Adventures in Quark

[cmharris6002]

I have been separating my goat milk to get cream for whipped cream, sour cream and butter so i have a ton of skim right now. I made some skim Swiss and Mozz which turned out pretty good for skim...

But I had this pot of raw skim I left on the counter until it turned to curds and whey. It smelled soooo good I thought I'd go ahead and scald the curd at 110F and make it into Magerquark. It was delicious!! It had a sour cream flavor and small dry curds so I added cream back to some. I am working up more quark now. This time I am going to try to catch it at yogurt consistency and drain in muslin for a creamier version.

I wonder if it would freeze very well?

[fastweedpuller]

Hi Christy:  I had my first experience with quark last night.

Mine was a buttermilk quark.  It seems if I don't make cheese every 3rd day we run out of refrigerator space so I had to hurry up and think what I was going to do with that half gallon of buttermilk.  We have an outdoor masonry oven (like a big wood-fired pizza oven) and yesterday was a firing day.  Normally, the ashes are scraped out and we bake bread in it (gotta have something to go with the cheese you know) but we fired pizzas in it last so I left the ashes in.  I put two halved pumpkins in a pan AND a casserole dish with that buttermilk in it and closed it up and left it overnight.  The ambient temperature was about 175F to start but the walls/floor are hotter.  When I opened it up this morning, I pulled out a beautiful, slightly caramelized pan of curds atop whey. 

After draining and salting, it's really sublime.  Smoky, crumbly.  Probably too crumbly to go well on toast but I can see about another 100 recipes that would benefit from its inclusion.  Tossing with egg noodles probably is dish #1...and then there's all that garden zucchini to eat.

Anyway, it's the easiest cheese I have ever made thusfar!

cheers