Hi all -
It has been a while since I have posted here, and I haven't made 'proper' cheese for some time
- hoping to get back on that wagon soon!
Meanwhile I have been pursuing other pursuits, but my dairy endeavors have been limited to making yogurt and straining it for labneh from time to time. I recently used my dehydrator on some strained yogurt to make hard cookie-like lumps which appear to have a long shelf life and parmesan-like flavor. This was in the interest of seeing if the yogurt process could go farther after having a Persian eggplant dish "kashk e badamjan", which referenced
kashk - a "dried yogurt" or "powdered yogurt" - as a traditional ingredient.
I have no idea if the version I made bears any resemblance to the real thing, but I have found these to be very nice crumbled into scrambled eggs for some umami and mildly tangy cheese-like flavor. See the pic below - I made my labneh into small balls and put them in the deyhdrator, but they quickly flattened out into cookie-like blocks. The one on the right is whole and on the left you can see how they chop up into powder/fragments when you run a knife through them.
Would appreciate hearing of any experiences others may have had in this vein. Here is some related info for reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashk