Posts Tagged “cheese”
You can do an awful lot with very few ingredients, Fellow FoodBeest. This recipe is basically flour and water with a little olive oil, cheese and seasoning. It is a two-step cooking process. First you bake the flatbread – it’s a cracker, really. Then you top it and bake it a second time.
I experimented a lot making this soup, tasting a lot of French onion soup along the way. I did it all on your behalf.
Here’s what I learned.
1) Like most soups, this one is best if you make it a day in advance. Two days is even better.
2) Use Gruyère cheese and plenty of it.
Any way you slice that turkey, Fellow FoodBeest, Thanksgiving can be high stress. This week the pre- Turkey-Day plan is to avoid eating anything that vaguely resembles poultry. And comfort food looks like a very, very good idea.
None of the recipes I had for cheese-making mentioned that the cheese curds had to be at 135-degrees F to become smooth, shiny and stretchy. Until I learned about this, my efforts at cheese-making were an abject failure. I kneaded the rapidly cooling ball of curd for at least a half-hour, and had grainy cheese curds all over me, the counters, the sink and the floor. Learn from my mistakes, Fellow FoodBeest. This was not pretty.
Ricotta cheese. No big deal. Comes in a plastic tub. It’s a mild, white and soft cheese and you make lasagna with it.
“What kind of idiot would bother trying making it at home?” you ask, Fellow FoodBeest? This little novice cheese-maker, that’s who! And while it’s easy to fail at it (I did!), when you succeed, the results are amazing.
I always thought that crackers just came in a cardboard box. I figured it would be ridiculous to try to make them. I was wrong. It took all of about 20 minutes and a few ingredients I already had in the house. These are so fast and easy I could be in trouble again.
