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cheese

Sealed With A Quiche

0 · Dec 28, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Including a food trend prediction for 2012…

 

By Alice DeLuca

 

When first married, I received lots of advice on how to stay married which is of course so much more complicated than “getting” married. For example, Sally told me that both a happy marriage and a career had been possible for her because she created and froze 4 quiches at a time.  I immediately pictured 4 quiches in the deepfreeze, carefully labeled for rotation of the stock so as to avoid freezer-burn and waste. The quiches would keep.

 

Sally said she could just run home, pop a frozen quiche in the oven, and make a salad and – presto – dinner was on the table.  That was the clue to a happy marriage for a woman who began her career in the late 1960s and lived through the advent of non-stick cookware and the 1970s food processor revolution.  She soldiered on with frozen pie shells to make all things possible.[i] Sally’s husband enjoyed both a fabulous career and his hot meals without ever giving a thought to the benefits of compulsive quiche stockpiling. Sally did remain married and retained her career right through to retirement, so perhaps the quiche did the trick and the best wedding present for the new couple today would be a sturdy porcelain pie plate.

 

American quiche from the 1980s bears little resemblance to the quiches that graced the window of every charcuterie in Paris in the 1970s.  The French Quiche Lorraine was a tart made with poitrine fumée, diced in to tiny delicious fatty cubes, just a hint of smoke barely held in suspension by a creamy egg custard.  The total thickness of the quiche was just a matter of a few centimeters.  The crust was buttery and flaky.

 

American artisanal quiche of the 1970s and 80s was really more of a pie, and a close relative of the casserole.  Its deep-dish heart and soul was convenient sustenance with no hint of subtlety, yet it was delicious in its own right.  Almost anything that could be considered main-course fare was served up in a quiche. It seemed like every restaurant served quiche[ii] and salad, and there were whole restaurants in the West that were entirely devoted to pie of all types and served up quiche in quarters.  A quarter of a quiche was a serving.  Up until at least the 1990s, it was still possible to waltz in to a Frontier Pies in Wyoming and buy a hearty slab of quiche for a quick dinner.  Pioneer Pies was another such restaurant.  In the early 2000s these pie-themed restaurants fell on hard times, but now that we are hearing that “pie is the new cupcake” perhaps these wonderful pie restaurants will make a comeback?  They have a web presence again, although their menus show pie only as an afterthought, but we can perhaps hope and dream.

 

If you want to stock-pile frozen American downhome quiches as a hedge against late meetings and bad traffic, there is no better place to start looking for recipes than the cookbooks put out by local women’s groups during the height of the quiche rush[iii].  I use a deep dish 9-inch Pyrex pie plate, recalling however that as a marriage-saving device my friend used frozen pie shells.  (Why not compromise and stockpile your own frozen pie shells?)  The general rule that I follow is based on the Colorado Cache Cookbook:

 

For the custard that holds things together in the 9 inch Pyrex plate, beat together:

 

4 large chicken eggs

1 ½ cups of cream or other milk-based products

Seasoning such as salt and pepper, dried marjoram, fresh parsley, chives, a grating of nutmeg etc.

 

The flavoring and savory ingredients are up to the artisan.  As a thoroughly mundane but delicious example of the filling, you could prepare the following ingredients and sprinkle them evenly in to an unbaked gluten-free pastry shell.

 

Hickory-smoked bacon fried until crisp (omit for vegetarian)

Spanish onions fried in butter until golden

½ pound of Gruyere or other hard cheese loitering in the refrigerator, coarsely grated to yield 2 cups

 

Pour the beaten custard over all of these and bake at 400 degrees F for 40 minutes, more or less, until a knife inserted in the center comes out barely clean.  Serve warm.  Or, freeze for later to save your marriage.

 

Other savory filling choices might be spinach and feta, ratatouille, wild mushroom with thyme (vegetarian), duck and preserved lemon (for meat-eaters), boneless Buffalo wings and gluten free blue cheese (for meat-eaters), five onion varieties (onion, garlic, shallot, leek, and scallion).  The choices for savory fillings are certainly not limited to the tastes of the 1970s.  Latin American, Cambodian, Thai, what sorts of quiche innovations await us now?

