The Cheese Did Not Fail Me; I Failed the Cheese

Part 2 of a 39-part series.

When life gives you sour milk, you make cheesecake..?

Well, when Jasmine goes to the store and mistakenly buys Ultra-Pasteurized milk, that's what she does. As any fellow cheesemaker might know, UP milk is the devil. Ultra-Pasteurizing milk brings it to such extreme temperatures during the process that the proteins become denatured and therefore unsuitable for cheese making (i.e. the milk won't coagulate).

After about 2 hours of waiting for my Gouda to become something less like milk and more like cheese ("Hmmm, that's strange,") I realized my amateurish error. I decided to hang the barely-coagulated curd in butter muslin, thinking I could do something with it (see Part 1 of this series). The next day, I rustled up some graham crackers and butter and began working on a pair of springform pans; crushed the crackers, pressed two beautiful crusts and proceeded to mix the filling. Then I tasted the cheese.

Wait, something's out of order.

It was sour; and the more I tasted it, it was not just sour but bitter. "Hmmm, I don't know," I kept telling the clabbered mass, expecting it to beg me for a chance. Eventually, it did. So I added sugar and more sugar. And well if you can't beat 'em, join 'em: I added Key lime juice (the milk had the sour-bitterness of citrus without the flavor). Then more sugar...and sweetened condensed milk...and Meyer lemon juice. There wasn't room for the sink.

I wasn't convinced.

So I let it sit. Truth be told, I just couldn't get to it for a few days, so it had to. But strangely enough, days later the sour-bitter mellowed. It was ready to take its new form. I added eggs, more Key lime juice (that had faded a bit, too), and a touch of vanilla. Into the pan went the filling, and into the oven went the pan.

Over an hour later...

[It turns out I still don't know how to use my oven, so it may have been an hour...or more...it was supposed to be only 50 minutes, or so I thought when I "turned off" the oven to let the cheesecake cool in the warmth of the oven (huh?). I kept checking on it, and it kept getting bigger and eventually I figured out I had not actually turned off the oven, but merely made the motions to do so with no follow-through. Since this particular goof worked in my favor, I'll end this tangent.]

...the first one emerged. It was quite lovely. The second followed suit. Probably some of the most aesthetically pleasing cheesecakes I've ever made. Technically, this isn't even cheesecake, it's whole-milk cake. No cream or cream cheese (so it's really diet cheesecake). I made a smaller yet taller one with a chocolate crust, and a wider more shallow one with a cinnamon graham crust. The short round won. It was much more dense and probably closer to actual cheesecake, though both had a somewhat grainy texture reminiscent of ricotta, which makes sense considering the ingredients. Although I have to wonder if lower heat in the oven might have prevented such a result. And while it just wasn't cheesecake, it was a delightfully tasty failure.