Appetizers: "Mascarpone" Torta

"Mascarpone" Torta

½ lb butter at room temperature
½ lb cream cheese at room temperature
2-3 tablespoons prepared pesto
2 tablespoons chopped walnuts
French bread slices, to serve

Summary

• Process cream cheese and butter in a food processor until smooth
• Spread half of cream cheese mixture into a mold lined with damp cheesecloth
• Spread pesto over cream cheese mixture, scatter with walnuts
• Spread remaining cream cheese mixture over pesto and walnuts
• Chill to set, unmold, serve with bread, toasts or crackers

Detailed Instructions
In the work bowl of a food processor or stand mixer (or in a regular bowl with a handheld mixer), combine the butter and cream cheese. Whir it around until they’re completely combined and quite soft. In the food processor the mixture will appear almost liquid as it flows around. That’s fine—you’re going to chill it back up in a few minutes.

Dampen and wring out a square of cheesecloth large enough to fit in your cake pan and fold over the top of the cheese. Drape the cloth over the pan and push it in a bit. Spoon about half of the cream cheese mixture into the pan and smooth it out. Carefully spread the pesto over the cheese. You want a nice layer of pesto, but it shouldn’t be thick. Just enough that each bite contains enough that the flavor comes through, and it’s obvious that it’s pesto. You want to leave as little border as possible—you don’t really want the pesto to show, but neither do you want the first few servings around the edge to be nothing but cream cheese mixture. Scatter the pesto with the chopped walnuts. Spoon the remaining cream cheese mixture over the pesto and walnut layer. This is where it gets a bit tricky, trying to smooth the cheese without disturbing the filling. Remember that what is the top right now will be the bottom, so any flubs won’t show when it’s turned out.

Fold the extra cheesecloth up over the top, press down gently, and refrigerate 8 hours or overnight.

When ready to unmold, unfold cheesecloth and position a platter over the cheese. Flip the platter and pan over and lift off the pan. If it should resist at all, tug gently on the edges of the cheesecloth to loosen the cheese from the bottom of the pan. Remove the cheesecloth. You can serve it at once, or let it sit at room temperature for a half hour or so to soften up.

Slice French bread into rounds for spreading. Toast in a 350 degree oven until lightly crisped, if desired. I often just leave the bread plain. You can also serve this with water crackers.

Thoughts
Originally this was to be a, "What do you DO with all that basil?!" post, a suggestion to make pesto, and then this recipe. And that may still be your problem if you live in most of the United States, but if you live where I live, you're wondering not what to do with all that basil. No, you're wondering if you're ever going to have any basil at all ever pretty much as long as you live. Then you sigh. Then you go buy a tub of pesto to make this recipe. Which, to be fair, is pretty great, no matter what the weather.

This was something we used to make when I worked in catering. It serves a large number of people for a very low cost per person, and it can be made in a huge batch, so it’s not labor intensive. The hardest thing to do is slice (and toast, if desired) the bread. A food processor (or mixer) does all the work for the torta. It’s molded in a cake pan, so you can get fun with the shapes if you like. We used to make this in a heart shaped pan for weddings and decorate the platter with flowers. I have also used just a plain 9” round cake pan. I cut the usual recipe in half because it makes a simply enormous amount when you use the proportions we used in catering. It’s really enough for 30 or 40 people. This reduced version I made in 6” loaf pan and it was perfect for the 15-18 people I was entertaining. To serve the larger number, just double the butter and cream cheese, and increase the pesto and walnuts to get the same even coverage (you'll just about double them as well).

The name of this recipe is in quotes because there’s actually no mascarpone in it. Perhaps at one time it was all mascarpone (if you're not familiar with it, it's a soft cheese that’s sort of half way between ricotta and cream cheese, often found in tiramisu), but by the time this recipe made its way to me, it was completely devoid of it. Just as well—it’s a little pricey to use in this volume. If you have recently won the lottery, or inherited a substantial fortune, you might try using all mascarpone, but if you’re like the rest of us peasants, the (relatively) inexpensive ingredients here will work just fine.

The Line

I think I’ve crossed a weird line here. As I type this, my mixer is going full blast in my kitchen, whipping cream into butter. No, I can’t say why.

When you mention that you ground your own turkey tenderloins to make meatballs for your kids, you get a look. When you explain that the “pre-ground” turkey included an ingredient called “seasonings” and that you felt you could add your own salt, if that was what you wanted, they actually nod understandingly. They agree that there’s so much salt in food already that it’s not necessary to buy food with added salt. Yes, you’re Normal after all.

You tell people you make your own bread, and they may ask when you find the time, but in general, they don’t say much. Making bread from scratch (especially for those who have a bread maker—not that I do) is actually fairly common these days. And I live in a part of the country where people don’t think it’s even slightly odd that you make your own bread.

Telling people you like homemade yogurt better than what you can buy in the store elicits a sort of shrug, as if to say “If that’s the way you want to do it.” A few people ask just how it is that you make yogurt, and then shrug again after you’ve explained the process. You’re peculiar, no doubt, but not beyond the pale.

When you say you make English muffins from scratch, you get a slightly more puzzled look. People just don’t know enough about how English muffins are made to understand that it’s not that different from bread baking. They may look at you askance, and dismiss you as some kind of oddity, but they don’t label you outright.

When people find out you make your own mayonnaise, and mayonnaise-based things (such as blue cheese dressing), you get a more peculiar look. Some people even ask “Why do you bother?” and go on to point out that store-bought mayonnaise is readily available (they neglect to recognize that store bought mayonnaise is really disgusting).

But tell people you make your own butter, and that’s the end.

So OK, I’m a freak.

[Note: the butter is now done.]

I read an article in the New York Times about making one’s own butter. It’s really easy—you just overwhip cream. Probably what the Times reporter made was better than mine, because the recipe they gave called for organic heavy cream, and I just used regular heavy cream from the grocery store. It’s been my experience that some organic things—chickens and beef, primarily—really do taste better. Still, mine seems like it’s pretty good (I haven’t yet eaten it on anything—just tasted a tiny bit off the spatula; I can’t bring myself to just eat butter).

This isn’t the first time I’ve been involved in butter-making, but in the past it’s been at Thanksgiving. Every year my family gets together for Thanksgiving, and the kids make butter. They put heavy cream into a plastic jug of some kind and shake it until it becomes butter. The butter is then served on the rolls with dinner. I think someone devised this idea years ago as a way of occupying the kids until the meal was ready. It actually works pretty well (by which I mean both as a butter-making technique, and as a diversionary tactic to keep the kids from driving all of the adults stark raving insane before dinner is served).

Today I happened to notice a quart of whipping cream in my refrigerator. And something possessed me and I decided to make butter.

The article suggested using a stand mixer. I have one, so I used it. They also said to be sure to create a sort of splatter guard out of plastic wrap to prevent…well, splattering. So I did that too. I poured two cups of cream into my mixer, hit the on switch and away we went.

At first, of course, what I wound up with was whipped cream. Then I wound up with cream that had been overwhipped, but still looked like nothing more than kind of flat whipped cream. And the plastic wrap shield seemed largely unnecessary. I stood there with my forehead resting on the motor housing, watching what happened. About five minutes later, all the fats came out of solution, the stuff that wasn’t fat was thrown up against the plastic wrap, and what I had was a very watery bowl of something that looked like faintly yellow cottage cheese. Bingo.

As instructed, I poured it into a colander over a bowl. I reserved the buttermilk (I’m betting that stuff makes the best pancakes you ever had), and rinsed the butter under running water, pressing it into a mass. I continued rinsing (feeling like a character in a Laura Ingalls Wilder novel) for a couple of minutes, then turned it into a bowl for salting. The “recipe” said that sea salt could be added if salted butter was desired. Since I have some really nice French sea salt I bought my husband as a stocking stuffer one year, and I like my butter salted, I decided to use that. I smushed the butter around to mix in the salt, stretched out a piece of plastic wrap on the counter, wrapped up the butter and tucked it into the refrigerator.

In case you’re wondering, two cups of heavy cream (one pint) makes, by my guesstimate, about a quarter of a pound of butter. I have no idea if it’s cheaper to make butter than to buy it. I suspect probably not, especially if you’re planning to make it with any kind of super-fresh organic type of milk. There is a place in my neighborhood that advertises that they sell raw milk. I’m not sure I’m brave enough for that (I have this fear of weird cow diseases that are found in unpasteurized milk), but I might see if they have any really high-quality organic heavy cream and see what kind of results that yields. I might even do a taste test of the butter made with the organic versus the grocery store cream.

Let me hasten to say that it’s not necessarily a done deal that I will be making my own butter from scratch from here on out. Unlike store-bought mayonnaise, store bought butter is just fine for most things. Perhaps for eating plain on bread I might occasionally whip up a batch (no pun intended), or if I was making something like Hollandaise sauce, in which the butter really was a superstar, then I might consider it. For day to day baking and eating, however, I’m not sure homemade butter is going to offer the same payoff as homemade mayonnaise. I don’t want to promise anything, but at this point in time, I don’t foresee butter-making as one of my regular chores around the house.

But now what’s next for freakish me? What, you say, will you make next? Will your next posting be about the chickens you’ve bought, or the wheat you’re growing in window boxes? Well, no. in the first place, I have no place to keep chickens (and in the second place, the farm supply store near me only sells chicks the Spring anyway, so there). I suspect my next foray into the realm of “Making Stuff Everyone Else Just Buys at the Store” will involve ricotta cheese. I understand that homemade ricotta is a cinch to make, and tastes about ten times better than anything you can get at the store, so perhaps that’s my next effort. I’ve also always wanted to try making my own pork sausage. Either way, I’ll keep you posted.