Farmer Cheese, Honey-Tahini and Blueberry Breakfast Toast

Our house is undergoing renovations.  For the past month, the kitchen has been dismantled. Refrigerator is in the dining room.  Stove is disconnected.  To cook, we have to rely on the microwave, toaster oven, and outdoor grill.  To shower, we have to go around to the attached studio out back. It feels like camping.

This morning, I was tired of cereal.  I wanted something fast, tasty, salt free and (if possible) Slovenian in spirit.

I am not sure if this tasty breakfast toast qualifies as Slovenian-inspired.  At least it is Eastern Euro-inspired, with honey-tahini spread from Kosovo and Russian-style farmer cheese (made by the Belfiore Company, right here in Berkeley.)    It also qualifies as low-sodium, with salt-free bread and farmer cheese and (I assume) tahini-honey spread without any salt.

Farmer cheese, Honey-Tahini, and Blueberry Breakfast Toast

1 slice whole grain bread (low sodium preferred!)
curd cheese or farmer cheese
honey-tahini spread
fresh blueberries

Toast bread.  Spread with a thin layer of honey-tahini spread.  Add a layer of cheese. Top with a sprinkle of fresh blueberries.  Finish with a drizzle of honey-tahini spread.

The verdict:  Easy, healthy and so delicious it tastes like dessert!

Enjoy!

Homemade Curd Cheese (Skuta), Step-by-Step

This is the simplest approach I have found to making curd cheese, otherwise known as farmer cheese, bakers cheese or (if you are Slovenian) as skuta.

For some background on this homestyle delicacy, see my previous post. I arrived at this simple recipe after reviewing many sources on the Internet.  Later on, I discovered another recipe, virtually identical, in Janez Bogataj's The Food and Cooking of Slovenia (2008.)

These recipes appear under a variety of labels.  Curd cheese and farmer cheese seem to have given way to Indian paneer or Italian ricotta in popularity. But they are all variations on a theme: simple, unripened cheeses, in which an acid is used to separate curds from whey.

The recipe below can easily turn into paneer, if enough moisture is pressed out. Technically, it is not really ricotta, although it makes a decent substitute.  Ricotta means "re-cooked" and is based on the whey that is left after making a rennet-based cheese.

This is an approach more than a recipe.  You can experiment and adjust.  The only absolute no-no is ultra-pasteurized milk, because it won't work.

A helpful and amusing comparison of the various approaches to making this style of cheese can be found on Serious Eats, in a Food Lab article, here.  (Yes, the writer refers to his cheese as Five Minute Ricotta and then admits in the small print that it's not really the same thing!)

Ready?  As the Serious Eats article says, it's simple: Heat milk, add acid, drain, enjoy!

Homemade Curd Cheese


8 cups (or use 2 litres) fresh milk (see note)
2-4 T. fresh lemon juice or white vinegar (I have used both)

cheesecloth
colander or strainer
twine

Note:  Any variety of fresh cow's milk should work, as long as it is not ultra-pasteurized. Check the label to be sure.  I use organic milk.



Before you begin: Rinse two layers of cheesecloth in cold water and line a colander or strainer. (In the old days, when salt was sold in a cloth bag, my grandmother used that instead.) Place strainer in large bowl.

Pour milk into a large nonreactive pot or kettle.  Heat slowly, stirring occasionally, until milk is just below the boiling point.  Be careful that bottom doesn't burn.

Turn off heat.  Drizzle 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar into the milk and stir gently until the curds form. (The curds are the white lumps. The whey is the greenish-yellow liquid.) If curds do not appear, turn the heat back on and slowly drizzle in more lemon juice or vinegar until the curds and whey separate.

After curds form, let the mixture sit undisturbed for 10 minutes.

Ladle the mixture into the lined colander and allow the whey to drain into the bowl, pouring off as needed.  (Save the whey for another use, like bread-making.)

Here we come to a choice point.  How to drain the curds.

The easiest and simplest approach is to let the curds drain for 5 minutes in the colander, remove, and use immediately or refrigerate.  This results in a soft texture that probably resembles cottage cheese or ricotta.  (I have never done it this way because I am not setting out to make five minute ricotta!)

I recommend the more traditional route: Draw the corners of the cheesecloth together, squeeze to remove even more whey, and tie the cheesecloth with twine (or simply tie up the ends of the cheesecloth) to make a firm package of cheese.  You can drain it by simply letting the cheese rest in the colander.  Or you can suspend it from a kitchen faucet or from a spoon placed over a pail. Some sources (like that Slovenian cookbook) suggesting rinsing the curds in cold water before draining.

How long to drain?

The Slovenian cookbook suggests several hours of draining, before unwrapping and refrigerating.  This will give you a semi-solid mass that can be crumbled and used for cooking.  It has a mild, fresh, slightly sweet taste that is perfect for desserts.  It is also ideal for making simple appetizer spreads, like Pumpkin Oil Cheese Spread or a new one I just discovered: Curd Cheese with Onion, or Koroška skuta s čebulo. (Recipe follows.)

