Cheese - Retro Food For Modern Times

Category: Cheese

26
Jan
2018

Vegemite and Pale Ale Gougères

categories: Australia, Beer, Cheese, Snacks, Starters

Today, January 26, many Australians will be celebrating Australia Day. On the good side – it’s summer, it’s a great time to get outside and have a bbq and, if you are not in the midst of a dry January, have a few drinks with some friends. On the downside, the day itself is becoming increasingly fraught for all manner of reasons – some of which you can read about here for a considered view and here for the opinions of a lunatic. Hey America…you’re not alone with your President, we have a Prime Minister (well ex-Prime Minister) who says dumb offensive shit too. And whilst he might not be orange or have a mad comb-over, there was .this….ewwwww.

But we are not here to get political. We are here to eat, drink and be merry. Because it’s a long weekend. And we’re going to celebrate with some Australian food. If by Australian food we mean something that we have totally (mis)appropriated from another culture. So let’s get to it shall we?

Gougères are the French version of what we in Australia would call a cheese puff. And they are delicious! Feather-light pastry flavoured with cheese makes for a perfect snack. Particularly if you happen to be imbibing something of an alcoholic persuasion. Making it a perfect start to this weekend’s round of bbq’s.

But we’re not celebrating Bastille Day…we’re celebrating Australia Day…so how to “Strayanise” these delicious French delicacies? Well, first we’re going to throw a little Vegemite into the mix. Now, I’ll be the first person to admit that I…ahem…”borrowed” the idea of the Vegemite Gougères from Rosie Birkett’s recipe for Marmite Gougères.

And then, to make it even more Australian, I substituted the water in the recipe for beer. I used the Gage Roads Little Dove Pale Ale as the beer for this because it is my absolute favourite and I had some in the house but you could sub in your own favourite.

The gougères are delightfully light. The combination of vegemite, cheese, cayenne and the very slight hint of beer go so well together that it would be a real shame to only save these for one day of the year!

Vegemite and Pale Ale Gougeres

Print Recipe

A tasty snack based on a classic French recipe

Author: Taryn Fryer

Ingredients

Scale

120g unsalted butter
150ml whole milk
1 1/2 tablespoons Vegemite
75ml Pale Ale
150g plain flour, sifted
4 eggs
100g cheddar, grated, plus 1 tablespoon extra, for scattering
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
big pinch freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoonfreshly grated nutmeg

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Instructions

Preheat the oven to 200°C and line 2 large baking sheets with baking parchment.
Put the butter, milk and Vegemite and ale into pan over medium heat and bring to the boil.
Add the flour and beat very quickly with a wooden spoon, over the heat, until the mixture is smooth and pulls away from the side of the pan (about 2-3 minutes).
Remove from the heat and allow to cool for a minute.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition until the mixture is thick and smooth and glossy.
Stir in the grated cheese, peppers and nutmeg.
Spoon the mixture into the piping bag fitted with a nozzle. Pipe little rounds (about the size of a chestnut) onto the trays, leaving space between each mound to allow for rising.
Alternatively, just spoon small spoons of the mixture onto the tray.
Scatter over the remaining cheese.
Bake for 20–25 minutes, until puffed and golden.
Serve warm. Or cool on a wire rack and reheat in a 180°C oven for a few minutes until they crisp up.

Notes

The gougères can be made in advance and frozen once cool.

If you’re celebrating, have a wonderful day and enjoy the long weekend!

If not, make these anyway, they’re awesome!

But remember…

Back with more Z Food next time! Have a fabulous week!

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25
Sep
2016

Repost – Blessed Are The Cheesemakers

categories: Cheese

Hey People of the Internet,

I’ve been making cheese. Actually I made cheese a long time ago and then totally forgot to post it. But, I am thinking of stepping once more into the breach and it inspired me to hunt this down and get it out.

To get me started, I bought a Mad Millie Italian Cheese Making Kit which came with all the bits and bobs, you need, the cheese cloth, the thermometer, a ricotta mould, citric acid, rennet, steriliser, etc as well as recipes for mozzarella, ricotta, salted ricotta, burrata and mascarpone. You can of course do it without the kit and there are some recipes below but I found the kit was very useful in pulling together all the items listed above.

All I needed to buy was the milk. They recommend you buy unhomogenised milk – i.e milk where the milk and cream are still separate. I thought this might be difficult to find but my local supermarket stocked it.

