Mozzarella - Retro Food For Modern Times

Tag: Mozzarella

28
Oct
2023

October 2003 – The White Menu

categories: 20 Years Ago Today, Cheese, Cheesecake, Delicious, Desserts, Fish, Meat, Mozzarella

Hello retro food lovers and welcome to October 2003 where today I am using Delicious magazine to create a white menu. White food has the double reputation of being 1) boring and 2) overly processed so my aim with this menu was to try to combat both of those. But first, let’s take a look at what was happening in pop-culture in October 2003.

School of Rock was #1 at the box office and The Five People You Meet In Heaven was the best-selling book. Number 1 on the pop charts was Where Is The Love by The Black Eyed Peas. Two weeks earlier it was White Flag by Dido which would have fit in perfectly with this menu! Let’s hope I won’t have to wave a white flag with my menu!

Now I also realise that this view of my cheesecake is not white, however it just looked so good, I couldn’t resist sharing it!

The Menu – October 2003

I found this menu template on Etsy. Isn’t it gorgeous? We’ll be seeing it a lot more from now on!

Mozzarella and Grilled Chilli Salad

This was AMAZING! So tasty and the perfect way to kick off a meal! I loved the simplicity/minimalism of this Jamie Oliver recipe. It also not only looked beautiful on the plate but tasted divine! Another recipe from this same article, a squid and cannellini bean salad nearly made the cut for the main dish in the menu and is something I am still very keen to try!

Mozzarella and Grilled Chilli Salad Recipe

Fish Stew With Lemongrass and Lime

This is an Ainsley Harriott recipe and was also divine! It was light and refreshing and, as he says in his intro, very different from the usual tomato-based fish stews. Like the mozzarella starter, this would be a perfect summer meal.

Lemongrass and Lime Fish Stew Recipe

Low Fat Cheesecake

I felt bad that I could not deliver a cheesecake for the Birthday Party, Cheesecake, Jelly Bean, Boom! menu. Because I LOVE cheesecake! So I was delighted to find one in this issue of Delicious. And this was a beauty too. It’s a pretty classic baked cheesecake. Even though it is low fat, it feels rich, The rest of this menu is light though so this seemingly decadent dessert won’t weigh you down too much!

Low Fat Cheesecake Recipe

My Nigella Moment – Beef with Lavender Mustard

For first-time readers, this refers to the moment at the end of Nigella Lawson’s cooking shows when she sneaks back to the fridge to have another bite of something delicious. In the context of these Twenty Years Ago posts, it is something contained in the magazine that does not fit with the overall menu theme but I’m sneaking it in either because I made it and it was really good, or I just didn’t have time to make it but it was one of the most appetising things in the mag!

OMG, this beef just melted in my mouth! And if you’re thinking you don’t have any Lavender Mustard, come back next week. I’ll have a little treat for you. I added a spoonful of honey to my Lavender Mustard to give the required sweetness to this. Also, I misread the ingredients and I bought a rump roast and not rump steak for my version. I seared the meat as per the recipe and then roasted it until it reached 72C / 165F on my meat thermometer.

Well, Delicious Magazine from October 2003 really came through with a delicious white-themed menu for me! Certainly no Didoesque white flag moments for me!

12
Aug
2018

Macdedonian Grilled Cheese (Przeni Lepcinja)

categories: Bread, French Toast, Grilled Cheese, Macedonia, World Cooking

Grilled cheese is one of life’s little pleasures. Warm toasty bread, oozy melty grilled cheese…it doesn’t get better than this. Except in Macedonia where they top their grilled cheese with…wait for it….more cheese!!!

Today we’re continuing our visit to the Balkan States with a little look at Przeni Lepcinja – Macedonian grilled cheese.

Macedonian Grilled Cheese is essentially a cheesy French toast, topped with cheese. It’s delicious and so quick and easy to make!

The blend of creamy melted mozzarella and the salty feta cheese is great and perfect with the crisp french toast style bread!

I found the recipe for Macedonian Grilled Cheese here I’ve also copied it below. I served mine with a little tomato and red onion salsa that was very similar to the Sopska Salata featured here. Although given the double cheese abundance in the toast, I left the cheese out of the salad!

If you feel like something a bit more substantial, this is also great if you serve with a poached or fried egg on top…this I think also has a nice symmetry – cheesy eggy bread, topped with cheese and egg.

And now, just because I can, here’s a cheesy joke for you:

What’s cheese’s favourite music?

R ‘n’ Brie.

🤗

Cheesy and cheesy if you know what I mean.

Just like a Przeni Lepcinja!

Have a great 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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