Not all recipes turn out quite the way you hope.
For instance, this is the beautiful wine-infused cheese I wanted to make. Isn’t it GORGEOUS? This cheese is from New England Cheesemaking Supply Company’s website. I’ve been wanting to make this for forever.
The only problem is… I didn’t want to use wine. I don’t like the flavor of wine (or fruit juice for that matter) but wanted that luscious burgundy marbling. Someone suggested maybe I could tint my cheese curds with beet juice. Okay, that’s worth a try! I followed my hard cheese recipe and gave the curds a good soak in two cans’ worth of beet juice before adding the curds to my cheese press.
Good googly moogly, that whey is pink. Aggressively pink. I like pink, but that’s too pink even for me!
Out of the press the next day, this is still the pinkest cheese I’ve ever seen, but at least there’s marbling. Maybe after aging the marbling will still be there. I can hope!
Three months in the cheese cave, and the pink cheese – now dubbed “Unicorn Cheese” – is ready to eat. The pink color has mellowed to almost a lavender shade, but it’s so delicious and the melt is phenomenal.
I shared some “unicorn cheese” with my friends and made a pizza out of it for supper. Just pizza sauce, bacon and my limited-edition pink cheese.
I had some goat milk feta in the fridge too, so I made a second pizza. Garlic oil, bacon and feta, no sauce. SO GOOD, I’m telling ya.
I’ll never use beet juice to dye cheese curds again but I’ll definitely make this cheese recipe this summer when the milk is plentiful once more. I’d make it now but my girls are resting up for having babies in two months, so excess milk isn’t too common at this time of year.
How about you? Did you ever tweak a recipe and be surprised by what you got?
That was some awesome pizza.
Usually I like the red sauce pizza the best, and that was a really good pizza, but that feta pizza was wonderful.
You could go to a custom pizza restaurant and pay bucks for pizza not as good as that.