springtime for fritters, and morel cheese

I can't actually use that title, much as I like it, since these are baked, not fried.

Homemade Morel-Ramp-Nettle Cheese Baked in Puff Pastry

1 gallon raw whole milk
1 packet fromage blanc culture
2 drops animal rennet
2 oz dried morels, crushed
2 tablespoons minced blanched nettles
4 ramp bulbs, minced
1 egg yolk
2 sheets puff pastry, thawed

For Marx Foods' annual dried morel cook-off, this year all entries had to use baking as their primary cooking method, and they sent along a bag of dried morels to use. I thought about pastas, I thought about a hot dish centered around a homemade morel version of cream of mushroom soup, and I wound up deciding this was a good time to make homemade cheese for the first time.

Okay, it's not quite the first time. I've made ricotta before, which just involves adding vinegar or lemon juice to warm milk in order to curdle it, and then straining the whey off. I've made labneh, which is yogurt strained to the consistency of cream cheese. But I haven't made a cultured or rennet-thickened cheese.

Now, in a sense, cultured cheeses are not a world apart from ricotta. Both are curdled by acidity. In the case of a cultured cheese, the various strains of lactobacillus bacteria eat lactose and convert it to lactic acid, which is a more gradual process of acidification than adding lemon juice. Because you're changing something in the milk, though, rather than just adding something, the flavor is much more complex, and obviously there's a great deal more variety in the types of cheeses you can make.

I'm far from a cheesemaking expert. I've done it twice now. I'm not even really a cheese-eating expert, not by foodie standards (I don't like blue cheeses, and have mixed luck with washed-rind cheeses). The fromage blanc culture and liquid animal rennet I used to make this cheese both come from New England Cheesemaking, who I highly recommend - not only do they sell the ingredients you need, they have a lot of helpful how-to's.

This fromage blanc is very simple: you heat a gallon of raw milk (use pasteurized milk if it's all you can get or you have health concerns about the raw milk, but I'm able to get raw locally now) to 86 degrees, which is just below body temperature and thus "feels neither cool nor warm" to the touch, dissolve a packet of culture in it and 2 drops of animal rennet (which help thicken it) and stir, and let it sit overnight.

What you see in the photos is half a batch, for the record. I was protecting this blog entry from the possibility of my screwing it up the first time!

My cheesecloth didn't arrive in time, so I used a clean towel to drain the whey off of the cheese:



At this stage, you can see that it's mostly drained -- all the initial whey which was separate from the thick layer of curd has passed through the towel -- but still a very wet cheese. This is where the morels come in. I ground up dried morels and added them to the still-draining cheese, so that they would be reconstituted by whey rather than water. This both softened the morel bits and thickened the cheese.

After the morels were reconstituted and the cheese had about the consistency of chevre (in general, this cheese - which is very tangy - reminds me of a cow's milk chevre, if you see what I mean), I added finely minced blanched nettles and ramp bulbs:



That's all your flavors of wild spring right there, a forager's cheese: the rich umami flavor of the morels is the strongest, followed by the sweet garlickiness of the ramps, with the nettles adding a little of their spinach-like minerality. I added salt at the same time - cheese like this tastes a little flat to me without salt, and it adds to the shelf life anyway.

I let the cheese sit overnight in the fridge for the flavors to mingle, though honestly I'm not sure I needed to - maybe because of reconstituting the morels in the draining cheese, it was very flavorful as soon as I removed the mixing spoon from the bowl.

Mix an egg yolk into the cheese you're going to use for the puff pastry.

Unfold the sheets of puff pastry and cut into squares the size of your liking. Add a spoonful of cheese slightly off-center in each square, fold over, and press edges together to seal. Bake at 400 until golden-brown - about 12 minutes in my oven, but in my experience this sort of thing varies a lot from oven to oven.



The pastries are rich and mushroomy, with a lot of tanginess from the cheese and a great spring flavor.

I have neglected the blog this year!  I know that.  I have some long-term projects coming up -

- a master post on coffee, putting everything I know in one place;

- peanut miso;

- black-eyed pea miso (okay, probably several kinds of miso);

- ramp nukazuke;

- ramp jack cheese, my first homemade hard cheese;

- but of course that does nothing to update the blog in the short-term.

Let me catch us up.

Lent: I ended Lent early, albeit bit by bit. Not to be one of those internet people who makes a big deal out of going to the gym, but ... I joined the gym.  During Lent.  Now, I know there are vegetarians who have no trouble working out on a regular basis, of course, but I'm not a vegetarian - I'm a meat-eater who was avoiding meat.  My protein cravings after the gym were just too great, and no amount of fish was doing the trick.

Easter: So Easter wasn't the "welcome back to me, meat!" celebration it usually is, but it was still pretty great. We made pulled ham muffulettas. The "pulled ham" was a pork roast that I cured for a week before smoking it until it fell apart.  We piled that on muffuletta bread with olive salad, blanched chopped greens, sharp provolone, salami, and mortadella:





More recently, Caitlin and I spent a week at the lake to celebrate her birthday. It's still cold up there - we watched the ice melt on the lake over the first couple days - and everything is pretty empty.



But it also meant there weren't crowds anywhere. We thought about going back to Sandwich Creamery, but it was muddy in enough places that I didn't trust the car on those winding dirt hills. We did make a pretty amazing find at the supermarket - locally foraged blue oyster mushrooms.



These were delicious, and kept their texture during cooking - I browned some chicken thighs with fennel seed, added a handful of cloves of garlic, the mushrooms, and most of a bottle of white wine, and popped it in the oven until the wine had reduced down to a glaze.

More mushroom stuff coming later this week, plus ramps and nettles!  It's sorta kinda spring!

lenten brunch

My mother took me out to lunch yesterday, and asked that I update the blog so a fish head isn't at the top anymore. Fair enough. I should write about My Sister's Kitchen soon, but will probably wait until I've had another meal there. For now - so much fish lately!

I had a package of Dover Sole filets from Trader Joe's, extremely thin and quick cooking - they take 3-4 minutes to pan-fry. Most of them I had with sides of pasta, and I'm going to blog about pasta soon, but they also made good sandwiches. This is two filets on a roll with baby kale, a little mayo, and Major Grey's chutney:



The thing about fish sandwiches is that you can use damn near anything you like as condiments and it'll work, which is a good way to keep things from getting repetitive. (Though as I write this, I am a little tired of fish and am glad to have made a batch of boiled peanut chili. Tomorrow is my weekly meat day, which will break up the monotony.)

Today I had a Lenten brunch of belly lox, eggs, and cream cheese. The eggs were soft scrambled. To me, there are two distinct schools of scrambled eggs. If you want your eggs to mainly be a vehicle for ketchup or the like, hard-scrambled with onions and maybe some cheese is the way to go. You whisk them with a little milk, you add them to the pan, stir enough to keep them from being an omelette, and cook till they're getting dry.

But soft scrambled eggs are a whole nother thing, one many people would say is the only right way to make scrambled eggs - but like I said, for me, they're just two different dishes. These are very good soft scrambled eggs, but not perfect soft scrambled eggs - the curds are too large and too firm:



To make perfect soft scrambled eggs, after gently whisking the eggs together with a spoonful of cream cheese, a couple spoons of cream, a little coriander seed, and a little dill, you add them to melted butter in a pan that's warm but not hot, and you cook them slowly, while constantly stirring.

Don't think of soft scrambled eggs as undercooked eggs, which hard-scrambled fiends seem to. Think of them as a custard without sugar and very little cream. You constantly stir. You want soft, fluffy, smooth. At one extreme you have something almost like a hollandaise, almost more of a sauce. I like curds a little more developed than that, and not so soft that it looks like yellow Cream of Wheat.

But like I said, the eggs here, the curds are larger than I intended - the pan was hotter than I wanted it to be, and once they were in the pan, there wasn't much I could do - they cooked a little too fast even though I removed the pan from the heat.

Some chopped belly lox was added right at the end. Alongside, pumpernickel toast with cream cheese and another slice of belly lox. Over everything, fresh-ground long pepper.

salmon head; oyster stew

Lent's off to a pretty good start so far.

At Battambang in Little Cambodia, salmon is $5.99 a pound. Salmon heads are $1.99 a pound. Granted: there's less meat on a salmon head. But what you get is pretty great, and certainly worth the price.




This is the salmon head picked apart, after simmering and cooling enough to handle. Clockwise:

Right at the top is a bit of salmon marrow - nice and clean and rich.