Now make way for a super thrilling picture of milk heating. Here it is, if you can stand the heat, milk in a saucepan. Oh, the cream blobs I’ve circled? Are actually blobs of cream. That’s about as exciting as the first part of cheesemaking gets!

Once your milk gets up to temperature, pop in your rennet and citric acid. And wait a bit. Your milk mix will thicken into gel like consistency.

Now get your knife and slash away. If you want to make that noise from Psycho, go right ahead. After all, you’ve just spent twenty minutes watching milk heat. You deserve it.

And now you have…no, not a dead girl in the bathtub but some slashed up curds and whey.

You then stir some more, heat them some more until they start to look kind of like melted cheese:

Next up, pour the entire mix into a colander lined with cheesecloth. The whey will run off and the curds will remain in the cloth. I deft you not to think of Little Miss Muffet when you are separating curds and whey.

Tuffet optional.

Now take a handful of curds. Drop them in hot water to let them melt a bit.

Now stretch.

Not like this:

Like this:

And when you’re done stretching, form a ball.

Then drop your balls in ice-cold water….

And you’re done! Fresh delicious mozzarella. Perfect for your next pizza or why not try my cheesy eggplant and salami sandwiches?

I also made some ricotta:

Until I made it, I never realised how much milk you need to make cheese. I think I used two litres of milk for the mozzarella and I got five fairly small balls (bigger than a golf ball, smaller than a tennis ball) of mozzarella. With the ricotta, I used a litre of milk and got the cheese shown above which even taking my huge man-sized hands into account, is not all that much! Still, it is a great experience and not at all hard to do – the ricotta was even easier to make than the mozzarella.

In a few weeks, I will be trying my hand at goat’s curd but shh don’t tell my book club, it’s a surprise!

Have a wonderful week!

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15
Jul
2016

Cowboys, Caviar, Casseroles and Cocktails

categories: Cheese, Chilli, Chocolate, Cocktail, Corn, Eggs, Kahlua, Salad, Vodka

Dear readers

I had such high hopes for this post. Then they were totally dashed by a twist of fate that…well…I guess if I’d seen it coming it wouldn’t be a twist would it? But I’m jumping ahead of myself. First, I was totally delighted when Greg from Recipes4Rebels asked if I would join in a cookalong for Cowboy Day! This event occurs on the fourth Saturday of July each year and is celebrated all over the world!

Obviously, this is not the fourth Saturday in July, however, as I will be sunning myself on the beach at Sanur in Bali that day, with Greg’s blessing I am posting my ventures into Cowboy Cookin’ early! And it’s a three course meal y’all. (Because 1 that’s how cowboy’s talk and 2 cocktails are a course aren’t they? This one is almost a meal! But again, getting ahead of myself!)

So now onto my foiled grand plans. My idea was that I would find a cocktail called a Bali Cowboy – possibly a more tropical version of this cowboy cocktail and I would make it for my post and then, on the day itself, I would tweet another picture of me in Bali with with my Bali Cowboy and it would in a glass as big as my head and it would be blue and loaded with umbrellas and pineapple wedges and all the other tropical cocktail paraphenalia.

A quick google soon showed me that there is such a thing as a Bali Cowboy. It is NOT a cocktail. Turns out that a Bali Cowboy is a male prostitute who hangs around Kuta Beach willing to sell his services to any rich (ie all) Western women who care to pay for them. So, whilst I’m not 100% ruling out a photo of me with a Bali Cowboy on Cowboy Day, the likelihood of it happening has dropped significantly!

So, new ideas had to be found. Starting with some caviar. Because we’re classy cowboys! It’s Cowboy Caviar of courseWhere has this salad / dip been all my life? If this is what cowboys eat, then I want to be a cowboy. It’s all kinds of beans and corn and tomatoes and avocado . Truly delicious! I loved this!

So, for the second course, I went straight to the top. And by that I mean Mr John Wayne himself.

Turns out The Duke and I share a love of eggs, cheese and chillies. Now, just one thing about the John Wayne casserole…. To my mind, when you combine egg yolks to beaten egg whites with other stuff, in this instance cheese and chilli and you them put that in an oven and cook until it’s all puffed up and golden, that’s not so much a casserole as a soufflé.

You be the judge:

I’ll sit quietly over here and let my case speak for itself.

