[food] Recent adventures

[kaberett]

1. GREEN PASTA. (~100g spinach, cooked and blended, mixed in with the egg.) Excitingly, at least for me, I actually got the amount of egg right first time, rather than ending up miserably adding more (and more and more) with increasingly sticky hands. (Also, I am very much enjoying the ridiculous pasta drying rack I acquired.)

2. RAVIOLI. I found a cut-price ravioli stamp, decided to experiment, and Was Successful. Fillings: the rest of the spinach, and some Experimental Cheese.

3. Turns out, and I had totally failed to realise this due to not thinking things through, that it is sort of important that you use hetero milk for rennet-based cheeses. Whoops. So next on my agenda is sourcing some Hetero Milk (yes, yes, bi erasure, I know) and having another go at that. (Context: back when I was a very baby queer -- this was the trip of Accidentally My First Pride, Thank You Vancouver -- we made a trip to Canada to visit relatives. I was thus introduced to Homo Milk, i.e. what appears to be standard Canadian marketing of homogenised milk. I was delighted. I remain delighted. I am frequently easily pleased.)

4. One of A's local friends was having a Rhubarb Problem with their allotment, so we have over the past couple of weeks eaten a lot of rhubarb-and-pear crumble, during which I have learned that (i) you really do have to stew the rhubarb first, (ii) this means you achieve Lumps Of Pear as a textural contrast, and (iii) putting hazelnuts in the topping along with the oats is excellent. Which I did not previously know, having previously been intensely suspicious of rhubarb, but I rather suspect this marks the completion of its rehabilitation. (School dinner rhubarb crumble was Bad Textures.)

Comments

[alexseanchai]

...hetero milk being non-homogenized?

[alexseanchai]

...no brain you are not allowed to go buy a pasta maker just to attempt green pasta

or red pasta or yellow pasta or any other color of pasta

[kaberett]

>___________________________>

[conuly]

People have been making pasta by hand for generations.

[kaberett]

Bingo!

[recessional]

It completely is: skim, 1%, 2%, homo. XD It throws me every time that I go to the US and it's "skimmed, partially skimmed, whole". I wasn't paying attention in the UK, not really needing to buy milk in grocery stores when I was last there.

Hmmm. I don't think we ever stewed the rhubarb for our family's rhubarb crisp. But then, I happily leave the apple-skins on for our cheese and apple crisp, so I may just be being a heathen again.

[kaberett]

I'm perfectly happy to leave pear and apple skins on! But the rhubarb stays sort of Grumpy and Cronch and if you're really unlucky does the horrifying stringy thing that is why I had to rehabilitate it at all, so, er, I'm Glad You Enjoy It but also Congrats You're The Wrong Kind Of Autistic. :-p

[recessional]

Huh. Ours did not stay cronch, tho? INTERESTING.

[azurelunatic]

Oh my GOODNESS, were they leaving the brouhaha in STICKS?! That is Objectively Wrong.

[kaberett]

(I was having a cheerful conversation with a frend in a cafe earlier this week about the HOMO MILK and how I had ERRONEOUSLY USED THE HOMO MILK and the Brit vaguely-queer-coded barista who was setting up around us was all "... wait WHAT I have NEVER HEARD OF THIS" and Much Joy Was Shared That Day. Because yes the UK doesn't do that! The UK is in the skimmed/semi-skimmed/whole-or-full-fat camp. Hetero milk usually gets called Gold Top and is usually specifically marketed as being from Jersey herds.)

[steorra]

I am amused by "hetero milk" and also being Canadian found the reference quite easy :-)

But why is it important for rennet-based cheese?

[steorra]

"(yes, yes, bi erasure, I know)"


Hmm... what could "bi milk" be?

[kaberett]

Apparently the emulsification resulting from the homogenisation process means it's very difficult to get the curds to actually set! Which I hadn't put together, but given that rennet-based cheeses are (approximately) based on getting the cream to coagulate from the whey makes sense now that I've realised it, given that the entire point of homognisation is to... prevent exactly that.

[davidgillon]

Goes and fetches rhubarb pie (sadly shop bought) to nom while reading.

[kaberett]

:-)

[redbird]

It's been long enough that I saw "homo milk" on a carton that I didn't make the connection, so thanks for glossing that. (I associate that with Ontario; the labels are different in Quebec, of course.)

I feel as though "bi milk" ought to be a mix of two different kinds of milk: cow and goat, or soy and almond, or at least chocolate and vanilla.

Alternatively, there's no specific "bi milk" because bisexuals are happy with either homo or hetero milk. Though if it's to put in tea, rather than drink on its own, hetero milk is easier to work with.

[kaberett]

I hereby nominate feta as the Official Bisexual Cheese.

(Right yes I should not have ignored predominantly-Francophone Canada! I have basically only been to Vancouver and Vancouver Island, but self, non-homo Canada, it okay.)

[madgastronomer]

If you're playing with rolling out pasta, a fun thing that I learned in culinary school was to take herb leaves -- parsley's pretty, or basil chiffonade, or anything that's not too tough (rosemary's not a good choice) -- and lay them on the pasta dough when it's about done, then fold the dough over it and roll it out again. You can do it multiple times for a layered effect. Less good in green pasta, as you might imagine, but lovely on plain, saffron, or other colored pasta.

[kaberett]

Oooh! Thank you. I probably shan't use parsley because me_and is suspicious of it, but I am abruptly very excited about pretty ravioli. :-)

[alexwlchan]

> I am very much enjoying the ridiculous pasta drying rack I acquired

Hooray!

I am very much enjoying reading about your food experiments.

[kaberett]

\o/ thank you for saying!

being a grumpy tran for fun and profit = having enough money to buy a ludicrous pasta-drying rack ;)

[jesse_the_k]

Did you chop the spinach fine and use it raw? Or steam/nuke it first? I can't picture soggy spinach & flour holding together correctly.

[kaberett]

I stared dubiously at the recipe that told me to boil it for 15 minutes and then blend it, and instead wilted it with a little butter and nutmeg before blitzing. Then mix it in with some of the egg before combining with the flour!

[ewt]

I've never had any problems using homogenised milk for rennet-based cheese, but the only rennet-based cheese I've made is halloumi.

[ludy]

Waitrose organic whole milk is "hetero".
As a child the first time I was given a milkshake with skemi milk the texture was all wrong and I adamantly refused to touch it again - I know now the problem was actually the homogenisation rather than the reduced fat.

Weirdly, you can also get homo gold top (marketed as Breakfast milk (!?)) I do not understand why that would be a thing anyone would want because surely the whole point of gold top is that lovely yellow top-of-the-milk goodness