Milk
Page 24
If you were to catalogue every variety that exists on earth, the list would stretch from egg barley and Pennsylvania Dutch rivvels to Sardinian fregola and the many forms of couscous. But probably the oldest members (and for me, the shining lights) of the family are kinds found from the Balkans far into the Middle East that are made with soured milk, buttermilk, or yogurt, particularly from goats’ or sheep’s milk. The interplay between tart milk and grain flavor has to be tasted to be understood.
The most varied and complex of the soured proto-pastas were developed in Turkey, where their collective name is “tarhana,” and Greece, where they are called “trahana” or xinohondros (“sour cracked wheat,” a Cretan specialty). The simplest kinds consist of nothing but flour and yogurt or soured milk, partly dried and crushed or crumbled to the texture of coarse flour or fine meal. The most elaborate ones are slowly fermented, sometimes with the aid of yeast, and use a battery of other ingredients that may include sweet and hot peppers, tomatoes, and chickpeas, with or without herbs and spices. Some kinds are made into coarse, rough-textured crumbs, some into bite-sized pieces. There are versions with sour fruit like pomegranate or quince. Every village, indeed every family, used to have its own variation. A version even came to Hungary as tarhonya, though today the name usually applies to a form of egg barley made without yogurt.
The long drying period produces a vividly fused concentration of all the original flavors together. Unfortunately, the drying step will be the chief logistical problem for many people seeking to duplicate this marvelous specialty in the United States. In Anatolia and Greece, the year’s supply was traditionally made from combined sheep’s and goats’ milk in late summer, when lactation was starting to wind down (resulting in scantier but richer milk) and fiercely hot, dry sunlight prevailed everywhere. Those of us in areas of high humidity can expect the drying process to take a day or several days longer than can people in Arizona. Depending on how stubborn it’s being, you may want to finish it off in a home dehydrator. Some cooks suggest an oven at lowest setting, but I don’t recommend this unless you can reliably keep the temperature below 150°F.
The chief use of tarhana/trahana (which is “kishk” or “kashk” in most of the non-Turkish Middle East) is as a kind of porridge, or a soup base or thickener. It also goes into some wonderful fillings for savory pies or stuffed vegetables. Making it from scratch is undeniably the sort of extended project that people either are or aren’t game for, like homemade pasta or sourdough bread. Come to think of it, sour-milk tarhana is not unlike a combination of the two, since sourdough is also a product of lactic-acid fermentation.
I have successfully made Turkish-style tarhana at home from a recipe in Özcan Ozan’s excellent The Sultan’s Kitchen. I recommend his version to anyone who wants to master this incredibly labor-intensive—but also incredibly good—staple of Turkish cuisine; otherwise, there are several good commercial brands. For most cooks, the recipe for Greek-style Sour Trahana will be a more practical undertaking.
I suggest trying a commercial Greek brand before deciding whether to embark on the adventure yourself. Look for the pebbly-textured Vlaha or Krinos brands of trahana labeled “sour” or “xinos,” meaning that it was made from milk in soured form. (If it says “sweet” or “glykos,” it was made from unsoured milk—perfectly okay, but not as interesting as the other.) The best, though unfortunately scarcest, imported trahana I know—the coarse-textured Pittas brand—comes from Cyprus and consists of cracked wheat and sheep’s-milk yogurt formed into pieces about the size and shape of Tootsie Rolls.
Tarhana imported from Turkey is often very sharp-flavored, from the complex mixture of vegetables and seasonings worked into the original ferment and left to ripen over a long period. Baktat, Coskun, and Sera are the most common commercial brands here. They are finer than most Greek trahana, a gritty powder with a strong pink or orange-red tinge from red peppers and tomatoes.
TO COOK TARHANA/TRAHANA: BASIC METHOD
In Turkey and Greece, people regularly eat tarhana/trahana as a breakfast porridge. This is one of the most forgiving and foolproof dishes in existence. Allowing roughly ¼ cup of dried cereal per serving, you stir it into about four to six times its volume of boiling water and cook it, stirring occasionally, over medium-low heat until the water is absorbed and you have a thick, well-softened mush or porridge. The time will usually be between 15 and 30 minutes. If the water starts boiling off before the grain is tender, simply add more water and cook longer. If you’ve inadvertently used too much water, turn up the heat to evaporate it faster. Or if you decide you’d like to try it in a soupy condition, that’s fine, too. Serve it with butter, creamy yogurt, crumbled feta or grated Parmesan cheese, or any desired fresh herb. And note that the Greek kinds—especially those using bulgur—make an excellent lunch or dinner side dish for grain fanciers.
Tarhana/trahana is often briefly soaked in water before being brought to a boil, to shorten the cooking time. Another variation is to cook it pilaf-style, briefly sautéing the cereal in butter or olive oil (sometimes along with chopped onions or garlic) before adding liquid—stock instead of water, if you want a rich man’s version of what is in its origins an exceedingly thrifty dish. By all means experiment with tarhana/trahana to thicken and enrich soups or stews; see the recipe for Turkish Tarhana Soup.
The most exciting array of recipes using trahana that I have seen—far surpassing my few suggestions—is presented by Diane Kochilas in The Glorious Foods of Greece.
HOMEMADE GREEK-STYLE SOUR TRAHANA
This is a several days’ project, though it involves very little real work. It makes a coarse-textured trahana that will be a hit with bulgur fans. My version is modeled on a recipe in Aglaia Kremezi’s The Foods of Greece—or was; over time it’s wandered some distance from the original. As noted above, the drying process may stretch out quite a while.
YIELD: About 2 ½ pounds (7 cups)
2 cups milk, preferably goats’ milk
2 cups rich, creamy plain yogurt, preferably Greek goats’- and sheep’s-milk yogurt
About 4 cups coarse bulgur
About ⅔ cup fine semolina
1 heaping tablespoon salt
2 to 4 tablespoons olive oil (optional)
Flour or more oil for handling the dough
Bring the milk nearly to a boil, and cool to room temperature. Stir in the yogurt, and let stand overnight in a warm room, loosely covered.
Pour the soured milk into a large saucepan with the bulgur and semolina. Mix everything together and set the pan over low heat, stirring, for several minutes. The goal is only to soften the bulgur enough so that it will absorb the liquid. Different batches will vary quite a lot in absorption capacity. You want a dough about the consistency of a dense meatloaf mixture. If it is much thicker than that, thin it with a little water; if it’s loose and runny, add some more bulgur or semolina. Work in the salt and oil (oil isn’t absolutely necessary, but it helps the dough cohere).
Let the sticky, pebbly-textured dough cool until you can handle it. Scoop out handfuls the size of medium meatballs and flatten them into patties, occasionally moistening your hands with oil or dusting them with flour to keep from sticking. Set the patties on parchment paper spread on a tabletop or cookie sheet. Let stand, turning several times a day, for two to three days, or until bone-dry. In weather too damp for complete drying, the final stages can be accomplished in a home dehydrator on the lowest possible setting.
Break and crumble the patties to coarse crumbs until the largest lumps are no bigger than a raisin. Store at room temperature in a glass jar or jars.
TURKISH TARHANA SOUP I AND II
Tarhana in a soup acts as both flavor agent and thickener. The thickening effect, of course, comes from flour—but flour magically transformed by having been set to ferment as a dough in the company of yogurt and vegetables. A tarhana-thickened soup is not floury but somehow rustic, suave, and fortifying at the same time.
Tarhana soup is so familia
r to Turkish cooks that recipes are scarcely necessary. “Dissolve some dried tarhana in some simmering water” is the gist of it. “Water or broth” is one way of enlarging the possibilities, but there are dozens more. Preferred ratios of tarhana to liquid range from about 1:4 (very thick) to 1:8 (thin).
Tarhana soup makes a great breakfast or lunch, and is a splendid main-dish soup for an otherwise light supper. The following two recipes—one minimalist, one a little more fleshed out—are only rough outlines of something that defies exact formulas.
TARHANA SOUP I
YIELD: 4 to 6 servings
6 cups water or broth (lamb, chicken, beef, or veal)
¾ to 1 cup Turkish tarhana
1 to 2 teaspoons Turkish dried mint, crushed (optional)
Freshly squeezed lemon juice to taste (optional)
Aleppo, Maraş, or Urfa red pepper flakes to taste (optional)
Salt to taste
Freshly ground black pepper
Bring the water or broth to a boil in a saucepan. Reduce the heat to low and add the tarhana in a trickle, whisking to eliminate lumps. Cook, stirring frequently, for about 15 to 20 minutes, or until thickened to the consistency of a light cream soup. In the last few minutes, stir in any of the optional seasonings along with the salt and pepper. Serve at once, piping hot.
TARHANA SOUP II
YIELD: 4 to 6 servings
3 to 4 tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 small Italian frying or cubanelle pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into thin strips
6 to 8 ounces ground lamb or beef (optional)
1 large ripe tomato, peeled, seeded, and chopped
6 cups strong broth (lamb, chicken, beef, or veal) or water
¾ to 1 cup Turkish tarhana
1 to 2 teaspoons Turkish dried mint, crushed
Freshly squeezed lemon juice to taste (optional)
1 tablespoon tomato paste (optional)
Aleppo, Maraş, or Urfa red pepper flakes to taste (optional)
Salt to taste
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
About 1 to 1 ½ cups cubed or coarsely crumbed bread from any preferred kind of sturdy-textured loaf, slightly stale
Melt 1 tablespoon of the butter in a saucepan, add the onion, and sauté until translucent. Add the pepper strips and sauté briefly. Crumble the optional ground meat into the pan and cook, stirring to break up lumps, until it loses its red color. Stir in the tomato, let simmer for a minute, and add the broth or water. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat to low, and add the tarhana in a trickle, whisking to eliminate any lumps. Cook, stirring frequently, for 15 to 20 minutes, or until lightly thickened. Add the mint, any of the optional seasonings, and salt and pepper.
Heat the remaining butter in a small skillet until fragrant, sizzling, and not quite browned. Add the bread cubes or crumbs and let brown lightly, tossing to coat well with butter. Serve the soup at once, piping hot, garnishing each portion with some of the croutons.
CULTURED MILK AND CREAM
Introduction
Some Cultured Milk and Cream Products: A Brief Survey
Homemade Cultured Buttermilk
Homemade Sour Cream
Herring with Sour Cream Sauce
Smoked Whitefish Salad
Buttermilk-Caraway Soup
Michael Field’s “Chlodnik” (Cold Savory Buttermilk Soup)
Chlodnik Litewski (Polish Cold Beet Soup)
Kadhi or Karhi (North Indian Thick Buttermilk Soup)
Moru Kozhambu (South Indian Buttermilk Soup)
Cold Blueberry Soup
Sour Cream/Crème Fraîche as Cold Sauce and Dip
Buttermilk Salad Dressing
Cucumber-Radish Sour Cream Sauce
Mennonite Buttermilk “Salad”
Beef Stroganoff
Chicken Paprikás, or Paprikahuhn
Mushrooms with Sour Cream Sauce
Mushroom Pirozhki with Sour Cream Pastry
Buttermilk Potatoes
Fried Bananas with Crema
Southern Buttermilk Pie
Hangop (Dutch Buttermilk Dessert)
Buttermilk as Drink
Yogurt is so hugely important in so many of the world’s cuisines as to cast most other kinds of cultured milk into comparative shade. But they exist in diverse forms wherever milk exists, because milk naturally attracts lactic-acid bacteria and sometimes other organisms, including particular molds and yeasts. We know very little about their history. Still, the reason for their diversity is obvious: As dairying spread out from its first centers into most of the Old World, local climates favored wild local microorganisms.
As explained earlier, over many centuries all dairying peoples learned to culture milk by exposing it in a fairly controlled way to certain organisms that prospered in their own haunts, usually in the form of a starter taken from a previous batch. Or to put it another way, they learned to domesticate bits of the local microflora. Probably no one will ever be able to identify the multiple versions of cultured milk made throughout the world. (Modern science is not close to identifying all the microscopic species and subspecies used to produce them.) What they have in common is that, like yogurt, they are allowed to ferment just until there is enough casein precipitation to form a partly liquid gel, not the firm curd of cheese. But unlike yogurt, most involve not the thermophilic (heat-loving) bacteria endemic to Yogurtistan but mesophilic species that need cooler conditions to thrive.
The most exotic kinds, from an American consumer’s viewpoint, were native to Central Asia and the western fringes of China, where horse-herding nomads used complexes of bacteria and yeasts to ferment the very lactose-rich mares’ milk into a sour, slightly effervescent alcoholic drink called “kumys” (or “kumis,” “koumiss”). Today it is rare and perhaps headed for extinction, at least as made from mares’ milk. A milder-flavored and less-alcoholic cousin, “kefir,” evolved in the mountainous reaches between Georgia and southern Russia. (Unless sugar was added, it never developed the same kick, because no milch animals except horses and asses give milk with enough lactose to support much alcoholic fermentation.)
Another family of regional cultured-milk specialties little known in this country originated in Scandinavia or the Netherlands and is known among dairy chemists by the collective name of “ropy milks”—“ropy” in the sense that a spoon dipped into the milk will come out trailing long viscous strings that non-Scandinavians find disconcerting. This unique quality comes from special mutations of several common mesophilic bacteria. Old-timers are said to consider ropy milk more flavorful and sustaining than any other kind of soured milk. The culinary historians Yvonne and William Lockwood report that diehards in the Finnish communities of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula still keep alive the Finnish version, “long viili,” while the younger generation offers unflattering comparisons to mucus or slime and sticks to “short viili,” which is more like our cultured buttermilk.
These are all too familiar stories of former knowledge going the way of the two-bit subway fare. Such changes are usually more subtle than the loss of mares’-milk kumys or ropy milk. The plainest examples in the United States and most of western Europe are the replacement of home-soured milk and true buttermilk by cultured buttermilk as a universal stand-in, and the parallel case of home-soured cream and cultured sour cream. Today the cultured versions are all that many people know of fresh fermented milk.
It is easy to suppose that “buttermilk” as we know it connects us with a homespun culinary past. But until about a hundred years ago, recipes mentioning buttermilk—or sour cream—by name appeared less often in cookbooks than today. If you made butter, you regularly had some buttermilk on hand and knew how to use it without recipes. And if you had more fresh milk or cream on hand than you had immediate use for, you were bound to have sour milk or sour cream as soon as the lactic-acid bacteria in your home started colonizing them.
The results were anything but uniform in quality. Any batch mig
ht differ from preceding ones, though experienced cooks could partly control things by keeping track of the ambient temperature (everything soured faster in summer) and using the last of one batch to carefully inoculate the next. Different households or regions as well as different ethnic groups had their preferences about how sour or mild, thick or thin sour milk and cream should be. Clearly, local complexes of lactic-acid bacteria can’t have been identical from one region (or even neighborhood) to another. The bottom line: Sour milk, buttermilk, and sour cream were simply facts of kitchen life, capable of infinite gradations that no one tried to capture in cookbooks.
Hints of change appeared around 1800, but it took more than a century to erase the diversity of American cultured milk. One factor was the introduction of alkaline leaveners for quick-raised breads and cakes, the predecessors of today’s baking soda. Sour milk at once took on a particular role in a new kitchen department that claimed to be more modern and enlightened than yeast breads or cakes—chemically raised batters for quick breads, biscuits, muffins, or pancakes. Batters using potash, pearlash, or the first versions of “saleratus” depended on a reaction that instantly generated carbon-dioxide bubbles in the mixture before it went into the oven or onto the griddle. This chemical change depended on the addition of something acid. Cream of tartar was the recommendation of the scientifically minded, but sour milk was cheap and universally available. It thus began acquiring a greater prominence in written recipes.
But sour milk’s days in the kitchen were numbered. The triumph of fresh, unsoured “sweet” milk was dawning. When pasteurized milk began to drive out raw milk, cooks reaching for sour milk increasingly found that they had none on hand. The usual improvised substitute was sweet milk rapidly curdled with a little lemon juice or vinegar. It was at this point, by about the late 1920s, that American dairy producers started selling the product known as “cultured buttermilk”—a slightly thickened soured milk based on commercial mixtures of mesophilic bacteria. Of course it was not real buttermilk, which was the residue left from churning butter and varied in flavor along with the character of the butter itself (this page). But by the time of World War II, few consumers knew enough to quibble over the difference. Recipes calling for buttermilk became more numerous in cookbooks, and cooks came to assume that they represented a taste of the colonial or early American past.