I'm making a spaghetti bolognese and I needed some milk for it (I make a fairly traditional version). The thing is, I don't actually drink milk (I don't like it, believe it or not), so I used a a miniscule amount of the half litre that I bought and had nothing else I needed it for. It was the cheapest milk I could find, so of course it is ultra pasteurised. I heated up remaining milk to just over 40 C and slowly added just under 2g of citric acid dissolved in 50 ml of water. When it broke I strained it with cheese cloth and added salt to taste. Amazing flavour.
Of course I've done this before :-) But it's sooooo easy and sooooo good that I think it's a shame people don't do it more often. I even drink the whey (which is weird -- I don't like milk, but I really like whey...)
And just in case you are interested, here's the bolognese sauce recipe (apologies to the true traditionalists, as it has some strange ingredients -- and most controversially, a bit of tomato)
70g beef connective tissue (essentially silver skin scraps)
70g beef scraps (other off cutting scraps, that don't contain connective tissue)
100g pork belly
75g duck breast pastrami (weird, but cheap ingredient I can get here)
1 clove of garlic
1/2 onion
3/4 carrot
1 small celery stalk
1/3 can of crushed tomatoes
~50 ml red wine
~50 ml milk
salt and pepper to taste
- Pressure cook the meat (other than the pastrami) along with the garlic for 20 minutes in just enough water to cover
- In the meantime, dice the vegetables (except tomatoes) and sweat them down in some olive oil
- After the pressure cooker has come down to normal pressure, open it up, add pastrami and vegetables. Simmer for an hour or so until the liquid has come down.
- Add wine and tomatoes. Simmer for a while until the liquid has come down a bit
- slowly add milk, stirring. I add enough that the sauce is a light brown -- not actually sure how much milk that is.
- simmer until quite thick (stop before it burns, but otherwise you can't reduce it enough)
- season with salt and pepper. Under salt it a bit.
This is enough for about 6 servings. I usually freeze it in 3 portions. To prepare, thaw it out and warm it up. Cook the spaghetti in heavily salted water (almost as salty as the sea!) When the spaghetti is just a bit harder than al dente, take half a scoop of the pasta water to loosen up the sauce a bit. Plate the spaghetti. Put the sauce over top. Cover with parmesan cheese (of course!) Actually, there are a lot of cheeses that will work with this sauce! If you have cheese and you can grate it, I feel confident that it will be good!
Quick note on the duck pastrami -- I can get a whole duck breast pastrami for under $3, which is crazy. It's really good. I use it as a kind of "special pancetta". Pancetta is just a kind of bacon covered in black pepper. Experiment with ingredients -- sometimes you can find amazing things that you would never expect would work.