By the way, cooking this for an hour would be way too much. You are seeing about 35 minutes and I think it was over. I would cook this…half an hour max. Also, the tomato didn’t do much. I would actually leave it out and cook this for 20 minutes total.

The ~~soufflé~~ casserole was good but I think I was so blown away by the Cowboy Caviar that it kind of paled by comparison. I will definitely make it again though!

And now for my grand Cowboy finale, I am turning to to person who started all of this, yep, Greg. This cocktail /dessert is A-MAZING! So, so good. Cowboys and cowgirls, can I present, the Giant Martini!

There is no other word for this but absolutely divine! The giant in the Giant Martini doesn’t refer t to it’s size (but you could scale it up very easily) but to the fact that it was created on the set of Giant by Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson.

Git along little doggie, this cocktail is all mine!

And you too!

Ah yes, Greg’s site on the PC, a cocktail in front of me and The A-Z of Cooking behind it. Just a regular day round these parts!

Many, many thanks to Greg, this was so much fun! Thank you so much for including me! I always say this but you hear so much about the internet being a a horrible vicious place, I am always delighted and totally honoured to make new friends, like Greg, on here.

Ok, I’ve gotta go, 5:30am start tomorrow! But I’m loving and leaving you with some some super rhinestone cowboy singing!

Find out all about the Cowboy Day Cook A Long here. Hopefully my attempts will inspire you to bigger and better things on the day!

The recipe for Cowboy Caviar I used came from Cookie and Kate.

The Giant Martini recipe is here.

Kiss me and smile for me, I’ll be back here in a couple of weeks but if you can’t smile without me, I’ll be tweeting and instagramming from Bali throughout.

Loving you, leaving you, now!

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19
Jun
2016

Potted Cheese – Delicious Food, Impossible Ingredients

categories: Cheese, Leftovers, Starters, Wine

Hey there people of the internet!

Take a look at this super delicious snack plate. Good at any time – but my favourite? A snack plate, a sunny Sunday afternoon,sitting on my balcony with a good book and a cheeky glass of wine = heaven!

The star of this particular snack plate is some potted cheese. .

Which sadly relies on two ingredients that may as well be unicorn’s tears and dragon’s blood for the times they have ever been available in this kitchen. Just one of them is nigh on a miracle and as for both, you had better go outside and look up because that moon out there will be bluer than Tobias Funke!

So what are these two magical, nigh on mythical substances?

Leftover cheese
Leftover wine

Whoever has them? No one I want as a friend!

My cheeses were the remnants….actually it even pains me to say that. The cheeses were items from a cheese platter (probably the previous weeks snacking plate) that I had just not got around to eating yet. And I cheated and opened a bottle of wine to make this.

I used a goat’s cheese, a blue cheese, a pecorino pepato and some cheddar. You can use any cheese you have.

First up, place all your bits of cheese into a food processor and whiz it up! Then add in your flavourings – I added port, a splash of red wine, Worchestershire sauce, cayenne pepper and then, because it was a little dry after the first whiz through, a little more port and a bit of cream. My recipe is based on a classic one by Jane Grigson but you can play with the flavourings to suit your palate and your mix of cheese.

Once you have whizzed it all up , pop it into a pot:

The next step is optional but traditionally the pot was then sealed with a layer of clarified butter:

Why Potted Cheese?

The idea behind potted cheese is simple. Back in the day when refrigeration was not as it is today, cheese was far more perishable than now. Potting your ends of cheese prolonged it’s life – I’m guessing the booze helped to preserve it whilst the clarified butter seal stopped bacteria getting in.

Nowadays, it is done more because it tastes delicious than for the preserving factor.

What Can You Do With Potted Cheese?

OMG, so much. Have it on crackers with a glass of wine! Quick, easy, delicious.

Replace regular cheese in a grilled cheese sandwich! Here is my salami, potted cheese, red onion and tomato version. With a pickle to add some sharpness.

So much oozy goodness!

I haven’t made these next lot but I think potted cheese would be delicious used in the following ways:

Replace sour cream in a baked potato. Or add it to chips and gravy for a take on a poutine.
Saute some bacon or steam some broccoli (or do both), cook up some pasta, top with potted cheese and stir through the bacon or broccoli
Fill celery sticks, add a topping of chopped walnuts
Replace crackers on a snack plate with slices of apple or pear
Heat up a dollop, add some more cream if necesary and use as a mornay or gratin sauce over anything you want to mornay or gratin
Spread it on bread, make up a savory custard and you have a super strata to go!

