Milk (49 page)

I
t is important to start out with very cold butter and take all precautions against letting it get warm and greasy. Have the kitchen as cool as possible while you work. To mix the dough ingredients, handle them as little as you can and use only your fingertips or a pastry blender.

If possible, use unsalted butter (salted butter often retains more water after churning) with a butterfat score of at least 83 to 85 percent.

YIELD:
Enough for a 9- or 10-inch tart

Sift the flour, salt, and sugar (if using) onto a work surface or into a large bowl. Make a well in the center and put the butter into it. Work the butter into the flour with your fingertips or a pastry blender, gradually sweeping everything from the edges of the well toward the center as the mixture starts to come together. Add the egg yolk, thinned with 1 to 2 teaspoons of the ice water; quickly work it into the flour and butter until you have a loose dough. Add just as much more ice water, a teaspoon at a time, as you need to make the dough
hold together. Put the dough on a lightly floured work surface. Working with a little at a time, use the heel of your hand to push the dough straight away from you with a strong, rapid pressure that nearly mashes it into the work surface. You are trying to eliminate lumps of butter and make the texture somewhat smoother than for an American flaky pastry.

When you have finished this stage, gather the dough up into a ball. Flatten this into a 5- to 6-inch disk, quickly rounding off the edges as evenly as possible. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, preferably longer.

Put the chilled dough on a lightly floured work surface or pastry cloth. Whacking it a few times with a rolling pin may make it cooperate more in the next stage: Roll it out into an 11- or 12-inch circle. Carefully lift the sheet of dough to a 9- or 10-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Ease it into the pan as gently as you can; press to anchor the base and sides firmly to the bottom and rim of the pan. Trim away the excess of dough from the edges, leaving at least a ½-inch overhang that you can press to the sides.

Use a fork to prick the bottom and sides of the pastry shell all over. It is now ready to use in recipes from any cookbook that call for a shortcrust tart shell. Consult particular cookbooks to decide whether to use the crust as is or to give it a preliminary “blind” baking. It is the ideal crust for
Lemon Tart
.

VARIATION:
For
Pâte Sucrée, use 3 to 4 tablespoons sugar and proceed as directed.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMAN BUTTER CASK

P
ossibly the most elegant use to which lemon curd can be put.

YIELD:
A 9- or 10-inch tart

Prepare the pastry and fit it into a tart pan as directed. Prick the bottom and sides all over with a fork while preheating the oven to 400°F. Line the pastry shell with a round of parchment paper or aluminum foil and add several cups of something that will weigh it down without imparting peculiar flavors—dry beans or lentils, rice, ceramic pastry weights. Bake it for 10 to 12 minutes to set the pastry. (Either a pie-crust shield or a narrow band of aluminum foil carefully crimped around the rim of the pan is a great help in preventing the edges from burning.) Remove from the oven, and reduce the oven temperature to 375°F.

Take out whatever baking weights you used and let the partly baked tart shell cool to room temperature. Brush the bottom and sides with lightly whisked egg white thinned with a tablespoon or so of water. Pour in the lemon curd and bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool to room temperature.

There are various currently popular ways of finishing and serving a lemon tart; most kitchen bibles today will have some suggestions. My own strong preference is to simply let it cool thoroughly, cover (or dot) the top with plain whipped cream, and set to chill thoroughly in the refrigerator. Let warm up not quite to room temperature before serving.

I
didn’t know anything about Canadian butter tarts until I happened to be in the vicinity of Toronto about two years ago. One bite, and I wondered why they haven’t become a mad passion here, as they certainly are north of the border.

The general idea is very simple: Line small tartlet pans with any preferred pie or tart crust pastry and fill them with a delectable butter-based custard somewhat resembling pecan pie or other “sugar pie” fillings; bake until the filling is well set. In Ontario, butter tarts are often made with additions like plumped raisins or chopped nut meats (generally walnuts or pecans). I like them plain. The usual filling uses sugar (white or brown) and corn syrup (light or dark) combined with eggs and butter. Cane syrup is a nice substitute for corn syrup.

Since I don’t have a set of tartlet pans, I use standard muffin tins with cups of about ½ cup capacity. Slight differences in depth and width between different models can affect the exact yield.

YIELD:
18 to 20 individual tarts

Make and chill the pastry according to your chosen recipe. When you are ready to bake, preheat the oven to 400°F. Roll out the dough about ⅛ inch thick (a tiny bit thicker for Pâte Brisée). Use a round cookie or vegetable cutter to cut it into circles about 4 inches in diameter. Fit and pat these into muffin tin cups; don’t worry if they look a little misshapen.

Beat all the filling ingredients into the eggs to combine smoothly.

Pour about ¼ cup of the filling into each tart shell, topping it up as evenly as possible with what’s left over. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until the filling is set and slightly browned on top. Cool on a wire rack. Serve plain or—for an inauthentic touch—with whipped cream.