 

An American quiche renaissance is predicted – you heard it here first – and this will come as a great relief to the increasing number of people keeping “home flocks” of hens and consequently holding a surplus of eggs.  The future of so many fledgling marriages and careers could depend upon a happy wedding of eggs and cheese.

 


[i] “Food Timeline: History Notes-pie & Pastry.” Food Timeline: Food History & Vintage Recipes. Web. 28 Dec. 2011. <http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpies.html>.

David, Elizabeth, and Juliet Renny. French Provincial Cooking. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Print.

[ii] Kalter, Suzy. “Jaye Tishman’s Business Is Serving Quiche to the Stars, and That’s Not Just Pie in the Sky: People.com.” People.com: The #1 Celebrity Site for Breaking News, Celebrity Pictures and Star Style. 30 Nov. 1981. Web. 28 Dec. 2011. http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20080809,00.html.

“When it comes to quiche, John Travolta prefers chicken-and-corn, Barbra Streisand orders broccoli-and-mushroom and Suzanne Pleshette likes Roquefort. So confides Jaye Tishman, 43, proprietor-chef of Ms. Tish’s Quiche Co. in Los Angeles, whose clientele reads like the Bel Air phone book. Her egg-and-cheese pies, which come in more than 100 varieties (from apple to zucchini), have themselves become celebrities of a sort. “Ms. Tish’s quiche boggles the senses,” raves food critic Merrill Shindler of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. “It’s as close to perfect as I could want.”…”

[iii] Colorado Cache Cookbook. Denver, CO: Junior League of Denver, 1978. Print.

Gillies, Linda, Anita Muller, and Pamela Patterson. A Culinary Collection; Recipes from Members of the Board of Trustees and Staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1973. Print. (including a recipe for lettuce and bacon quiche)

Quiche – gluten free!

Fall, Lunch, Meat-eater, Pie, Recipes, Summer, Vegetarian, Winter cheese, gluten free, meat, quiche, vegetarian

Say Cheese! – making homemade cheese

0 · Dec 9, 2011 · 1 Comment

By Alice DeLuca

 

Many years ago, on a train traveling slowly through the French countryside – I don’t remember exactly where and I refuse to invent a location for the sake of a story – I met a man whose job it was to sell cheese mold.  This friendly man was sitting in the same compartment with me.  I was naturally apprehensive when he started to speak. Sometimes men traveling on trains want to share stories and sometimes they want to show young women other things whether the women are interested or not, but that is another story.

 

The suited gentleman had a tidy briefcase which he offered to open so that I could see his wares.  It was a great relief to find that he was a genuine gentleman, and that what he wanted to display was an assortment of tiny envelopes containing samples of unique cheese molds that were required in the production of famous French cheeses such as Camembert and Brie.  Perhaps interpreting my relief at his desire to talk about cheese as an ardent interest in learning about his profession, he explained the whole process by which these molds would be sprayed on the cheeses during the manufacturing process.  The uniform, paint-white rind of fresh Brie, with its mushroomy aroma, had mystified me until that moment when I learned that the rind was a fungus just like the kind of thing that produces mushrooms and that this fungus was sprayed on to the cheeses; an aerosol mushroom.  I had wrongly pictured the right molds, living in the area, just meandering in on a fresh lavender-scented breeze from the French countryside and settled conveniently on each cheese, creating a uniform coating.

 

In fact, a mushroom is the fruiting body of an underground fungus, poking up through the forest floor.  The Brie cheese rind is seeded with the spores of a particular fungus that does not make those pop-up fruiting bodies.  So, fine cheese and mushrooms are related, which makes sense when you think about it, and I got the first inkling of this knowledge on a rumbling train.

 

It was also news to me at the time that cheeses were mass-produced rather than made individually the way we had tried to do at home.  Unlike our lonesome artisanal cheeses that cured with the native spores traveling through the air at our house, there were whole rooms full of camembert, just sitting around waiting to be sprayed with precisely engineered mold. I pictured in my mind whole rooms full of cheeses just sitting there, waiting.

 

Our few attempts at making homemade cheese had been laborious.  One particular cheese required a few gallons of whole, unpasteurized milk and some rennet, a funky smelling material derived from the stomach of a cow. You could obtain rennet at almost any grocery store by purchasing a package of “junket” mix – this is actually rennet that can be added to milk to make a sort of custardy dessert that has now fallen out of favor – or you could purchase rennet tablets specifically intended for cheesemaking, in a small cylindrical vial.[i] We used the rennet tablets and our homemade cheese had a pleasant flavor.  We coated the cheese with wax that we tinted turquoise with candle-dye, to make our cheese stand out from those endearing goudas encased in the bright red wax that children love to play with at the table, annoying the grownups.  Our wax was too hard and did not have the elasticity of the red cheese wax, so there were occasional holes and leaks in our coating which we patched horribly with little globs of additional wax.  As amateurs we had lots of enthusiasm, but we didn’t have all the skills and equipment of the professionals.

 

There are so many diverse careers out there in the world.  Here was a man who traveled around on trains with a suitcase full of mold.  He provided a vital service to one of France’s major food industries, and he obviously enjoyed the work, the travel and the conversations along the way. He was not a Willy Loman character[ii] suffering from depression and despair, ruining his home life with his philandering ways.  He was a proud, friendly gentleman who happily went about selling cheese mold to the heroes of French cuisine.  I did not get his name, and by now he must be a very old man, but if I could I would thank him and ask him so many more questions.

 

I encountered another great member of the world of cheese professionals on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, New York, in the 1980s. My memory is of a small shop where a lumberjack-sized man with large handlebar mustaches created mozzarella cheese with his bare hands.  He made it look easy, as he kneaded the white curds in nearly boiling water until the cheese stretched like taffy.  The process of creating hot ropes of cheese from milk turned out to be much trickier at home, especially since my hands were not used to being immersed in very hot water for extended periods. My hands turned red as they cooked, and I did not have the strength of this giant professional.

 

This video demonstration evokes the gentleness and patience of the true process similar to what I recall from watching the fellow making mozzarella in the Bronx in 1982: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_48-nGlxaw&feature=related[iii]

 

I have recently learned that it is possible to make homemade mozzarella using a microwave oven.  People swear by this method and some claim to make cheese every week, almost ritually. This development could revolutionize many home kitchens, whether or not the cook adopts an obsessive-compulsive cheese-making habit.  Following are links to a pictorial instruction on how this microwave mozzarella is made.  The thing that is missing though is the slow, steady stirring; the brilliant efficiency of the strainer sinking in to the whey to separate the curds; the loving kindness of the great artisanal food artist at work.

 

Homemade microwave mozzarella: http://www.cheesemaking.com/store/pg/21.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPUortoNUWo&feature=fvwrel

 

 

 

 

 


[i] Junket mix is still available today, and there are recipes for using it to make cheese here.

[ii] Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman.

[iii] This demonstration gives an idea of the same process done by cheese professionals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o-55_Hhjek&feature=related

Condiments and Sauces, Pickles and Preserves, Recipes, Vegetarian cheese, DIY, homemade, vegetarian

Gluten Free Reuben Sandwich

0 · Jun 1, 2011 · 1 Comment

gfzing reuben sandwich

A craving for a gluten free Reuben Sandwich (Grill) sent me to the local supermarket in search of corned beef, sauerkraut, swiss cheese, dressing and gluten free “rye bread” since I have not made some.  Well, of course disappointment awaited, since they carry no gluten free corned beef at the store.  How is it possible to put wheat in corned beef?  It’s meat, right?  Sliced meat.  Of gluten free rye bread, there was none.

A few compromises later, and I had a decent sandwich that had much in common with a Reuben sandwich.  The following is a very good sandwich in its own right, and the directions show how to obtain the melted cheese and hot interior of a fine sandwich, despite the remarkable insulating qualities of gluten free bread.

Ingredients:

2 slices Rudi’s gluten free Cinnamon Raisin Bread

2 teaspoons butter

2 thin slices baby swiss cheese

2 thin slices gluten free deli barbecue chicken (check the label on the Dietz & Watson brand which at this writing was labeled gluten free)

Sauerkraut (check the status on refrigerated Ba-Tampte New Kraut which at this writing was labeled with these ingredients: Cabbage, Water, Vinegar, Salt, Sugar, Less Than 1/10 of 1% Benzoate of Soda, Sodium Bisulfite).

1 TB gluten free Thousand Island dressing (check the status of the Wishbone brand which at this writing was labeled gluten free.)

Melt the butter in a frying pan on medium low heat.  Put the two slices of bread in the melted butter to coat one side of each slice.  Turn off the heat and set the bread aside.

Drain 2 TB of the sauerkraut, place it in a microwavable glass dish and microwave for about 1 minute until hot. Set aside.

Put one slice of buttered bread, butter side down, in the pan.  Coat the top side of that slice with Thousand Island dressing. Lay the 2 slices of cheese and the 2 slices of chicken on top.  Cover with the other slice of bread, butter side up.

Turn the heat to medium low, and cover the pan.  The goal here is to brown the bread without burning the raisins. Fry the sandwich for about 1 minute (check to make sure the bread toasts but doesn’t burn).  When the bread on the bottom is brown, flip the sandwich and cook for 1 minute (covered) on the other side.  When both sides are toasted, transfer the sandwich to a microwavable plate.

Open the sandwich and add the pre-heated sauerkraut. Close the sandwich.

Microwave the sandwich for 1 minutes until the cheese melts.  (Adding the microwave step is the key to melting the cheese when using gluten free bread). Slice the sandwich in two pieces and serve!

Make sure that all your ingredients are gluten free!

 

Bread, Fall, Lunch, Meat Dishes, Meat-eater, Recipes, Spring, Summer, Winter cheese, meat, sandwich, sauerkraut

White Hakurei Turnip Gratin

0 · Jun 6, 2009 · 6 Comments

The first turnips of the spring have arrived, courtesy of a local CSA.  We have learned to love the strong umami of white hakurei turnip prepared with cream and seasonings.  In many recently issued cookbooks there is a complete dearth of recipes for turnip, but if you turn to the older books, notably the 1961 New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne, or the stellar 1979  From Market to Kitchen Cookbook by Perla Meyers, you will find many recipes for this neglected vegetable.  The well-cooked turnip will take you on a time-travel journey back to the days when real vegetables, packed with flavor, made people grateful for every meal.

An excellent recipe for a gratin of white turnip appeared in Gourmet magazine 2007 but that recipe called for a whole cup of heavy cream and a matching cup of grated parmesan.  It was hard on the arteries and on the wallet, and required both top of the stove and oven baking. So, Gf-Zing! has modified it slightly for recession and health reasons.  Serve the turnips with a small steak, and a salad.  You will want to obtain more fresh spring turnips, once you try them this way.

Melt 1 Tablespoon butter in a non-stick 12 inch skillet (make sure you have a top to fit the pan.)

Wash one bunch of white hakurei turnips well, top and tail them, and slice them in 1/4 inch slices.  Save the turnip greens for another recipe. You don’t need to peel the turnips.  Layer the slices in the pan.  Sprinkle the sliced turnips with 1 teaspoon dry thyme, 3/4 teaspoon salt, 1/4 tsp. freshly ground pepper, and 1/8- 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper.

Cook for 3 minutes over medium heat, then pour 1/2 cup heavy cream and 1/2 cup gluten-free chicken stock over the top.  Cover and cook the turnips over medium heat for 20 minutes.  The turnips will be completely cooked through, but there will be considerable liquid left in the pan.  Remove the cover and cook to reduce the liquid.  When most of the liquid has reduced (about 5-10 minutes), and the sauce is thickened, grate finely 1/2 cup of fresh parmesan cheese evenly over the top.  Watch closely as the cheese melts and make sure that the liquid does not entirely cook away. Recipe credit: www.gfzing.com

Serve the turnips hot.  The recipe is supposed to serve 6, but maybe realistically it would only serve 4, once they discover that they love turnips!

If you should happen to have a cup or so of the finished dish left over, by all means add it to a lentil dish like Mujaddara.

Make sure all your ingredients, including the spices, are gluten-free.

*Most Popular Recipes*, Recipes, Spring, Vegetables cheese, cooking, food, GF, gluten free, gourmet, hakurei turnip, recipe

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