[yumprint-recipe id=’67’]So, it’s Sunday and whilst not balcony sitting weather at all, I’ve got the fire going and Hollow City, the second book of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children good to go, so excuse me, I have a potted cheese snack plate to prepare! Dammit! Speaking of YA literature just made me realise I should have saved this for when The Cursed Child, the new Harry Potter comes out. I could have filled it with Harry Potter of cheese gags! Stay tuned for the re-post!

Have a fab week!

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04
Nov
2015

Vincent Price’s Buckingham Eggs Jaffle

categories: 1960's recipes, Anchovies, Bread, Breakfast, Brunch, Cheese, Eggs, Jaffle

You made a what???

For for those of you who are already totally confused, let me explain. A Jaffle is an Australian term for a toasted sandwich. And it is a much loved food for breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, supper, a midnight snack or any of the times inbetween.

And I made one based on Vincent Price’s Buckingham Eggs. And it was very good!

Like I guess many of my generation, the first real inkling I had of Vincent Price was as the voice in Thriller….

I had no idea he could not only cook, but cook like a boss, until I started blogging. It’s one of the reasons why I am so excited that the 50th edition of Vincent and Mary Price’s A Treasury of Great Recipes is about to be released. And I am reliably informed by Jenny of Silver Screen Suppers that, in her view, it is the best cookbook ever written! And Jenny knows her stuff!!!

Only a few more sleeps ’til that happens but first, Jenny invited her blogging pals to take part in a cookalong with some of Vincent and Mary’s recipes.

I hadn’t really intended on making the Buckingham Eggs for the cookalong . I was totally primed to make Vincent Price’s Champagne Chicken but, it was only 10:00am. Possibly a little too early for a roast dinner. But I was hungry and a jaffle seemed like the perfect thing to tide me over til dinner time. A quick glance at the fridge revealed eggs, cheese and anchovies. I had a thought process that went something like this:

You could make the Buckingham Eggs
But I want a jaffle
The Buckingham Eggs sound really good.
So does a jaffle.
Anchovy and Mustard butter…-
Egg and Cheese Jaffle
Hmm…what if we…
I like where you are going with this

And thus the Buckingham Eggs Jaffle was born. I’m sure neither Jenny or Vincent would disapprove of my tweaking the recipe slightly to satisfy both the devil and the angel on my shoulder! For the purists, here is a link to the original recipe as cooked by Jenny:

Buckingham Eggs

For my version make an English mustard and anchovy butter. I could not find any anchovy paste so I mushed up an anchovy. The mustard adds some heat and makes it a beautiful colour!I could just eat this on toast forever and be totally content!

But, wait, there’s more!

Eggs and cream and cheese and onions. I meant to add some Worchestershire Sauce but I totally forgot! Oh well, all the more reason to make it again next Sunday!

Now, add the onions to the egg mixture and scramble them really lightly. You need them to thicken up but still be quite moist as they will continue to cook once they are in the jaffle iron.

Now, butter both sides of the bread (if you’re feeling decadent ) or the one side if not. Place the buttered sides on the surface of the jaffle iron. This is important otherwise your bread will stick like crazy. Place the cheese on one side and the thickened egg mixture on the other side.

Fold The Iron over. Trim any bits of bread hanging out of the iron and place over a low heat.

The only tricky bit is that once the iron is closed you have no way of telling how much the inside has cooked unless you open it up and have a little peek. Make sure you turn it over at least once so both sides get toasty. As a general rule, once the outside is a dark golden colour, the inside will be perfect. This is the colour you are aiming for:

At the risk of sounding a bit hippy dippy, when cooked like this, the egg and cream mixture and the cheese become one in a gorgeous creamy melange. This is surrounded by crispy, salty, slightly spicy bread…..OMGZ delicious.

This made a super brunch, but if darkness is falling across the land and the midnight hour is close at hand, this would also make a super late night snack!

A massive thanks to Jenny for including me and to Vincent and Mary Price for the recipe.

For all the deets on the cookbook launch and activities around it, click any (ALL) of the links below:

Vincent Price Treasury Cookalong with Silver Screen Suppers

Vincent Price Legacy Tour – for details of celebratory events in the UK

Amazon Page for the 50th Edition of A Treasury of Great Recipes

Treasury of Great Recipes Facebook page

Silver Screen Suppers Facebook page

Champagne chicken up next! Stay tuned….

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