Queso Fresco or "Hey, I just made cheese!"

If you are a close friend of mine you've probably heard me talk about my 649 dream to buy a goat farm in Prince Edward County where I will make artisinal cheeses that I will sell at farmer's markets until Lynn Crawford and all the other hot Toronto chefs discover my amazing cheeses and make me independently wealthy (which I am already anyways in the dream having won $25k in the lottery duh!) by using them in their restaurants.

In addition to my small Anglo Nubian herd, I will also have a Jersey cow named Daisy for milk, 2 little pink pigs that will always look like Babe, and at least 6 chickens.  And the chickens will be Araucana ones from Chile, which will lay the pretty blue eggs for me, and some Cochins with feathered feet,  in case you wondered.  Cochins make excellent pets apparently.  I know...wake up, right?  Ah well, maybe one day.

A few months ago there was an article in Toronto Life Magazine about making your own ricotta, and I kept meaning to do it but never did.  Then...inspiration struck...I am taking Chorizo Sloppy Joes to my friends' this weekend for their annual Lane Party and I thought I would try making cheese to sprinkle on them.  Ricotta wasn't right, so I started looking into fresh cheeses.  Now I am no expert on fresh cheese nor any kind of cheese, but I love to eat it and from what I saw on the internet it seemed pretty easy to make.  There are only three ingredients:  milk, vinegar and salt.  Generally it is called Queso Fresco or Queso Blanco.  

It is not quite feta but not really mozzarella or ricotta either.  I think it will be a nice mild slightly salty cheese to sprinkle on pizza or sloppy joes, and there is no goat milk in sight, which will make my friend James happy.  Junior Chef J-Man thought it was a fun project tonight and so did I.

As an FYI, this cheese will not melt nor can it be shredded but it can be crumbled or sprinkled.  And it can be made using any kind of milk - the only difference being the yield of cheese.  I did it with 1% and only got a small amount of curds, but using 3.8% organic homo (the highest fat milk I could find), I got quite a nice yield.  If you don't have white vinegar, other kinds like rice wine or apple cider will work but you will have a slightly different tang to the cheese.

When adding salt, remember that some will drain out with the whey, so what might seem salty at first, might not have much salt to it in the finished product.  What I did here was crumble my cheese into a container, and grind some additional salt in, and shook it around.  Worked well.

This entry level foray has inspired me to pick up some ingredients to try more complicated cheeses.  Next thing poor Glen knows, goats and chickens are living in the back and our garage is converted to a cheese cave.  Sorry about that...but you know it is inevitable....the dream never dies.

Queso Fresco

2 litres (1 gallon) homo milk

1/3 cup of white vinegar

1-2 tablespoons sea salt (adjust how salty you want it)

Directions:

Rinse the inside of a medium saucepan with water to coat the surface.  Add milk and heat on medium for about 12-15 minutes or until it comes to a low rolling boil.

Add the vinegar. The curds will separate from the whey almost immediately, and the mixture will start to look grainy.  Let it simmer for a couple of minutes and stir using your spoon to assist in the curd separating.  If the whey doesn't seem to really separate (the whey is the yellowy liquid left after you separate out the milk fat), add another spoonful of vinegar.

Pour the pot’s contents into a cheesecloth-lined colander and let it drain for a couple of minutes.  Sprinkle with salt until it has the taste you are looking for.

Gather the curds in the center, and squeeze out what liquid you can.  You can tie the cheesecloth’s ends and hang the cloth on the faucet so it can drain for a few hours.

Or like I did, squeeze out what you can and then place a bowl on top of the cheese, and weigh it down with weights or a couple of heavy vinegar bottles to drive out more moisture.

Leave like this for a few hours or overnight if possible.

The next morning, untie the cheesecloth, and admire your cheese!  It should keep for a while in the refrigerator (did you look at the expiry date on your milk...) but plan to use it in the next few days.

That's it!  We made cheese.  Next step is looking into ordering liquid rennet, tartaric acid and mesophilic culture on-line. 

Culinary School Chronicles - Lamb

Last week's class was about stuffing pork chops and this weeks class was about stuffing and tying a boneless leg of lamb. Gross as it sounds, I was kind of hoping we'd get bone-in lamb so we could learn the technique for future reference.  Buying cuts of meat whole is generally much cheaper than buying the finished product and all it takes is a little elbow grease and practice to get the cutting right.

Today we were given previously frozen boned New Zealand lamb leg.

The first step, is to wash the lamb well and pat it dry with a paper towel.

You cut the leg open at the thinnest point and spread it flat on your cutting board.

When you look at the leg, you will see that the pieces of meat at the end are thicker than that in the centre.  Sliding your knife in, you slice down the middle of the meat almost through to the outside, then flip the meat out to create a butterfly cut.  Do the same on the other side.

Sprinkle the inside of the leg with salt and pepper. Spread your cooled stuffing (I'll get to that in a minute) across the inside of the lamb leg.

Starting at the more narrow end of the lamb (the bottom in this photo), start to roll the meat up like a sleeping bag, trying to keep it tight as possible.

If it all works out ok, it will look something like this.

Now you will need some butcher's twine.  The rule of thumb to truss a chicken is 1 times your arm span.

The rule for a leg of lamb of this size is 1.5 times your arm span.

Next, tie the end of the butcher's twine at one end of the lamb.

The motion to make - and it takes practice - is to hold out your left hand over the lamb, thumb in towards yourself.  Using your right hand pick up the long piece of the twine and loop it over your thumb, then your pinky finger, around under your hand, then twist your hand so your thumb points away from you , then rotate your hand until your palm is facing up.  Slip your hand out of the loop, then place it over the lamb and tighten.

Repeat, repeat, repeat and repeat until your entire lamb is tied off.  Something like this.

Wrap the remaining twine back over and around the lamb to secure the end pieces and create a nice compact package for cooking.

Brown your lamb, fat side down, in a 1 tablespoon of cooking oil, flip over and then place in a 350 degree preheated oven for about a hour for medium rare.  Check the internal temperature of the meat to your desired doneness.

To me, rare should read 130, Medium around 140 and well done around 150-155.  Remember that the lamb will continue to cook for a while once you remove it from the oven so it will come up 5-10 degrees in temperature while you let it rest.  Do let the lamb rest tented with foil for about 10 minutes before carving.

Serve with mint sauce.

Goat Cheese Stuffing:

1/2 onion, diced
1/2 red pepper, diced
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
3 sprigs rosemary leaves removed and chopped

3-4 sprigs parsley,  leaves removed and chopped

3 sprigs mint, leaves removed and chopped

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

2 ounces plain white goat cheese

Salt and pepper

Heat olive oil in a satué pan over medium high heat.  When hot, add onion and cook until golden brown.  Add garlic and sauté another 1-2 minutes.  Add peppers and herbs and continue to cook for several minutes.  

Remove from heat, and transfer to a bowl.  Add mustard and goat cheese and combine.  The heat from the onions and peppers will soften the goat cheese so it melts into the vegetables.  

Set aside and let cool slightly before using on lamb.

Mint Sauce

2 bunches fresh mint, washed, picked and chopped

1/2 cup malt vinegar

1-2 tablespoons brown sugar

2 cups water

Salt and pepper to taste

In a sauce pan, bring water and vinegar to boil over medium heat.  Reduce heat, and add sugar, chopped mint  and continue to simmer for 10-15 minutes to infuse the flavour.  Adjust sweetness if needed.

To thicken the sauce slightly, disolve 1 tablespoon cornstarch in about 1/3-1/2 cup water.  Add a little at a time to the sauce, allowing it to come to a boil between each addition so the true thickening power of the slurry is shown in the thickness of the sauce.

Incidentally, things referred to as sauces are thickened using a roux (could be a hot roux or a beurre manie) while things thickened with a cornstarch slurry are called a "jus lié (joo lee-yay). Chef always has interesting anecdotes.

Chef also recommended making a Sauce Robert to serve with lamb.  Sauce Robert is a brown mustard sauce made with chopped  onions cooked in butter until translucent, to which white wine, pepper, and demi-glace added and reduced, then is finished with mustard

Sauce Robert is one of the "small" or compound sauces made using Espagnole sauce (a mother sauce).  I read on Wiki that there are 78 compound sauces on record as catalogued by the great Marie-Antoine Carême who was a great chef in the times of Napoléon and the father of haute cuisine. Sauce Robert is one of the oldest compound sauces and was being used in kitchens in the late 1600s.

Restaurant Visit - The Wine Bar

For those not familiar, Summerlicious is annual Prix Fixe Food Festival in Toronto.  In the dead of the Toronto winter, we also have Winterlicious.  150 restaurants of all sorts, sizes and varieties join up to offer set dining menus as set affordable prices (hence prix fixe).  Meals must be a minimum of 3 courses and lunch has to be $15, $20 or $25 and dinners $25, $35 or $45.  The idea of course is to try to get people to go out for dinner and to try restaurants they never would have before or thought were too prohibitively expensive.

