[Sca-cooks] help with cheese

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Jul 20, 2006, at 7:33 PM, Huette von Ahrens wrote:

> I have that book too.
>
> Although, I have heard people say farmer cheese is curd cheese, it  
> really doesn't
> have the right texture for curd cheese, IMHO.

It's the curds that are throwing you, eh? ;-)

Actually, this interests me since I've heard of people using  
something they call "Farmer cheese" as one (or all) of the cheeses  
for the Digby Savory Toasted Cheese, and the problem with that is  
that Farmer Cheese (not to be confused with farmhouse "cheddar", just  
in case that's what people are thinking of) doesn't really melt.

So perhaps there are two things variously called Farmer Cheese.

I'm assuming the hoop cheese you speak of is curds packed into a hoop  
and drained without (or without much) of a weight on top, so it's  
sold quite fresh, not salted [much] and still has quite a curdy  
texture. But that's a pretty fair description of typical commercial  
farmer cheese here (say, Breakstone, to name a brand, which comes in  
soft bricks like cream cheese but has a definite moist, curdy  
crumbliness to it). It's softer than feta, say.

Adamantius