While I don’t know that much about the actress, I do know a lot about soft goat cheese, or chèvre. It’s one of my favorite cheeses–isn’t it everyone’s? I love how you can use it in almost any application, from a simple sprinkle over a salad to a good, old fashioned cheese plate, to a filling for buttermilk biscuits with blueberry compote (yum!). Most cheeses don’t work equally well in both sweet and savory applications, and I like to think that’s where goat cheese shines. Just like sweet yet sassy friend, Meryl. Did you know that a lot of goat cheeses are not vegetarian? Most are made with an animal-based rennet, so I love that this recipe is vegetarian. Not only that, it’s preservative-free, and you can definitely pronounce every ingredient included. I tried making mozzarella once–I mean, really making mozzarella. I’d semi-successfully completed that “quick mozzarella” bit, where you just heat and stretch and all that mess once, but I decided that taking on “serious” mozzarella-making might yield a more, you know, perfect result. So after hours and hours or tip-toeing into the kitchen to check on its temperature, gently moving my pot a little to the left under the stove light to better maintain 93º or whatever, and basically giving myself 3rd-degree burns from stretching too-hot curds, I was almost there. It was around 9:15 at night, and I whipped out my handy pH-tester that was required by the recipe. And…… nothing. The thing had promptly stopped working, right on time. That would’ve almost been fine, but considering it was 15 minutes past Home Depot’s closing time, I ended up despairingly admitting defeat, made a quick brine out of the whey, and ate this weird feta-like farmer’s cheese-type.. thing.. for weeks in our salads. So you can imagine my skepticism when I came upon a simple goat cheese recipe that took only about 2 hours and required two ingredients. Yet I trudged forward, glaring towards the kitchen during the draining period, certain that I’d end up with a mess of sludge-like curds and absolutely nothing to do with them. But instead, 2 hours and 2 ingredients later, I was instead surprised by the sweetest mound of fresh chèvre, fluffy and light, perfectly tangy and creamy. Has my cheese-making curse been lifted? I have no idea. But I can tell you I think I’ll be avoiding the days-long cheese-making ventures in the future and sticking with this unbelievable chèvre method. Make sure you use a non-reactive pot, as something like aluminum will end up leaching into the milk. Yuck. My recommendation? Stainless steel. Some awesome uses for fresh goat cheese are my biscuits with goat cheese and blueberry compote, crumbled over your everyday enchiladas (my own veggie recipe coming soon!), or in a spinach salad with strawberries, pecans, and a balsamic vinaigrette. Yum!