Next, salmon meat - mostly cheek (the nuggets that look like chicken oysters) and jaw.

Salmon eyes - I'm going to save them in the freezer until I have an appreciable amount later in the month.

Salmon skin with tons of fat.

Salmon bones and cartilage.

The bones and cartilage went back in the simmering pot for an hour with a couple cloves of garlic, and became a salmon stock gelatinous enough to turn solid in the fridge.

The meat, marrow, and skin I crisped up in a pan for dinner last night, in a roll with some sliced Vidalia onion, Tony Chachere's, and melted cheddar cheese - sort of a salmon melt.

That salmon stock? That was the backbone for oyster stew:



Sure, it's not pretty. There's black sesame paste in there as a thickener. But it's tasty stuff.

I sliced up more Vidalia onion and cooked that in a little sesame oil (the sesame oil floating on top of the jar of black sesame paste, in fact) until it started to turn golden, during which time I blended a few spoonfuls of sesame paste with the salmon stock. Added the sesame-stock combo to the pan, heated it up, added fish sauce and soy sauce until it tasted salty enough, and then added chopped blanched collard greens and half a pound of raw shucked oysters.

From that point, you just need to heat it through.  Three or four minutes until it comes back up to a simmer.

lent!

Some housekeeping!

First, my reconstructed Watergate salad is in the Marx Foods contest previously mentioned. If you like voting for me, this is pretty much the only way to do so. Conduct yourself accordingly.

Second, this whole fucking Maker's Mark thing.

I've mentioned the whiskey shortage before, and even written about it in my day job. The upshot is this:

* For a long time people drank less whiskey because of vodka and shit like that.

* They started drinking a bit more whiskey.

* Whiskey takes a long time to make. There was no way of knowing whether the increased demand would hold up, or if it was just a fluke.

* Distilleries reacted in various ways: new American microdistilleries sold a lot of white whiskey (unaged) and in general aged their whiskeys a lot less than the larger distilleries, which not only brought their product to market faster but made them more flexible with respect to reacting to demand fluctuations; Scottish distilleries like Macallan removed the age statements from some of their whiskeys, no longer guaranteeing, for instance, that the whiskeys in Macallan 12 would be a minimum of 12 years old, freeing them up to increase supply by using younger whiskeys; many, many distilleries have simply raised their prices; and Maker's Mark has done more or less the same thing, reducing the proof of their whiskey -- which means adding more water, so that a given barrel of whiskey will fill more bottles than before.

It's not too weird a way to respond to supply and demand problems - it's like grinding up meat and adding bread crumbs to it so you can have six servings of meat loaf instead of five servings of whatever meat you started with. It's the done thing.

But you know, when you make meatloaf instead of meat, you're changing the product. And the difference in proof isn't great here, but it's real.

In theory, this shouldn't affect me much - Bulleit and Knob Creek are close enough to Maker's price point that I buy them more often. On the other hand, perhaps because it's a flagship brand, Maker's goes on sale often enough that it's remained in the heavy rotation of my purchases for years, because I can so often get a great deal on it.

If you love Maker's, you should be a little insulted by the change, but it's not going to ruin things for you: add less ice or drink it faster, and it's the same juice.

Third, yesterday was Mardi Gras, so today is Lent!  My usual Lent fasting is in effect:

- Meat only once a week (traditionally Sunday) plus corned beef on Saint Patrick's Day.

- Seafood doesn't count as meat.

- Meat-derived products like homemade stock and lard are okay as long as I'm not buying meat expressly for that purpose. In other words, I think it's silly to let things in the fridge and freezer go to waste for the sake of Lenten fasting.

Sadly, my Lent this year won't include Maine shrimp. The season has been abbreviated and beset by problems from the weather: even before Winter Storm Nemo, shrimpers were having problems with the texture of the shrimp they caught, because conditions at sea were so cold that the shrimp were freezing on deck.

It will include salmon heads ...

... and the collars I remove from those heads ...

... and smelts.


My last meat meal before Lent?