Here is the optional final step: Shaping and pressing, which creates the equivalent of paneer.

After an initial draining, twist and squeeze the cheesecloth-wrapped curds into a round, flat cake.  Set it on a rimmed plate.  Top with another plate, and place a heavy weight (like a large can) on top.  Leave in the refrigerator overnight.

When you unwrap the next day, you will find a nice, firm round of white cheese.  When cut into slices, it resembles fresh mozarella and can be used in the same way.  For a delicious appetizer, slice the round of cheese and drizzle with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and fresh basil leaves.

Are you wondering about the absence of salt?

The salt is omitted in many, if not most, of the traditional recipes for curd cheese and paneer. Others, like that Five Minute Ricotta recipe, do add a little.  But even if you are not trying to cut down on sodium, you are better off leaving out the salt, until you figure out what to do with the finished product.  If the cheese will end up in a sweet dessert, the salt is unnecessary.

That's the beauty of this recipe.  You are fully in control of what goes into it.  It's just milk. Raw or organic, homogenized or not.  Full fat, low fat, or fat free.   Just make sure it's not ultra-pasterized.

And do stick to cow's milk. I got the bright idea of trying to make a salt-free goat cheese, but I couldn't get the milk to curdle properly. So I rescued it by making a sort of grainy yogurt, which I then drained in a coffee filter to make yogurt goat cheese.  It was good, but way too time-consuming.



Below are photos of the cheese-making process, start to finish.

Stay tuned for more recipes using this tasty home-style cheese.

Fresh Curd Cheese: An Easy, Delicious Salt-Free Staple

Curd cheese. Farmer cheese.  Baker's cheese.  Pot cheese. Hoop cheese.

Ring a bell?

If any of these are familiar ingredients in your kitchen, there is a good chance that your roots are Eastern European or Jewish.  If not, you probably grew up on the East Coast or in parts of the Midwest where people from these communities lived.

When I was growing up in Cleveland and Chicago, a product called "dry curd cottage cheese" was carried by most grocery stores, right alongside the familiar creamy variety. My mother, like most people, used this dry, mild cottage cheese for baking.  Most often, she used it to make the sweet filling for cheese blintzes.  (She never did let on that this was a Slovenian dish as well as a Jewish one!)

As a child, I was fascinated by the taste of dry curd cottage cheese.  I always managed to sneak a little sample, before my mother put it through the food mill and added sugar, vanilla, and eggs.  It was dry, tart and almost aggressively bland.  An empty canvas, waiting to be transformed.

Somewhere along the way, dry curd cottage cheese seems to have disappeared. Sometimes I could find  something similar: firm rectangular blocks of Friendship farmer cheese, shaped like cream cheese but with the taste more like dry curd cottage cheese. But eventually, even farmer cheese became harder to find, especially after we moved to California.

Most often, if I needed to make a cheese filling for either a sweet or savoury dish, I ended up substituting regular cottage cheese or (as the years went on) Italian ricotta.  But it wasn't quite the same.

During my just-completed year of Slovenian cooking, I discovered even more dishes that called for curd cheese fillings.  An elaborate dessert called prekmusrka gibanica or strudel pie.  Savoury dumplings like štruklji and žlifkrofi.  Ajdovi krapi or buckwheat turnovers.  And even a nice cheese spread with pumpkin seed oil.  At first, I just used ricotta, and it was fine.

But I was thrilled to find a wonderful local source of farmer cheese in a shop right around the corner. It is called Farmers Cheese, Russian style, made by Belfiore Cheese Company in Berkeley.  It comes in rectangular tubs.  This cheese has a delicious tang and is a little moister than the dry curd cottage cheese or the block-style farmer cheese I used to be able to find.  It became my baking cheese of choice for ethnic dishes.

Since I now had a fine local source, it would never have occurred to me to consider making my own curd cheese if I hadn't taken on the challenge of salt-free cooking.

It was all because of Sodium Girl (of course!) who had written a funny but informative blog post about paneer, the Indian cheese that shows up as firm white cubes in any number of delicious vegetarian dishes.  She had become a big fan of paneer because, unlike almost all other cheeses, it is usually prepared without added salt.  She also noted that it is easy to make at home and included a link to a simple recipe. (Take a look at her full post, Paneer is Here.)

So that got me combing the Internet for paneer recipes.  And I quickly learned that paneer is one of a family of simple, uncured homestyle cheeses. Remember Little Miss Muffet who sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey?  Well, these cheeses are the curds minus the whey.

Farmer cheese and pot cheese.  Russian tvorog and Indian paneer.  Mexican quesco fresco and Slovenian skuta.  Every culture seems to have a version.  They are variations on a theme. They all begin the same way.  Milk is heated, and then an acid (usually lemon juice or vinegar) is stirred in, to separate the curds and whey.  In other words, the milk curdles.  The curds are drained and either left as dry crumbles or pressed into a firmer cake or block.

Sometimes a cultured milk product, like yogurt or buttermilk, is added along with the vinegar or lemon juice.  There are various degrees of sitting, heating, and pressing involved.  Some recipes do call for a little salt at the beginning, but most seem to wait until the cheese is in its final form before adding.

Salt-free cheese.  It seemed too good to be true. I had assumed that any farmer cheese or curd cheese I bought would have at least some added salt.   Besides, I was intrigued. So I set out to make my own.

As it turns out, I was wrong to assume that commercially-made farmer cheese and curd cheese always contain added salt. Belfiore, my local brand, does not.  But I'm glad I didn't discover this until recently, or I might not have set off on my cheese-making adventures.

Here is an interesting article about the history, disappearance and re-emergence of farmer cheese, with a nice mention of my two favorite brands:  New York-based Friendship and Berkeley's own Belfiore.

Ready to try making curd cheese yourself?  Take a look at the next post for a step-by-step recipe.

Slovenian Dinner Week 28: Buckwheat Ravioli with Cheese-Millet Filling, Vegetarian and Gluten-Free!

Menu
Buckwheat Ravioli with Cheese-Millet Filling (Ajdovi Krapi)
Ajvar and Greek Yogurt
Parsley Chicken ā la Jacques Pépin
Green Salad

I first discovered buckwheat pockets, or buckwheat ravioli, in the bilingual vegetarian cooking blog of a young Slovenian woman. The ingredients seemed so simple and wholesome: buckwheat flour, farmer cheese, millet.

The Slovenian name she gave for the dish was ajdovi krapi.  (I-dough-vee krah-pee). There was nothing like it in my vintage Slovenian American cookbooks.  So I figured this must be her original creation.  A vegetarian twist that was far removed from traditional, meat-heavy Slovenian cooking.

But I was wrong.

A few months later, I discovered a half dozen references to this wholesome traditional dumpling,  sometimes with recipes included.  Ajdovi krapi turned up on Slovenian government websites, on blogs, and in an except from a recent book by a Slovenian cooking expert.  But that original blog had disappeared.

To figure out a recipe, I had to do my own metric conversions, and sometimes my own translations.  As usual, Google Translate was an awkard tool.  The low point was one surreal suggestion about how to serve these intriguing dumplings:

". . . top with sour cream and cold sores."

Umm, no thanks!  Sour cream and cracklings, the correct translaton, did sound a little more appetizing, but I liked the idea of a meat-free entree.  If nothing else, it would be a change of pace.

This project turned out to be more challenging than I expected.

It started with the Russian-style farmer cheese I bought for the filling.  When I opened the container,  I discovered a strange fuzzy film of mold on top.  Luckily, the cheese shop was just around the corner, so I was able to exchange it without too much trouble.

Then, perhaps because of the metric conversions, I ended up pouring too much water into the buckwheat flour.  And I forgot that I had never made an all-buckwheat dough before. So I was a little thrown by the sticky mass and had to knead in more more flour.

Ultimately, it all worked out.  Read on!




Buckwheat Ravioli/Ajdovi Krapi


1 1/2 cups buckwheat flour
1/4 c. boiling salted water  (more if needed)
1 egg, beaten

1/2 c. millet, cooked in boiling salted water and drained
1 1/2 cups farmer cheese or ricotta
1 egg, beaten
salt to taste
fresh parsley to taste, minced

First,  make the filling: Cook millet in boiling salted water for 20 minutes.  Drain and cool. Mix in cheese, egg, salt, and parsley.  Refrigerate.

For dough: Pour about 1/4 c. boiling salted water into buckwheat flour and stir with a spoon to make a stiff dough.  Let cool slightly, then add egg and knead until smooth. Cover and let sit for 30 minutes.

Roll out the buckwheat dough on a floured board, thinly, as for noodles.

For shaping the ravioli, there are a few choices.   Typically, squares or rounds of dough are folded over a spoonful of filling.  But the all-buckwheat dough didn't seem pliable enough for that.  So I decided to sandwich together pairs of  3-inch rounds. (See the photo below.)  Don't forget to seal the edges with a fork!

Cook the ravioli, a few at a time, in boiling salted water for 20 minutes.  Drain.

For serving, there are two traditional accompaniments: Buttered bread crumbs, or sour cream and cracklings :-)

For that first night,  I kept it simple and light: Plain boiled ravioli with ajvar and yogurt.  My husband decided to contribute one of his favorite quick entrees, from a Jacques Pépin recipe: boneless chicken sauteed with garlic and parsley.  (I suspect he had some doubts about how my buckwheat dumplings would turn out!)

The next night, we went completely vegetarian.  My husband sauteed the leftover ravioli with  mushrooms and red peppers.  With a green salad alongside, it was a fine dinner.

The verdict:  Delicious and versatile!  We kept on eating these wholesome buckwheat dumplings all week long.   I froze some for my Slovenian American mom to try.  She was the lone dissenting voice.  She didn't recall anything like this from her childhood in Cleveland.  "Too dry," she thought.

Buckwheat does have a hearty, assertive flavor.  For the faint of heart, the dough can be made with a blend of buckwheat and white wheat flour, as I did with my struklji recipe.  But we liked it this way!

Here are is how it looked, step-by-step: