Steen's home of the certainly strange
Today Doc and I took Farmcurious’ “Three Cheeses in Three Hours with Wine” class and had a lot of fun. We made mozzarella, burrata, and goat cheese. Originally the class made ricotta instead of burrata, but due to popular demand it got changed.
Doc wanted his cheese to be extra squeaky and rubbery, like the Wisconsin cheese curds often advertised as “The Squeakiest Cheese Curds Around!” and I think he got what he wanted.
I made way too many marshmallows. There is no way we will be able to eat them all. But this was the first time I made marshmallows so that was fun. They are pretty much like… whipped JELLO. If that makes sense.
I also do not have a candy thermometer, so I decided to eyeball when it got to 240 degrees F, and that actually worked pretty well. When it just barely started boiling at first, I figured it was 212, and about 4 or 5 ish minutes after that it went from a frothy boiling to a more… clear boiling. And I figured that was 240 degrees. Whether it was or not, the marshmallows are marshmallow-ey and don’t seem to have suffered for the lack of a thermometer.
I flavored them with vanilla and lavender. They’re pretty tasty, but we are going to be drinking hot cocoa for a long time to get rid of them all.
Today I decided to make pork buns. After investigating pork bun recipes, I decided to stuff the buns with coleslaw and Southern US-style barbeque pork, instead of the usual cabbage and Chinese-style barbeque pork. I slow cooked a rack of ribs with a basic rub (brown sugar, paprika, salt, pepper, cumin, garlic, onion, chili powder). Then I tore all the meat off the ribs, chopped it up, mixed it with coleslaw, and that was the filling that went into the buns.
The Ribs.
The final product was not too dissimilar to regular pork buns, I must say. While it certainly had good Southern barbeque flavor and the coleslaw flavor was noticeable, I suppose neither substitution was different enough from the original to have a wild and unexpected flavor. At the end of the day, the filling was still slow cooked pork and cabbage; they just had different seasonings on them.
Mixing the chopped meat with the coleslaw.
Despite my disappointment that they were not completely weird and wacky, they were still absolutely delicious and I enjoyed eating them. I do love pork buns, after all. I served them with an apricot barbeque sauce for dipping.
The Assembly.
Waiting to be steamed.
Delicious.