Is This the Breast Thing He Could Think Up?
Cow, Sheep, and Goat cheese are good enough for me.
Question: What would you do with an abundance of breast milk sitting in your freezer?
Answer: If you’re Chef Daniel Langerer from Klee Brasserie in Manhattan, you’d make cheese with it.
Here’s how this story started. Langerer’s daughter, lucky Baby Arabella, has a mommy who pumps so much of this life elixir that their freezer is packed with little plastic bags storing the overflow. Apparently it takes too much time and bureaucracy to donate the stuff to hungry babies, so Chef Daniel decided to do something to avoid the need to purchase another freezer. He began experimenting with the excess and came up with some home grown cheese. I think this may be taking the whole creative chef thing just a bit too far. I don’t really care if the old saying goes “waste not want not.” Baby Arabella looks to be wanting nothing.
The thought of turning breast milk into cheese turns me just a bit queasy. I admit to tasting a drop, not a cup, of my own breast milk back in the days that I nursed. For the curious, it tasted very similar to sweetened condensed milk. But that was enough of an experiment for me. I certainly had no interest in turning it into a New York cheesecake, even though I have the pedigree for it.
So if consuming my own milk made me feel just a bit squeamish, you can bet that I have no interest in tasting Mrs. Langerer’s milk. And yet Chef Daniel has used it in several gourmet recipes that he describes on his website. Customers are invited to ask for a taste when they visit his restaurant. How about some Maple Caramelized Pumpkin Encrusted Cheese with Texturized Grapes?
I wonder if there would be a corkage fee for women who breast fed in the restaurant.
Whoopie!
Photo copyright Sur La Table.
I don’t think I ever tried a whoopie pie until I was an adult. Either they were unavailable in New York, or maybe my family never purchased them because we had too many good Italian desserts to enjoy. Now that I’ve tried them, I find they’re appealing in a Hostess cupcake sort of way. There’s a layering of textures and sweet flavors. You can pull it apart and lick off the cream or bite through the layers at once with the cream squishing out the sides.
Deconstruct, reconstruct, there are fun possibilities in the whoopie pie, kind of like a Mallomar cookie. Did you ever have one of those? Nabisco Mallomars are somewhat unique in the processed cookie world because they’re a seasonal product, only available in the winter. You get a cookie base, topped with a marshmallow and coated with chocolate. Now that I think about it, they must be Nabisco’s answer to the s’more. Duh. I suppose that was obvious to anyone who had camped as a kid, but s’mores are another sweet I never tried until I was an adult. But I digress. I loved to deconstruct Mallomars by cracking the chocolate coating, peeling it off the marshmallow, eating the marshmallow, and finally dunking the cookie base in milk. Pretty elaborate for a small cookie, don’t you think? It’s a good thing because it saved me from consuming too many at one sitting.
So back to whoopie pies. The gourmet kitchen store, Sur La Table, just sent out an email today announcing a new Wilton product they’re offering – a baking pan for creating whoopie pies. Doesn’t the photo above make them irresistible? Even if it weren’t for the other reasons I just gave, this photo convinces me that I need to get a whoopie pie pan so that I can make this everyman’s treat in my own kitchen. How about you? Are you hearing the same Siren call as me?
I’ll Have to See this to Believe It
Wonder if they'll de-fat the bacon, along with the chocolate?
Scientists in the U.K. are working on developing chocolate with water, air, or gel bubbles replacing the fat, for a low-cal, low fat substitute to replace the real thing. I wish them good luck, but I can’t imagine how fake chocolate could ever fool a person with a taste for the real thing. They are working to keep the taste, smell and feel the same as the full fat chocolate. But one of the sensory pleasures of chocolate is the meltability of the product. How will they make water drops melt like fat?
Many people are able to eat desserts with artificial sweetener without detecting the difference. Some people have learned to prefer the artificial sweetener. As for myself, I’d rather eat no dessert than one that’s artificially sweetened. Similarly, I expect that passing up the fake chocolate will be my choice over this lab created hybrid.
You have to wonder about the eternal optimism of scientists. Haven’t they learned that all the low fat snacks over the past decade have done nothing to help folks lose weight? Most people believe they can just eat more because it’s low fat.
In a similar story, this same scientist group is working on developing porridge that stays in the stomach for 5-6 hours to keep one’s appetite away. Hmm, maybe they’ll throw the unused fat from the chocolate into the porridge. That should do the trick.