EXERCISE 4 While the inoculated batch is souring, turn your attention to the remaining skim milk. For each quart of milk you will need about 2 tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice or 1 to 1½ tablespoons of distilled white vinegar (please, no fancy vinegars here!).
Quickly bring the milk to a boil. Turn off the heat, stir in the lemon juice or vinegar, and take the pan off the stove. The milk will quickly separate into a soft fluffy-looking (the technical term is “flocculent”) substance and a thin greenish-white liquid. If the separation is not fairly distinct, add more lemon juice or vinegar (about 1 tablespoon per quart of milk).
Dampen a piece of tight-woven cheesecloth (not the gauzy stuff) or a large cotton handkerchief, wring it out, and use it to line a colander set over a deep bowl. Pour and scrape the contents of the pan into the colander, then gather up the corners of the cloth and tie them together securely to make a bag. After a few minutes’ draining, lift up the bag and put it somewhere to drain more completely. I usually suspend it on a long wooden spoon placed across the top of a pail or deep stockpot. Leave it until the liquid stops dripping, which may be anywhere from four to more than eight hours.
Meanwhile, taste some of the greenish liquid that drained into the bowl. You probably know that this is “whey” and the solider white stuff is “curd,” or “curds.” The flavor of whey depends on the method used for separating it from the curd. This batch may be almost imperceptibly sour from the lemon juice or vinegar, but there will still be something definitely milky about it—though without the body of whole or skim milk. Set it aside, at room temperature or in the refrigerator. When the curd is drained, transfer it to any convenient container and taste a spoonful. It will be quite bland and delicate, a little like a closer-grained ricotta cheese (which is based on a similar idea).
You have now removed the suspended phase of the milk from the aqueous solution that it was suspended in. The solution is no longer white and opaque because it has lost the components—milkfat globules and still more importantly casein—that make milk milky-looking by refracting light off their surfaces. Line up the whey, curd, and previously separated cream, and you will see the three phases of milk side by side, as well isolated from one another as they can be by low-tech home methods developed thousands of years ago.
There are really several possible means of separating curd and whey. The one given here happens to be the simplest for American home cooks. It is a classic method in northern India, where Western-style cheese is unknown. Like all other ways of producing curd, it persuades the tiny casein micelles to come together in large enough clusters to literally fall—chemists say “precipitate”—out of the whey by the force of gravity. What you did was to combine the action of heat and an acidulant, which join forces to precipitate curd faster than any other method.
You can eat the curd as is, or perhaps turn it into a spread with a dash of salt and some minced scallion and/or green chile. It is the chhenna described more fully on this page and used in several of my Indian recipes (see Vegetarian Malai Kofta, and Saag Panir).
EXERCISE 5 You can easily see that your efforts have produced more whey than anything else. In earlier and thriftier dairying eras, all the whey drained from curd got used. Today millions of pounds are literally thrown down the drain—except where prohibited by local environmental regulations—because the amount that can be put to any halfway profitable purpose is only a fraction of the volumes produced in commercial cheesemaking. But if you seriously love making the dairy foods that yield whey as a by-product, you will eventually want to try finding a good use for it.
Whey comes in two basic forms. You have just tasted one of them, “sweet” (i.e., unfermented) whey. This is very bland, because the acidulant that you used to curdle the milk was too mild to impart much of an acid taste. The alternative is “sour” whey. To make it, inoculate the bowl of whey with live-culture “buttermilk” or plain yogurt by stirring in anything from ¼ to ½ cup per quart just as you did with the first batch of skim milk; leave it to culture in exactly the same way, tasting it occasionally to follow the souring process.
You may already be familiar with another excellent version of sour whey, the liquid that separates from drained yogurt. For more about forms of whey and their uses, see “Fresh Cheeses.” But for a first experiment I suggest either mixing sweet whey with enough sugar and lemon juice to jazz it up a bit or seasoning sour whey with a vigorous pinch each of salt and dried mint. Both versions are extremely refreshing poured over ice cubes.
EXERCISE 6 The cream obtained in Exercise 2 has one more trick to play, if you haven’t already put it on strawberries. For those who couldn’t get unhomogenized milk and are working with “boughten” cream, the general idea is the same. In both cases you are going to get two results—very small in quantity, but thought-provoking for any real cook—from one batch of cream.
I suggest doing or at least trying to do this by hand. It’s laborious, but enables you to track critical stages of change more closely than any other method. People who have had to settle for ultrapasteurized cream may need to use a handheld immersion blender, but I recommend first seeing how far you can get without it.
Have the previously skimmed cream or half a pint of commercial heavy cream in a small glass bowl or measuring cup. Both cream and container should be very cold when you begin, because the amount is small enough to easily become overwarmed through simple friction. Start rapidly agitating it with a small wire whisk. Large bubbles will appear, then stop appearing. The whole consistency will gradually become heavier. (This will take longer with ultrapasteurized cream.) Keep plying the whisk until you recognize the beginnings of whipped cream.
In technical terms, you have incorporated air into the mass while partly knocking apart the remarkably constructed membrane that surrounds each milkfat globule. Some dislodged components of the membrane now form walls around the air bubbles. Whipped cream is not your present goal, so go on beating the cream stiffer and stiffer until the whisk will scarcely move through it. Keep watching the pace of change. After a longer or shorter interval (once more depending on variables beyond your control) you will see a bit of liquid seeping from the stiff, heavy foam. Keep on whisking, and the whipped cream will resolve itself into a grainy yellow-white substance and a thin, cloudy whitish liquid.
Scrape the wires of the whisk as clean as you can, and beat the half-separated components with a small wooden spoon to separate them further. Drain the liquid into a small cup; work the yellow stuff with the spoon to force out any more residue, and drain that off, too.
You have now produced butter and true buttermilk by wrestling your way through a phenomenon known as phase inversion. The cream at the start of the proceedings still consisted of milkfat globules emulsified in the underlying solution, which held the fat globules as a fabric may hold tiny beads or sequins. The solution—not too far removed from the whey you saw in the curd experiment—at that time formed what is known as a continuous phase, with the milkfat globules sprinkled throughout as a dispersed phase. (The suspended casein micelles that later came together as curd were a whole different dispersed phase; you may now be starting to see why food chemists never tire of pointing out that milk is an incredibly complex substance.) Agitating the system forcefully enough eventually causes the separate globules of fat to unite in a coherent mass, squeezing out most of the original wheylike solution. Most of this liquid will drain from the mass as you work it, but not quite all.
In a switch of roles, the previously dispersed milkfat has become the continuous phase: butter. The tiny amount of the original solution/suspension that hasn’t drained off now remains scattered through the mass in minuscule droplets of true buttermilk as the dispersed phase of a suddenly inverted emulsion.
Examine the buttermilk. Its main difference from the whey that you obtained before is that it retains whatever casein was in the original cream. (This is why it looks whiter.) Taste it. In spite of starting with a gallon of milk, you unfortunately don’
t have enough to do anything more with, but at least you can recognize it as a pleasant cousin of both sweet whey and milk. If you had cultured the cream before churning it, the buttermilk—the liquid residue of the phase-inversion process—would be more like soured milk. (What is sold in today’s America as “buttermilk” is really a kind of soured milk similar to the version you tasted in Exercise 3.) In dairying parlance, the culturing of cream for butter often is called “ripening.”
If you ever make ripened butter by the directions in “Butter and True Buttermilk” and sample the resulting buttermilk, probably you will scratch your head in puzzlement at the complete unavailability of real ripened buttermilk in any part of this country.
The small amount of cream used here yields only a little butter—but oh, what celestial stuff! Put it in the refrigerator to chill briefly. (Butter most emphatically is not among the foods that reveal their ultimate perfections when left to bask in the warmth of an American kitchen.) Dig out a bit on a spoon and eat it, trying to concentrate on every microsecond of its delicate passage from solid to melted. Spread some on a plain cracker or piece of sturdy bread and eat it. If there is enough left, scrape it out onto a helping of piping hot cooked vegetables or noodles. It is like the Platonic essence of the cream you tasted earlier, containing tiny, elusive vestiges of the original fresh skim milk together with the suave, luscious, ineffable newly churned butter. It is not as wonderful in consistency as butter made by very good professionals who know the ideal temperature for different batches of cream. But the flavor ought to make any butter lover wonder how manufacturers have the nerve to call some of their wares “butter.”
WHAT HAVE WE BEEN MISSING?
Now, what exactly have you proved by all these exertions? After all, anyone can buy the results of the foregoing experiments (or nearly all of them) as separate products. Most of them won’t taste as good, but doesn’t the convenience of being able to get ready-made butter, skim milk, and so forth compensate for some small loss of quality?
Well, yes and no. If you’ve eaten good fresh dairy products, you’ll know that the loss of quality is not small. But there’s something else at issue here. You started out with one single batch of milk that was as close as practicable to the state in which it emerged from the cow. (True, it was pasteurized, but that didn’t greatly impair its fitness for our purposes.) The amount was not huge. But through an alchemy not hopelessly beyond everyday American kitchens, it supplied you with not only delicious whole milk but wonderful fresh cream, skim milk fit to drink with pleasure rather than resignation, refreshing soured skim milk, nutrient-rich curd and whey (whose versatility I’ve barely hinted at), a bit of truly lovely butter, and a tantalizing soupçon of real buttermilk. It could have yielded still other transformations—for instance, yogurt, yogurt “cheese,” junket, pot cheese and several other fresh cheeses, or clotted cream. Some of these can also be made from the so-called whole milk that we’re all familiar with—it bears repeating that by no stretch of the imagination is commercial U.S. whole milk really whole—or from other standard offerings in the supermarket dairy case. But they are better when they are, so to speak, mined from the original ore that is true whole milk.
Why should all the white magic be left to the big dairy processors and not the home cook? It’s as if the only way people could buy wheat were as cake flour, prepackaged cake mix, biscuit mix, white sauce mix, frozen bread dough, flavored instant bulgur, and so forth. How could any cook ever learn to understand what wheat itself is all about? How could any consumer ever fathom the sheer wastefulness of a corporate machinery geared up to make one of the world’s most ancient foods available only in the form of superspecialized products meant to fill arbitrary little retail-sales slots, while excluding the incredibly versatile basic material that could furnish better homemade versions of them all?
Since none of us lives in some ideal realm of pristine ingredients, most of my recipes are based on easily obtainable versions of cows’ milk, butter, and so forth. But I would like users of this book to keep thinking of the tangible, tastable culinary magic that is ancient applied dairy chemistry. Not so long ago, millions of ordinary people could readily perform this magic in their own homes. We still should be able to recapture it. If more cooks understand that they, too, can manipulate the miraculous complexities of milk to splendid culinary purpose, their voices may move the American dairy industry to bring us the basic substance in less technologically manhandled and denatured form.
FRESH MILK AND CREAM
Introduction
Label Babel: Buying Milk and Cream
Cream, Whipped and Unwhipped: Some Thoughts
Clotted Cream
Mascarpone
New Englandish Clam Chowder
Cream of Tomato Soup
Apple-Onion Cream Soup
Vichyssoise
Milk Toast
“White Sauce” or Sauce Béchamel Maigre
Ají de Leche (Venezuelan Milk-Chile Infusion)
Spicy-Milky Peanut Sauce
Pan Gravy with Cream
Chhenna and Panir
Vegetarian Malai Kofta
Saag Panir or Palak Panir
“Corn Kees” (Gujarati Stovetop Corn Pudding)
Irish Champ (Mashed Potatoes with Milk and Greens)
Scalloped Potatoes
Creamed Spinach, Madame Saint-Ange (Épinards à la Crème)
Chinese “Fried Milk”
Rice Pudding
Chocolate Pudding
Panna Cotta and Relatives
Cremets d’Angers
Lemon Sponge Pudding
About Vanilla Ice Cream
Vanilla Ice Cream I: Custard-Based
Vanilla Ice Cream II: Philadelphia-Style
Crème Anglaise (Stirred Custard)
Cajeta Mexicana (Mexican Dulce de Leche)
Dulce de Leche with Canned Condensed Milk
Batidos (Latin American Milkshakes)
Thai-Style Iced Coffee
Hot Chocolate
Chocolate Malted
Hoppelpoppel: Eggnog with a Difference
Milk Punch
To most American cooks, the idea of ordinary milk or cream as a vehicle of vivid or concentrated flavors comes as a surprise. We’re more used to encountering them in gentle contexts where no one expects them to be anything but bland, and where that quality can be seen as a virtue. Indeed, sometimes it is a virtue. But there’s a lot more to milk-based cookery than mild-mannered innocuousness.
A simple first step for starting to think outside the box: Take about two cups of milk—any kind from skim to whole will do—and a few ounces of strong-flavored smoked fish like chub, whitefish, Finnan haddie, or kippered herring. If none of these is easy to find, substitute a chopped raw onion. Put the fish or onion in a small dish, pour the milk over it, and let sit for four to twelve hours, well covered, in the refrigerator or at room temperature.
Strain the milk through a fine mesh sieve and taste it. It will have picked up either a distinct fishy-smoky edge or an equally definite pungency from the onion. Even plain water will leach out salt from foods, but water doesn’t have the property of becoming subtly and complexly infused with other essences. One of milk’s signature qualities is the tenacity with which its more volatile or reactive components latch on to reactive counterparts in more strongly flavored foods. This really should be considered a useful talent. Your fishy or oniony milk would make a wonderful cooking liquid—say, as part of a roux-based milk sauce or the foundation of a chowder.
As this mini-exercise suggests, American cooks usually have very limited experience in exploiting some fascinating aptitudes of plain milk and cream. Models of suavity and creaminess we have aplenty, and I’m certainly not turning up my nose at those qualities or planning to forgo demurely luscious incarnations of milk such as whipped cream. But it must be said that the familiar English- or French-derived uses of unsoured milk or cream seldom are notable for piquancy, intensity, or multidimensional v
erve. Probably our most notable milk-based dishes are sweetened puddings, which can be excellent but represent only a tiny fraction of what we could be doing.
Opportunities for enlarged horizons have become more obvious as America has become progressively enriched by the cooking traditions of new immigrants, and will be still more so in years to come. Recent arrivals from northern India have introduced millions of us to the firm cheeselike delicacy—not a true cheese—that is called panir or chhenna and eaten in marvelously spiced sauces. Clotted cream, which depends on very slow heating to thicken the top cream layer of unhomogenized milk into a dense, nutty-tasting crust, has long been known to people who travel in the West Country of England, and is now taking up permanent residence in this country thanks to Turkish immigrants devoted to their own riper-flavored counterpart, kaymak. People from the Asian and Latin American tropics are bringing preferences of their own that usually include a love of sweetened, concentrated dairy products such as canned condensed milk or the still intenser dulce de leche—also condensed, but by heating in an open kettle rather than under a vacuum. Latin Americans are also crazy about their own versions of milkshakes (batidos) based on many different kinds of tropical fruits.
In short, today’s uses of fresh milk and cream in starring roles add up to more of an expanding galaxy than anyone could have predicted a few years ago. There also seems to be more hope of persuading a few independent-minded farmers and dairyists to improve the quality of what we have to work with.
LABEL BABEL: BUYING MILK AND CREAM
The usual commercial choices in this department unfortunately have more to do with arbitrary niche marketing than simple, unvarnished milk or cream. Nonetheless, some of the questions I’m most frequently asked are about the meanings of different designations on labels of fresh milk and cream. Clearly there is a hunger for more information. Here, in ascending order of richness, are the kinds usually available in retail markets. A preliminary caveat: Very few fresh dairy products have been assigned any formal FDA “standard of identity” in the Code of Federal Regulations; it may be frustrating to learn that things bearing the same name often vary in composition from one state (or indeed one manufacturer) to another, but such is unfortunately the case.
Milk Page 11