[Sca-cooks] help with cheese

[Cat Dancer]

>
>> 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

I would have to guess that Farmer Cheese is a category rather than a type. 
The kind we get here in the Midwest is a plastic-wrapped brick cheese, 
like any of the other harder cheeses. The texture is like a Havarti rather 
than anything curdlike, and IIRC it's very like the stuff I grew up with 
that was sold as "brick" cheese, which is fairly bland but not curdy. I'd 
have to buy some and test to see how it melts, since I don't remember.

Margaret FitzWilliam