Honestly, you are either a fan of Summerlicious or you are not – there are as many “neigh” sayers about it as there are supporters.  There is an increasing level of bureaucracy in applying to participate in the program by the City of Toronto – in addition to the actual application process, the meals have to meet certain price to cost ratios to show value, menus must be submitted for consideration 6 months in advance, and it goes on and on. Leave it to the City of Toronto to red-tape a great idea to death (dare I mention food carts!)

As a diner, I think introducing the price to cost ratio is a good thing.  I don’t know how many times I went to a restaurant for a Summerlicious lunch, and the appetizer was some mesculum greens with a few tomatoes with a vinaigrette, boring salmon with a few vegetables, and then some pudding.  And they’d charge $20. 

I usually try to hit at least 2 or 3 restaurants in each festival.  Bymark is always an outstanding choice and the value of their lunch menu is staggering.  And unlike many other venues who come up with price-conscious items to offer clients, Bymark generally serves off its regular menu.  At $25 what you are paying for is your main, and they are more or less covering the appetizer and dessert.  Don't get me started about their tower of Tuna Tartar or I'll end upon a very long tangent.  I’ll come back to Bymark in the Winter, but I wanted to try a few different places this Summer.


The Wine Bar ($15 Lunch)                                 

9 Church Street

Menu

I have long been a fan of The Wine Bar since it first opened years ago as JK Wine Bar (Jamie Kennedy has moved on to other ventures in and around the City.)  Besides the fact that you can no longer see Jamie behind the stoves of the completely open kitchen and Chef’s bar, not much has changed – and good thing too because this restaurant has it right in my books.  Great wine list, plenty of offerings by the glass and generally great service.

I really enjoy the small plates/sharing thing and I have never been here where everyone orders “their own” dish and doesn’t share.  This is the first time I have hit The Wine Bar for lunch and the first time for Summerlicious.  I applaud them for trying to keep the meal on the low-end of the Summerlicious lunch price range, but I really wished they’d charged a little bit more and made the “main” a little bit larger.  Maybe the expectation is that you'd order a few extra dishes to begin with.

As usual, you HAVE to order the poutine here.  It is always a higher end play on the Quebecois dish of fries with gravy and cheese curds, but their gravy is always to die for and the fries always perfectly cooked.  I should have listened to myself and ordered the Mini Burger Poutine, which had an astonishing beef gravy topped with smoked cheddar.  So good!!!  Instead I went for the Local Broccoli Salad, which was nice with raisins, toasted almonds and honey balsamic vinaigrette, but I was salivating over Deanne’s poutine.

I went for the Smoked Salmon open faced Sandwich with dill cream cheese and a fresh fennel & sweet onion slaw.  Truly a wonderful lunch dish.  The other ladies enjoyed Grilled Quail, served with some greens, roasted hazelnuts and pickled corn & mustard vinaigrette.  More than half a quail per person would have been a better serving.

Dessert was good with Sour Cherry Bread Pudding with Rum & Butter Sauce (a little light on the cherries though) and the Chocolate Tart with Chantilly Cream was enough to put you in a chocolate coma.

At the end, we were still a bit hungry so we finished up with one of their artisanal cheese platters.  Overall, food was good, if perhaps a little small (what do you want for $15, tho right?), and the service was a bit rushed but it was lunch hour so that is easily forgiven. 

Justin's Junior Chef Bloggette - Spider Wienies

I am back in the City after camping, a week cottaging and sleep over camp.  I love summer.  Lots to do and lots of places to visit.

I really like camping.  My favourite night time camping snack is Spider Wienies.  I also like S'mores and Jiffy Pop.

Spider Wienies kind of look like a spider but also like a crab but Spider Wienies sounds better than Crab Wienies doesn't it???

Here is our secret method for making the best tasting campfire wieners ever!

Take your wiener and make a cut right through the wiener at both ends.  Make sure to leave a couple of inches of the wiener whole in the middle.

Flip your wiener over and make a second cut through it at both ends.  You will then have 4 arms on each end.

Stick your wiener on your long handled BBQ fork.

Place your wiener over the open camp fire and cook until slightly brown.

Be sure to keep turning it for even cooking.





Watch as the the arms of the "Spider" curl back.

Let the wiener cool a bit before you eat it.

Then repeat, repeat and repeat until all the kids are full!