Milk (53 page)

C
reaminess is a relative concept. Make cream cheese with the richest, heaviest cream you can find, and it may prove a disappointment. The curd sets up more satisfactorily and with better flavor if you aim for a higher protein content and lower fat content than that of heavy cream. (It still won’t behave exactly like the curd from cultured and renneted skim milk, but it will make a nice cheese.)

My idea of an agreeably creamy cream cheese starts with a mixture of about two parts whole milk—unhomogenized is best—to one part not-too-rich cream made by combining equal amounts of half-and-half and heavy cream—both also unhomogenized, if possible. Remember that what’s labeled half-and-half in one store might pass muster as light cream in another; there is no uniformity in these matters from region to region or even processor to processor.

Your advance planning for cream cheese should include both lining up some small weights and clearing the decks in the refrigerator for the last stage of draining.

YIELD:
About 2¼ cups of cheese, 6¾ cups of slightly sour whey (but every batch may be different; the richer the cream, the higher the proportion of cheese to whey)

Pour the milk, half-and-half, cream, and buttermilk into a saucepan. Set the pan on a heat deflector over very low heat and slowly heat the milk to about 98° to 100°F. Put the piece of rennet tablet in a small bowl or cup, crush it to a powder, and add a few tablespoons of water, stirring to dissolve it thoroughly.

Find a spot in a warm room where the pan of milk and cream can rest absolutely undisturbed for the better part of a day. Remove it from the heat, stir in the dissolved rennet, and loosely cover the pan with a kitchen towel. Let
the inoculated mixture sit without jostling or jiggling for 12 to 16 hours, or until you can see by very gently testing the edge with a spoon that it has become about as thick as sour cream. It should smell slightly sour.

Follow the directions on
this page
for preparing a cloth-lined colander set over a saucepan or other vessel, tying the cloth into a bag, and hanging it up to drain. After about 5 or 6 hours of draining you will have something approaching cream cheese, but it will still contain some residual whey. (Cream cheese has less of a casein matrix than milk-based cheese to squeeze out moisture from the interior.) Get the cloth-swaddled curd arranged in the colander so that you can place a weight on it. A few beach stones are good, or something like a few heavy cans set on a small plate. For years I used a couple of my husband’s 2-pound lead diving weights (on a plate, natch). Put the whole affair over a bowl in the refrigerator until the curd is about as firm as commercial cream cheese and virtually no whey is coming from it. This may take another 6 to 10 hours—some batches drain more cooperatively than others. Check it at intervals.

Turn out the drained cheese into a mixing bowl and taste it. It should be beautifully creamy but not cloying, with a fresh lactic-acid flavor. Beat it smooth with a wooden spoon and work in a little salt. It will keep in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for about a week.

L
ight,” that is, by comparison with the previous example. But please don’t expect anything “lite.” To me this is the ideal cream cheese. I think it strikes just the right balance between creamy and cheesy. It also spreads a little more easily than the preceding version.

The yield is nearly the same as for “creamy” cream cheese (a tiny bit more whey and less cheese). The procedure is identical. The ingredients are 7 cups unhomogenized whole milk, 1 cup rich half-and-half or light cream, ½ cup gumless and saltless cultured buttermilk (at least 1.5 percent milkfat), ½ unflavored Junket brand rennet tablet, and ½ to ¾ teaspoon salt. Follow the directions in the preceding recipe; the cheese will drain a little more quickly and more completely. It will also be slightly more perishable. Allow a day or two less keeping time.

I
n the heyday of the Lyon silk industry,
canuts
was local slang for weavers in the region’s mills. Apparently some wag decided that this strong and highly seasoned cheese spread—clearly a counterpart of Liptauer cheese and Greek
tyrokafteri—
resembled what silk weavers used for brains.

Any unripened curd cheese will do as the foundation of a pleasant copy, but American-style cottage cheese or ricotta should be well drained of whey and either beaten smooth in a food processor or worked through a fine-mesh strainer. Of course it tastes best when made with a homemade fresh white cheese or good commercial fromage blanc. The seasonings can vary widely as long as shallot and chives predominate. I tend to think that the fewer herbs, the better.

YIELD:
About 2 cups

Work the cheese smooth with a wooden spoon. Mince the shallots very fine; crush the garlic (if using) to a paste with the flat of a knife blade. Mince or snip the chives very fine, together with the chervil and other optional herbs. Work all these seasonings into the cheese along with salt and pepper. Beat in the wine or vinegar, oil, and cream. Let sit in the refrigerator, well covered, for at least an hour before serving it as a spread for coarse country bread or dip for crudités.

S
ay what you will of commercial American cream cheese made by the standard hot-pack method with an array of gums (see
this page
), the fact remains that it is
useful.
This truth dawned on a large public during Prohibition and Repeal, when booze-absorbing cocktail nibbles for one-handed eating multiplied like rabbits. In contrast to the elaborately decorated canapés of the previous era, they tended to require almost no time or attention on anyone’s part. Cream cheese turned out to be the perfect all-purpose vehicle for many of the new filler-uppers. Having a pleasantly neutral flavor that clashed with nothing, it could be almost instantly mixed to a kind of cement for chopped olives, bacon, sweet pickle relish, raisins, or some stronger cheese like Roquefort.

