestic and foreign truffle prices are roughly the same, despite a 100% import tariff on foreign truffles. The domestic producers are matching the going market rate and competing instead on freshness and speed of supply. Truffles are full of moisture and a long trek from Europe reduces that moisture, but it may only take domestic truffles a couple of days to get from underground to your dinner plate.
Truffles are expensive though, and not everyone appreciates the musky and earthy aroma. Right now the Italian white Alba truffles, which are in season, are pulling in $180-240 per ounce. The black Périgord truffles are a bit cheaper, and will cost roughly $60-90 per ounce, but the exact prices are determined at the beginning of each season based upon supply and demand.
If you want to buy truffles, the first place to look is domestically. In the United States, two sources are Piedmont Valley Truffles and Tennessee Truffles. Again, these will be fresher than European truffles (if you live in the US) and cost about the same. In the coming years, more and more US-based truffle farms will be coming online, so there should be more buying options in the near future. Tennessee Truffles also sells Australian black truffles in the off-season.
If you can’t get them from those sites, you may need to purchase European truffles from online gourmet food and specialty stores. Several of them exist, and I have listed a selection below. If you search online will no doubt find more suppliers.
Gourmet Food Store
Plantin
Marky’s
Sabatino Tartufi
Black Star Gourmet
Urbani Tartufi
Tartufi Unlimited
When ordering truffles, it is good to keep some general rules in mind as you won’t want to waste a lot of money or purchase some disappointing truffles.
First, when buying truffles be aware of the season and don’t buy so-called ‘fresh’ truffles when they are not in season. Anything that is too cheap is probably not a top-of-the-line French or Italian truffle, but instead a lower quality truffle. They may look similar and be the same color, but they are not the prized truffles sought after by chefs. Don’t get me wrong, they may still be very good for cooking, but you just need to be aware of what you are buying as they won’t be as aromatic or flavorful as the higher-end truffles.
Second, there are some problems with counterfeiting using Chinese black truffles. Chinese truffles are sometimes stored with real Périgord truffles to pass on the aroma to the inferior Chinese truffles, and then the lower-quality products are represented as French. Stick with established online retailers, and again, if it is too cheap, it is too good to be true.
Third, it is always best to buy fresh truffles, but if you absolutely need some truffle in the off season, you may have to turn to canned truffles. Look for some that are “first cooking whole” and canned in their liquid. Again it is best to buy only from reputable suppliers such as Plantin which offers good canned truffles.
And lastly, when you get your truffles, they may come packed in rice or vacuum packed, but it is best to store them in tightly sealed plastic or glass containers in the refrigerator and use them up quickly as truffles lose their aroma very fast. It is also not recommended to freeze them, but if you absolutely must, do it in olive oil and only for a short period of time. But the wisest thing to do is protect your investment and it quickly.
Yesterday I purchased off of eBay the vintage wooden butter mold pictured to the right. One of my cooking goals for 2010 is to learn how to make my own butter. I know it isn’t that difficult, so I held myself to a higher standard of making butter for a special occasion. And even that seemed a bit too easy, so that led me to buying the butter mold, and now my plan is that on Christmas Eve I am going to bake a loaf of bread and make my own butter too. I think that will be a good combination.
So after buying my mold, I started looking into how exactly to make butter and ran into this video. You just have to shake heavy whipping cream in a jar for several minutes and rinse. That seemed too easy, and I had some cream already in the fridge, so I gave it a quick try. You are supposed to leave the cream out at room temperature for 6-12 hours to culture it first, but since I had a partial pint of cream already in the fridge and about to go bad, I decided to skip that step. So I got a Mason jar, poured in the very thick cream and started shaking.
After about 3-4 minutes I started to vigorously shake the jar as I wasn’t seeing the results that were in the video. He had a deliberate and steady shake, but I had to upgrade to a wild and violent shake. Maybe it didn’t form as quickly because the cream was chilled — I don’t know. Regardless, I did get the cream into a very thick state, but I still didn’t have the little globules of butter, so I just put in about a half cup of cold water and started shaking again. It only took about 10 seconds after that and I had nice, tangy fresh butter. I rinsed it a couple of times, smashed in some freshly ground pepper and kosher salt, and made some hot butter toast.
It took me only 10 minutes from the end of video to having warm toast with fresh butter. That was nice. And I think my daughter is going to like making ’shake’ butter too.
There are a lot of videos and instructional material on the web on how to make butter, but in addition to the video referenced above, I thought these two articles were interesting. One is from Cooking For Engineers and the other is from Saveur magazine. I will probably use a combination of their techniques when I make my final holiday butter.
If you want to buy butter molds, cookiemold.com has some nice hand-carved ones and Ruby Lane has interesting vintage molds and presses available. Just do a search for ‘butter molds’ on their website. Other than that, you can always check on eBay as I did.
Fine Cooking featured the cookbook How to Roast a Lamb by Michael Psilakis in the Dec/Jan issue. Psilakis is an American chef of Greek heritage out of New York City, and his contemporary takes on Greek food have made him a rising star in New American cuisine. He has operated several restaurants in New York City, but his restaurant Anthos is one of only two Greek restaurants with a Michelin star, and in 2008 Psilakis was named Best New Chef by Food & Wine and Chef of the Year by Bon Appetit.
Psilakis is a self-taught cook, and this cookbook is his first. In it he blends personal essays with beautiful photographs along with contemporary takes on Greek food. Many of the recipes are rather complex and call for a lot of ingredients, but at 304 pages thick there are still a lot of dishes that are accessible to the average cook. If anything, it will inspire people to cook more Greek food.
The cookbook, despite its title, is not just about lamb, but I was initially attracted to it because of the lamb dishes. My local CSA is now offering lamb to its members, so I will be stocking up on my lamb cuts of meat this week and want some guidance for a great holiday lamb dish. I can’t wait.
You can purchase How to Roast a Lamb
Recently a question was posed to me about which bread making machine was best, and frankly I didn’t know. While living abroad I learned how to make a simple bread dough from a Jamie Oliver recipe and have used that recipe ever since. I have never used a KitchenAid mixer or any other machine for bread; I make it completely by hand and I love the results. But frequent bread making from scratch is rarely an option for most people, and now that I have an artisanal bakery nearby, I have only made bread once in the last six months.
Essentially, bread making depends upon a person’s situation. Food needs, busy schedule, size of family, and existence of bakeries can all affect how and if we bake a loaf of bread. So here are a few questions you might ask yourself when thinking about buying some new bread making equipment.
- Do you have a good bakery nearby? You will likely bake less bread if that is the case.
- What type of bread do you like? Do you want artisanal bread or just better sandwich bread for you kids’ lunch box?
- Do you have dietary restrictions? If you can’t eat gluten, then making your own bread is a good option.
- Cost? If you can’t afford a bread machine or mixer, you may need to make bread the old fashioned way.
- How much bread do you eat and how often? These are simple questions but important.
Too many people buy bread machines and kitchen mixers and never use them. They just have different bread needs, and that’s perfectly fine, but if you are looking to invest in kitchen tools or to start making bread, examining your habits, needs, and expectations will help make it so you actually use the equipment you buy.
So with that said, I like to group home bread making into four categories.
- Handmade bread from scratch with no tools;
- Handmade bread with use of kitchen tools such as mixers;
- Semi-handmade bread with use of a bread machine; and
- Completely automated bread with full use of a bread machine.
The first method of completely making bread by hand is probably the most messy and time consuming and takes some dedication. This is what I do as I don’t own a food processor, KitchenAid mixer, or bread machine. However, I don’t feel that most people unless they are serious bakers or bread lovers would choose this method nowadays, especially with so many kitchen tools to make the job easier.
I initially chose making bread this way because I had no appliances and no good bakeries. If you are a serious bread purist, concerned about cost, or a foodie that just wants to learn baking and make a handful of loaves per year, this style of bread making will probably be fine. It works, isn’t as hard as it seems, and tastes great. I just started out with a simple recipe and moved on to more elaborate breads. Here is the Jamie Oliver recipe I use.
The second method of using kitchen appliances to help out is probably the most common. Either a mixer or food processor assists in mixing and kneading the bread dough, and you are left to proof and bake the bread on your own. The advantage of this method is that it cuts down on some of the work and clean-up and also gives you a lot of flexibility with making different types of bread. You control the bread product. And for most cooks, you will already have a mixer or food processor that can handle bread dough. This is the way I would do it if I had the tools.
If you cook bread in this manner, I would also recommend two books that will help cut down on the time without sacrificing bread making results. Both Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
The third method of using a bread machine to do everything except baking the bread is a hybrid approach and is also popular. You still have some control over the bread but the bread machine eliminates the mixing, kneading, and proofing steps. You simply take the unbaked, proofed bread from the machine, form it how you want, and bake it in the oven. This is a great compromise approach if that suits your needs.
With proper measuring of ingredients and a book or two, this method will also yield very good baked bread. A useful tool for this method is a digital scale to get the ingredients properly measured as that is one of the main causes of unsatisfactory bread machine results. Go by weight and not volume if you use a bread machine.
As for bread machines, a highly recommended model is the Zojirushi BBCCX20 Supreme Bread Machine
And if you end up going the total bread machine route, a highly recommended book is The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook
Finally, the last method of complete automation with a bread machine is obviously the easiest, but you lose a lot of control over your bread result. This doesn’t mean it is bad bread, but you will have less control over shape, rising, and crust and you may need to experiment to get your results to come out properly. Again, the books listed above will help produce better results, and they will also give numerous recipes. The main benefit of this all-in-one method is less work, but if you are willing to forgo true artisanal bread, a bread machine will allow you to have fresh bread awaiting you in the morning along with that great aromal. Also, for larger families that eat a lot of bread, taking this route may be the easiest and best option to ensure a great supply of fresh bread.
And last of all, if you want a good site for a lot of useful bread-making resources, I would recommend checking out King Arthur Flour. Serious bakers use this site, and it is well organized and has a lot of good equipment. Happy baking.
A couple of weeks ago I was at Kitchen Window in Minneapolis and saw for the first time that Epicurean, which is normally associated with cutting boards, is now producing kitchen utensils. They have a series of spoons, ladles, turner spatulas, pasta servers, and saute tools that come in two lines and colors. The Kitchen Series is completely made out of their trademark composite wood and comes in natural and slate, just like their cutting boards. The Gourmet Series also comes in natural and slate but incorporates a high-temperature nylon head.
I ended up purchasing the Gourmet Series slate-colored spoon and large spatula to try them out (shown above), and though I haven’t used them that much, so far I like them a lot. The handles are very comfortable, the construction is stiff and sturdy, and the nylon heads seem to be firmly attached. The utensils do feel as if they will be durable – though it is hard to tell at this point. As for heat resistance, the wood handle can manage up to 350 degrees and the nylon head up to 400 degrees, and they are also dishwasher safe.
Additionally, I think they look better than other plastic utensils, and the spoon has measuring ridges on the interior for 1 tbs, 1/8 cup, and 1/4 cup. It isn’t something that you would use for precise measuring as you need to have the spoon very steady and level to get exact amounts, but this feature may come in handy for a quick-and-dirty measure if you need it. I could see myself using this feature when adding olive oil to a dish, broth to some risotto, or if you need to add some pasta water back into a dish.
The price is also reasonable at about $9.50 per utensil from the Epicurean website, or you can buy selected items at Amazon
A few nights ago, I dined at a fabulous restaurant in Chicago called Alinea. I am not going to review the restaurant as it is well known as a great place to eat, and in 2006 Gourmet magazine named it the best restaurant in the country. It is good; very very very good, and I am not going to be able to contribute to that discussion.
What I will say is that the eating experience at Alinea under Chef Grant Achatz was a singularly amazing experience. And even though Chef Achatz’s style is often termed molecular gastronomy, I didn’t feel that to be the defining style. If I were to describe it I would say it is the foodie equivalent of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. It was haute cuisine, molecular gastronomy, a gourmet theme park, and a food fantasy land — it was essentially food cabaret at its finest.
Even when you enter the restaurant, it is whimsical and amusingly confusing. The entrance is angular and narrows and the ceiling height also drops as you progress down the hallway. You are part of an illusion. In fact, it is very much like the part in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when they approach the tiny door entrance to Wonka’s factory. But here, as you walk towards the illusory small entrance, a motion sensor opens the real door to reveal a bustling restaurant full of food, diners, and wait staff. You have entered culinary Wonkaland.
But before describing the food, I have to say something about the service. It is impossible to compare the food service at Alinea to that of a regular restaurant; it is a different breed altogether. They take care of you in micro dining rooms within the restaurant, and their every move contributes to the wonder of your meal. At one point, a waiter asked, “I see you are drinking your wine with your left hand. Would you prefer to have your glass on the other side?” And that sounds absurd and made me chuckle at first, but once you eat there it makes sense. The staff setting the table were more akin to an architect drawing up plans or an artist constructing a mosaic. The placement of every dish was important and precise, so the placing of a wine glass was no less important. In other words — it made sense.
So now for the food. As opposed to most American restaurants, you cannot order off a menu. There is only a choice between a smaller ‘tasting’ menu and a larger ‘tour’ menu, and the menu changes about four times a year. The price and courses are set, and frankly the cost is not for the faint of heart, but save up and go at least once in your life if you take food seriously; the experience won’t disappoint. You can order wine from a wine list, but they also have a wine pairing menu that is amazing. It comes at a pretty steep price though, so be prepared to budget for it.
With that said, here are some of the wonder food highlights:
- A lightly breaded pheasant ball pierced with a small oak leaf twig and the leaves were smoldering to give a burning leaf aroma. You eat it like a twig skewer.
- A passion fruit injected with ingredients to make it taste like the famous New Orleans drink: a hurricane. The waiter uses a scissors to open the passion fruit top and you scoop out the fruit as it sits on a glass tube.
- A plate comes out on a pillow that is filled with nutmeg-air that slowly deflates and spreads the aroma of nutmeg as you eat.
- A gulp of potato soup in a small waxen dish comes with an acupuncture needle piercing the wax and suspending some butter, Parmesan, a potato ball and truffle shaving above the soup. You pull out the pin to drop the garnish into the soup and gulp it down. (This dish is pictured above.)
But I think the most amazing dish came at the end. A waiter came over and said, “Can I please remove your water glasses; it will be better that way.” So they clean off the table completely, and you are left to wonder what will come next. Then they place in the center of the table a silicon tablecloth, and two staff unfurl it to leave you with a rubberized table top. Yes, a rubber table. And you just sit there waiting expectantly for the next food wonder to arrive.
Next a young attendant comes out and organizes a set of dishes with zen-like precision on the far end of the table so we can’t see inside. Again, food and wonder are key. Then a chef comes out and proceeds to construct a desert that is placed directly on the rubber table top. He takes broad utensil strokes with a sauce here and there; dribbles tiny droplets; and describes each stroke in the process. It is more like a painting than a dessert. Then they deposit some chocolate that was chilled with liquid nitrogen right in the middle along with other ingredients in piles. That is dessert, and you eat it directly off the table.
At this point we were the first in the room to have dessert, and all eyes were looking at our table. People laughed, stared, and wondered and then did it some more. We were part of the entertainment, and it was an amazing dessert.
So that is Alinea: it is food and entertainment in the best of unimaginable ways, and you are part of it. Chef Achatz will almost literally bring out the snozberries and everlasting gobstoppers and you play your part and eat with amusing surprise. And though the staff aren’t Oompa Loompas, they provide just as much whimsy and wonder as they convey the food to your table. To this day it has been the most amazing eating experience of my life.
For those interested, there are a several online resources focused on Alinea. Two sites: Alineaphile and Alinea at Home are dedicated to all things related to the restaurant’s food and reproducing the dishes at home. They are great resources if you want to experiment with this style of food.
You can also visit the the official sister sites to Alinea such as Alinea Mosaic and Alinea Oenophilia. These sites will give recipes and information about the wines and equipment that accompany the restaurant’s food. You can even subscribe to a wine club where they will send you the wine-pairing bottles for each quarterly menu.
Lastly, if you want to know more about Chef Grant Achatz and his recent battle with tongue cancer that left him temporarily without the sense of taste, there is a good NPR story on him. It is very interesting.
After failing at my first attempt at making mozzarella cheese, I succeeded the second time around. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my less-than-satisfactory effort, so I made some changes and all worked out fine. Basically, the last time I felt that the microwave step of heating the cheese to get it all stretchy, along with the firmness of the cheese curds were the big problems. So here is what I did differently.
First of all, since temperature is important, I boiled some water and re-calibrated my thermometers, then picked which thermometer was best. It turns out the thermometer that came in the cheesemaking kit was completely off, almost ten degrees lower than the boiling point at 212 degrees. I can’t imagine anyone would have an easy time making cheese with that thermometer.
The next thing I changed is I let the curds and whey cook to a higher temperature than recommended by a few degrees, and then let the mixture sit twice as long. This ensured that my curds were nice and firm.
After the curds set, I cut them up with a knife, stirred them a bit, and reheated the mixture to the higher temp for the waterbath, all according to the recipe. I sided with using the hot waterbath method instead of the microwave, and that helped a lot. Last time, the microwave unevenly heated the cheese curds, and they ended up breaking down into a ricotta-like texture. The hot waterbath, even though a bit more time consuming, worked great for getting the mozzarella all stretchy so it could be kneaded and formed properly. It was a lot more forgiving than a microwave.
I also divided the curds into two batches so if I messed up one time, I could still have a second attempt. Both batches turned out, but it was good to have a back-up plan. For flavoring, I added thyme, freshly ground pepper, and salt.
So I am on my way to completing my top 10 cooking goals for 2010. One of those goals was making cheese, and though I will not stop with just mozzarella, I probably won’t be going crazy with home cheesemaking any time soon. I will, however, be ordering the book: Home Cheese Making
