quark update
It was pretty good!
It ended up sort of a weird process; most quark recipes are acid-set (you ferment the milk until the curd breaks) but I was attempting a lazier and shortcuttier version that introduces a bit of rennet partway through the culturing process. The rennet had no effect that I could see, though… so I left it longer and it ended up getting two full days of fermentation. That’s still well within the range I saw in various recipes, but by then I was getting impatient again and so I put the whole kit in an oven set to “warm” and voila, two hours later the curd broke.
I left it to drain through cheesecloth overnight and then attacked the slightly-hardened curd with a hand blender.
The result was a texture somewhere between cottage cheese and cream cheese, although it doesn’t taste like either IMO. I had some for lunch yesterday with a fruit cup and some raw broccoli and it was pretty awesome. I mixed about 3oz. with a teaspoon of honey for dessert last night and that was pretty awesome as well.
I don’t know the nutritional info since I made this myself, but off-the-shelf skim milk quark has something like 22 cal/oz, with about 4g protein and 1.5g carbs. I used 2% milk so my quark will have some fat in it.
I haven’t tried making sahnequark (basically quark smoothed with cream for a yogurt-like consistency; it’s crazy delicious to make fruit salad with this) or kräuterquark (herbed quark smoothed with a small amount of liquid, whey or milk or sour cream or creme fraiche, and used as a spread) but I intend to do both. Yum!
(I’m NOT going to make quarkkuchen, german cheesecake, because I am trying to LOSE weight, not gain it).
I might just make quarkkuchen, since at the moment I have the luxury of just trying to maintain weight. I’ll bring you a tiny sliver if I end up doing it. Thanks for the ingredient!
As I sat here, waiting for one step of my quark-dessert baking process to finish, I realized that comment didn’t really come out how I meant it. It kind of sounds like “HA HA UR SO CHUBS,” which is not what I meant at all.
As someone who has spent almost literally every day of the past year+ trying to lose weight, I’m just really psyched to finally eat some damned cheesecake. You’ll get some, assuming it doesn’t turn out crap.
Haha, no sweat, I didn’t read that into it but it would have been true because I am in fact pretty damned chubs. I look forward to the rhubarb quarkkuchen thingamajig anyway.
I have another post in the works about sahnequark and kräuterquark and a non-rennet quark recipe I am trying (and probably failing), which would be up already except the non-rennet recipe is moving slower than I expected.