Ashkenazic Jews viewed cream cheese a little differently, as uniting the handier qualities of Russian-style sour cream and pot cheese. (A few places on New York’s Lower East Side continued to make their own cream cheese—sometimes really creamy cold-pack versions—until the last years of the twentieth century. But by then only a handful of diehards cared about the difference.) People took to putting cream cheese on bread or rolls, either plain or mixed with something else—for instance, some member of the onion fraternity. By the 1950s “scallion cream cheese” or “chive cream cheese” was an indispensable Sunday brunch adjunct to bagels and bialys. By the turn of the twenty-first century it was being presented as a dip for crudités, widely sold in prepackaged versions that don’t hold a candle to anything you can mix yourself—especially if the cream cheese is homemade or gum-free.

Scallion (or chive) cream cheese scarcely needs a recipe. For every cup (8 ounces) of cream cheese, use a few tablespoons of cream or whole milk and two or three large scallions (the white and a few inches of the green part), cleaned, trimmed, and coarsely chopped. Mash everything together with a wooden spoon, adding cream a tablespoon at a time to make a spread (thicker) or dip (thinner) and using as much or as little scallion as you like. It will keep for several days in the refrigerator, tightly covered, but be sure to let it warm to room temperature before using.

VARIATIONS:
There are dozens of other possibilities. I like cream-cheese spread or dip made with a few crunchy raw vegetables, for instance, shredded carrots and minced celery. Clam dip with minced clams (usually canned) and a
few seasonings like a little garlic, prepared horseradish, and/or Tabasco sauce is a Superbowl party perennial. People also love smoked fish, especially salmon, in cream-cheese dips and spreads. Roasted red peppers (coarsely chopped) are wonderful. There is a big fan club of blue-cheese dips. In fact, nearly any of the suggestions for sour-cream dips on
this page
can be easily adapted for use with cream cheese, as long as you thin the cheese slightly with cream. Some people add mayonnaise for easier spreading, but I like the flavor better without it.

L
ike many American cooks, I first met Liptauer cheese as a spread made from ordinary cottage cheese (generally enriched with butter) or cream cheese, with a little paprika, caraway, onion, and/or anchovy paste. And such versions are perfectly good in their own way. But Liptauer cheese really started as something more characterful.

Its historical and culinary career involves many confusing wrinkles. In the first place, the popular Austrian and German name “Liptauer” refers to a Slovakian district that was once a county named Liptó in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. Long ago it received a large influx of Vlach (Wallachian) sheepherders from parts of present-day Romania and Moldava. Through them, sheep’s milk became dominant in local dairying. The cheese called Liptovsky/Liptoi/Liptauer was a version of sheep’s-milk “bryndza,” or “
brinza”—the name for
brined cheeses like feta throughout much of Eastern Europe, locally Germanized to “Brimsen”—that came from Romania with the Vlachs. It is still made in the former Liptó county.

The eponymous “Liptauer cheese,” meaning the seasoned spread made from the cheese itself, originally was nothing but a western cousin of
Greek Tyrokafteri
. Before commercial versions were developed, it was a household or farmstead production whose flavor and texture varied with the quality of the main ingredient—younger/older, milder/saltier, softer/firmer. When the dish caught on along the western Danube, the usual local farmer cheese or pot cheese made from cows’ milk generally replaced brined sheep’s-milk cheese.

In the course of its Austro-Hungarian adventures, “Liptauer cheese”—the spread, that is—acquired a lacing of sweet paprika
and caraway seeds, usually with some chopped onion. There are factory versions with these seasonings or others already mixed in. It usually has a good dose of butter (corresponding to the Greek olive oil) worked into the cheese. Some people consider it incomplete without capers, dry or prepared mustard, or anchovies.

I have come to like Liptauer made with sheep’s-milk feta. But Liptauers based on fresh cows’-milk cheese now have a long track record of their own that merits a separate version. The proportions are highly elastic; don’t hesitate to use more or less of any seasoning.

YIELD:
About 2 cups

Coarsely crumble the cheese or cut it into largish (1-inch) chunks. Put it in a bowl and let stand, covered with cold water, for between half an hour and 1 hour. Change the water once or twice and taste a bit of cheese for saltiness (but remember that the butter will further dilute the briny flavor). When it is desalted to your liking, drain it in a colander until it stops dripping.

Either process the drained cheese in a food processor or blender with the butter, paprika, and caraway, or use a stout wooden spoon to force the cheese and butter through a coarse-mesh sieve into a bowl. Add the onion and optional garlic or chives and process for a few seconds longer, or work them in with the spoon. Let stand at room temperature 1 to 2 hours, to let the flavors develop. Serve it as a spread for good bread, preferably pumpernickel or Jewish rye; it’s also excellent with crisp fresh radishes and scallions.

YIELD:
About 2 cups

Omit the soaking of the cheese; otherwise combine the ingredients as directed in the previous recipe, adding any or all of the stronger-flavored seasonings in small increments to taste.

VARIATIONS:
Many people like cream cheese as a Liptauer base, though I find it lacking in texture. For this version, omit the butter and use two 8-ounce packages of cream cheese.

The farmer cheese can also be replaced with an equal amount of a fresh young goat cheese.