Pig tails covered in a mountain of salt, curing salt, sugar, and chiles, for a few days; rinsed off and let to air dry in the fridge for a week; simmered until the skin softened; and smoked. Amazingly good country ham tails.

reconstructed watergate salad

Like I said, I just got an ice cream maker for Christmas, so when Marx Foods announced its latest recipe contest -- It's Easy Being Green, making anything you like using any two of the green ingredients provided -- I naturally started thinking of ice creams.

I'd had congealed salads and other southern salads on my mind - they're in that middle ground, old school enough that your grandmother made them, but her grandmother probably didn't, since they depend on convenience food ingredients developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of them date back that far, and some are much more recent - like Watergate Salad from the early 1970s, which for some reason picked up the name of the political scandal.

Watergate Salad combines pistachio pudding and Cool Whip or whipped cream, studded with orange and pineapple.

Well.

I could find another way to do that.

And I could make it ice cream!

Two of the ingredients lent themselves very well to this profile: bamboo rice, which is a light green color from the bamboo juice with which it's infused, and green cardamom, an extremely fragrant spice that goes well with both fruit and nuts.

But here's this. I wasn't going to use Jello pistachio instant pudding for a cooking contest, nor was I going to spend $20 and shipping for nut butter, especially since a less than perfectly smooth nut butter would make for a very different texture here.

So I brought the nut element in another way.

Creme de noyaux is an old school liqueur made with the kernels of members of the prunus family - the stone fruits: apricots, almonds, peaches, plums, cherries. It's a little like amaretto - real amaretto - with a complex flavor that's sort of floral, sort of nutty, sort of like maraschino liqueur, sort of like New Orleans nectar soda. You're not likely going to find it on the shelf, and if you do, it's probably Hiram Walker or Bols, both of which are probably artificially flavored and dyed red (because of the Pink Squirrel cocktail).

It's easy to make yourself, though. Any time you have a peach, a cherry, a plum, anything in that family, take a hammer and break the pit open. The kernel is inside. Drop it in a jar of vodka, or put it in the freezer until you have enough of them. Let them steep in the vodka for a few weeks, and then add sugar syrup. ("Creme" in French and "cream of" in English both refer to heavily sweetened liqueurs, too sweet to drink on their own.)

A little goes a long way, just like with vanilla extract. So it's a lot of work, sure, but you don't have to do it very often.

Now, if you want to go about this recipe and don't want to take the time to make creme de noyaux, you could also use the kernels themselves - just steep them in the cream with the cardamom, below.

If you don't want to do ANY of that, I would recommend maraschino liqueur rather than amaretto, unless you know of some really excellent amaretto that's escaped my attention.

Onward. For a pint or so of ice cream:

1/4 cup bamboo rice
2 cups half and half
2 teaspoons creme de noyaux, divided
1/4 cup heavy cream
8 cardamom pods
1/2 cup sugar or so
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup diced pineapple (or crushed pineapple)
1 orange's worth of orange segments, supremed (remove all pith, skin, etc)

First infuse the cream with cardamom: bring 8 cardamom pods, 2 cups half and half, and 1/4 cup cream to a simmer, turn off the heat, and let cool. It ought to be good and infused by the time it cools down to room temp. Remove cardamom pods.

Now make a rice pudding: simmer bamboo rice in the infused cream, with a dash of salt and 1 teaspoon creme de noyaux, until rice is very very plump and soft. Add the 1/2 cup sugar and taste for sweetnesss - it should be sweeter than ice cream.

Beat the two egg yolks, add a little hot rice-cream mixture to them to temper them, and add the egg mixture to the pan, stirring constantly over low heat until thickened (a couple minutes, usually).

Remove from heat, stir in the remaining teaspoon of creme de noyaux and the orange and pineapple, and chill in the fridge.

When churning ice cream, it's important to make sure your mixture is fully chilled, not just room temp.

Churn according to manufacturer's directions, and freeze to harden it up if necessary.

The final result is complexly spiced from the creme de noyaux and the cardamom, with nice plump grains of bamboo rice and bits of tart fruit.

Catching up, now that I have my camera back!

The smoker, in the rain, at a barbecue joint in Georgia (we got barbecue beef - shoulder clod, maybe? - and Brunswick stew):



So much soda! Also in Georgia. Not all mine.



My beloved Frisco melt, at Steak and Shake:



The Pat La Frieda lamb burger I had mentioned earlier, with melted cheese and Dijon mustard: