This is the story of mascarpone, the second-fattiest food you can make from cream, besides pure butter. I used instructions found here, but scaled up drastically due to my...bountiful...situation.
The first step was to heat the cream to 180F, which I did with one modification: I used a heavy-bottomed frying pan as an additional heat defuser because I'm paranoid and dairy is vulnerable to scorching. I couldn't find the candy thermometer, so I used our digital probe thermometer instead.
I prepped a mesh colander set over a bowl and lined it with gauze cloth:
That cream of tartar sure got measured!
After the cream hit 180F, I stirred in the acid, stirred some more, then poured into big bowls to cool in the fridge.
The next morning, a little liquid had managed to strain through the cloth, and scraping the gauze off with a spoon produced little clots of proto-mascarpone.
Which I then put on my toast for breakfast.
Here is where I learned that cream is really thick for a liquid, and it takes a long time for the watery part to strain out from the fatty part. It took several more days of scraping
and straining, and waiting...
Until I had something closer to the semi-solid that is mascarpone. At this point, it resembled Greek yogurt, and I called it done because I was tired of scraping that stuff twice a day, and do you know how crusty gauze cloth gets when you leave it in the fridge for a week? It's gross.
All in all, an interesting experiment was had and guess what, I have to do it all AGAIN because what you just saw was one quart of cream being processed, because that's all I could fit in the colander at once. I still have the other quart from the initial boiling, waiting to be strained! Hurrah! Ugh.
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