In a small bowl, soak dried mushrooms in 1/3 cup hot water to soften. The result will certainly be a cheese sauce that will please.įettuccini with mozzarella, ham, mushrooms and tomatoesĦ tablespoons dried mushrooms such as cepes or porciniĤ tomatoes, peeled, seeded and coarsely chopped Just remember our trusty ingredients - a little starch and a little lemon juice - and cook with confidence. You will be astounded by how well this works.Īs you can see, cooking with cheese is easy. To prevent it from becoming stringy, I sprinkle a little lemon juice on the grated mozzarella before adding it to a cream sauce, then stir it in over low heat. I love to make fettuccini with a sauce of mozzarella, prosciutto or country ham, mushrooms, and tomatoes. Citric acid binds with calcium and can overcome stringiness, even in the extreme case of mozzarella. This can prevent stringiness, but citric acid in lemon juice is actually much more effective. He says wine contains tartaric acid, which helps prevent calcium phosphate from linking the cheese proteins. Anthony Blake, director of food science and technology for the international flavor and fragrance company Firmenich SA, lives in Switzerland and is an enthusiastic cheese lover. To reduce this, cooks have traditionally added dry white wine to such foods as fondue. The reason, as explained by Norman Olson of the University of Wisconsin, is that some cheeses, including mozzarella and Swiss, contain calcium phosphate, a compound that can link cheese proteins in long strings. Because mozzarella can become so stringy, many cooks would not dream of putting it into a sauce. If you stir a cheese sauce much after the cheese is added, particularly with certain cheeses such as Swiss, it may become stringy. That leaves us with the battle against stringy cheese. Whatever the science, we have learned from experience that most home-use starches, including flour, cornstarch, potato starch and tapioca, can prevent proteins from curdling. It may simply be that when the heated starch granules soak in liquid and swell, they become large objects that physically keep proteins apart. Scientists do not know exactly how starch prevents proteins from joining at the temperature they normally do when heated. Time and time again in cooking, starch will prevent proteins from curdling, whether it is the flour in a pastry cream, a little cornstarch in a yogurt quiche or cornstarch in a low-fat sauce.
Just make sure that any dish to which you are adding grated cheese contains some starch.Ī macaroni-and-cheese dish that has a little starch such as flour in the sauce won’t curdle, while one that contains only grated cheese and milk may. Most are made by adding grated cheese to a cream sauce. This helps you avoid the overheating that can cause curdling.Ĭheese sauces that contain starch also help us avoid curdling. In many recipes, the directions tell you to remove the dish from heat and then stir in the grated cheese. Simply preventing overheating may save a dish. The temperature and ingredients with which a cheese is combined, as well as the nature of the cheese itself, influence how easily curds will form. We refer to this as curdled.īecause the proteins in cheese are already linked, they can easily overcook and curdle. Likewise, with many proteins, there is a narrow range between cooked and overcooked.Ī stirred custard properly cooked is creamy and thick, but overcook it and it is transformed into knotty curds (curdled egg and dairy proteins) floating in a liquid. You may remember having had overcooked shrimp that was so tough that you practically needed a steak knife for cutting. If you continue to heat or expose them to acid or air, the bonds tighten and squeeze out the moisture, and the proteins become dry and tough. Initially, when these proteins bond, they are moist and tender because a lot of water is trapped between them. (We see this change when the egg white in a heated frying pan turns solid white or raw shrimp or fish or chicken goes from glassy-looking to white.) Now there is no longer room for light to go between them.
Almost immediately, an unwound (or denatured) protein with its bonds sticking out will run into another unwound protein, and they will join together.
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