Introduction

Sorting Out Names and Cheeses

About Brined Cheeses

Getting Organized for Cheesemaking

Fresh White Cheese: Kindergarten Version

Fresh White Cheese with Cultures

Fresh White Cheese with Cultures and Rennet

About Cream Cheese

Cream Cheese: Creamy

Cream Cheese: Light

Cervelle de Canut

Cream Cheese–Scallion Dip

About Liptauer Cheese

Liptauer Cheese I

Liptauer Cheese II

Tyrokafteri or Htipiti (Whipped Feta-Cheese Spread)

Syrniki or Tvorozhniki (Russian Pot-Cheese Fritters)

Savory Lokshen Kugel (Noodle Pudding)

Non-Nursery Junket

Paskha (Russian Easter Dessert)

Uses of Whey

Bulgur Pilaf with Whey

F
resh
cheese is one of those things that nobody had to “invent.” It undoubtedly invented itself many times over in the
original dairying lands that I call the
Diverse Sources Belt—and later just as often in other regions—when someone let soured milk sit around too long for drinking. Sooner or later it would have become two substances, one of which could be progressively drained off to leave the other more and more solid. Before draining, it was
curds and whey; afterward, the first version of
fresh cheese.

The first cheeses were from
sheep’s and
goat’s milk. Other animals—chiefly
camels, cattle, and
water buffaloes—got in on the act later in different reaches of the Diverse Sources Belt. Eventually, cheesemaking would spread to northerly Old World climates—but not the biggest southerly dairying region, the Indian subcontinent. The closest Indian counterparts of cheese,
chhenna and
panir, lack the main elements that give true cheeses their curd structure: fermentation by lactic-acid bacteria and/or coagulation by
enzymes.

Fresh cheeses produced by one or both of these means gradually proliferated through a wide geographical range, and other refinements appeared over time. They came to exist in a range of forms that defied logical classifications. At one time there were not only regional but neighborhood-to-neighborhood or household-to-household variations. Even today, when most of this diversity has been ironed out, it is difficult to line up fresh cheeses in strict categories. One type has a way of shading subtly into others.

The two main ways of turning milk into curd have both existed since prehistoric times. The older was bacterial fermentation—a prolonged version of the process responsible for the earliest counterparts of yogurt. What happens partly resembles what happens in a nursing infant’s stomach where acid is being secreted: Lactic-acid fermentation eventually creates a low enough pH (or high enough acidity) to knock out the negative electric charge that keeps
casein particles separated from each other in fresh milk. As they become free to precipitate, or start coming together in a body, the milk first takes on the consistency of thin
yogurt and then, with increasing acidity, forms a defined curd with somewhat more distinct separation from the whey.

The second means of curd formation also mimics something that happens in actual digestion—at least, digestion of mothers’ milk by nursing infants. Much of the business is carried out by enzymes specifically tailored to reconfigure
casein—the most important source of protein in milk—so that it will be more slowly, complexly, and completely absorbed than if the enzymes weren’t there. After weaning there is a general rearrangement of digestive enzymes, with the original milk-digesting ones ceasing to be produced. In infant ruminants like lambs, kids, and calves, there is another wrinkle: Unlike adults, they receive food straight into the fourth stomach, or
abomasum (see
this page
), bypassing the three other ruminant stomach chambers that will take over digestion when they are old enough to eat grass.

The milk-digesting enzyme secreted by the lining of the abomasum is chymosin (“rennin” in older sources, but latterly rechristened). It snips off certain parts of the casein micelle more neatly and predictably than acid alone, though actually it is better activated in the presence of digestive acids. The newly pruned casein particles gather together in a firm curd that can be digested in gradual stages.

How did people first learn about this mysterious milk transformer? Our best guess is that someone either inadvertently discovered the curdled contents of a young lamb’s or kid’s stomach bag in butchering the animal or tried using the bag as a container for previously drawn milk and found that the milk had turned into something else. In any case, long before classical times the layer of tissue that produced the effect had become a prized cheesemaking resource, and remains so to this day under the name of “
rennet.”

Until a few centuries ago, cheesemakers used dried pieces of the actual abomasal lining, or sometimes soaked it in
brine to make an extract, or ground it to a paste or powder. This comparatively unrefined rennet had strong effects on the character of the finished cheese. Unlike modern purified rennets or rennet equivalents, it contained not just chymosin but a bouquet of other enzymes designed to tackle other parts of the milk besides casein. From a flavor standpoint, the most important ones are lipases, or fat-digesting enzymes. Part of their role is to chop up the long, mild-tasting fatty-acid molecules into shorter ones that are aggressively pungent. Short-chain fatty acids are responsible for the piquant bite of provolone and a few other Italian cheeses (nowadays, manufacturers add lipase to cheesemilk in refined form for just this purpose). We can pretty certainly surmise that fresh cheeses made with older versions of lamb, kid, or calf rennet were not as bland and unindividualized as the ones we’re used to. Their flavor must have varied sharply with the lipase content of the rennet and the way different farmers prepared the rennet for use.