Gluten-Free Cheese Muffins

I have lately had occasion to experiment with gluten-free baking. Namely, the more pregnant I get, the more picky my stomach becomes. I'm not complaining; I've so far had a ridiculously easy pregnancy, so long as I figure out the rules and follow them.

Anyway, these muffins are a bit of a marvel: crusty, buttery, eggy, and all that, but somehow the cheese gives them a very gluten-like springiness and chewiness. It makes sense, I suppose, given that gluten has a texture like cooling melted cheese.

Gluten-Free Cheese Muffins

Preheat the oven to 375.

Mix together:

1.5 cups sweet white rice flour (Bob's Red Mill brand is what I've found)

1 cup fine cornmeal

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

In a separate bowl, beat:

3 eggs

Then add:

3/4 cup water + 1 tablespoon of vinegar (or 3/4 cup whey, kefir, etc...)

Melt:

2 tablespoons butter

Grate:

4 oz. cheese (I used a sharp cheddar)

Stir everything together. It will seem like way too much cheese at first.

Then I take 3 tablespoons of butter and divide it between 9 muffin holes. I use a stoneware muffin pan with muffin holes that are 1.5" deep and 3" across at the top; adjust the number if yours are much different. Pop the pan in the preheated oven for a few minutes to melt the butter.

Scoop the muffin batter into the melted-butter-filled muffin holes. The batter will come up about level with the top of the pan.

Bake 30 minutes. Remove from the pan to cool.

The melted butter in the pan makes the muffins so nice and crusty! These would also be delicious with some fresh herbs minced in, like chives or rosemary.

Make Cheese When the Fridge Freezes

When things go wrong, Babette-the-Cat tells me, make cheese from the curdled mess. This time, the refrigerator froze a top-shelf bottle of kefir, causing the butterfat to separate from the curds, which in turn separated from the whey. Thank heavens for mason jars and cheese cloth -- I would that there were such a convenient solution for my other woes. Or even a nice analogy. Let's see -- I suppose cheesemaking is rather like panning for gold, which is rather like solving pecuniary problems. In any event, I had the curds draining by my desk as I worked, and it smelled sweeter and sweeter the warmer the afternoon became. Perhaps I should market dairy-based room fresheners.

We have yet to see how butter chunks will affect the cheese. Probably they will separate entirely into a wee teaspoon of butter, and my strange little cheese shall be the less rich for it.

Update: The butter re-emulsified quite nicely with the curds this morning. Have a care when salting the curds, as it takes an hour or more for the saltiness to diffuse and permeate the cheese. Babette knew it for the cheese it was as soon as I took it from the fridge. No wonder she's such a plumpkin -- her brother's favorite food is wheatgrass, and I don't see him toting a bowling-ball belly around.

Kefir Cheese and Dates

I had to leave for a few days to V.'s French kitchen, and so I cleverly stashed my latest batch of kefir in the fridge, hoping the chill would retard the fermenting action of the kefir grains. Unfortunately, there is no stopping the kefir once it gets going, and when I returned home and went to strain out my precious kefir grains, I was left with curds and whey -- the kefir grains, of course, firmly embedded in the curd.

Unfazed, I removed a good bit of curd/grain mixture, wrapped it in cheesecloth, and rinsed it well. I refrigerated the grains in a little glass jar filled with water, and turned to my remaining kefir cheese. I had about a cup of it -- an average cheese yield for a quart of raw milk. I sprinkled it with sea salt, stirred it well, and let it sit. The salt absorbs slowly, so it's good to be cautious. (Ordinarily, kefir is of a creamy, slightly frothy consistency, not much thicker than light cream).

At the Civic Center farmer's market today I bought a pound of honey dates ($2/lb), as well as some on-the-twig fresh dates ($2.50/lb). Fresh dates are crisper than the gooey self-preserved things we find in grocery stores, and taste something like a fuyu persimmon. Sometimes they even have an orange luster to them. For a lovely midafternoon snack, split and pit a large date, dab it with kefir cheese, and pop it in your mouth. The contrasting fibrous sweet goo and creamy salty cheese are rather too addictive.

Cheesemongrel

Yesterday my employer asked his wife why the cheese was in the refrigerator. It might seem an odd question, except V. is French, and habitually breaks food safety recommendations to keep her cheese out on the counter. "Here," she said, "it is too warm. In France we have a cool room next to the kitchen for keeping cheese. Anyway," she added, "in France we eat cheese at every meal, and use it up much more quickly." Her kitchen teems with bacteria -- kombucha and kefir and yogurt fermenting everywhere, raw milk and soft runny cheeses puddling at all sorts of scandalous torrid temperatures.

I made a little promise to myself that I would buy some good cheese when I got back to the city. After stilton and raclette and cave-aged gruyere, one finds oneself snubbing dowdy little annatto-yellow cheddars. Late in the afternoon, my companions paused in a small town to meet somebody. We were patiently sipping pinot noir when one of us said, "If you had to give up either wine or cheese, which would you stick to?" We weren't even eating cheese. It just so happened to be on everyone's mind.

"Wine," said the filmmaker to my left.

"Cheese," said the rapper to my right.

"Where is the boundary," I asked, "between milk and cheese? Leave me something fermented and dairy and I'll give up the cheese." I pictured myself straining a nice yogurt to a tangy custardy thickness and insisting to an arbiter of cultured dairy disputes that it really wasn't "cheese".

Some more pinot and a splash of bourbon later, I found myself on the way to the Tenderknob with a new girl who announced at no provocation, "I promise you, I love cheese more than you do."

Frankly, I'm just a casual cheese philanderer. A dairy dilettente. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Before I even started this job, I knew cheese way more than anybody. But my boss knew orders of magnitude more than I did, and that was a year ago I started learning from her. I just spent the last week with an ex in Hawaii eating shitty food, and I can't wait to go eat some cheese."

What was the phrase my employer used? Show some neck. "What is it that you do?" I'm a cheese cur showing neck.

"I'm a cheesemonger." I'm a cowering mongrel. Maybe she'll give me a rind of parmesan if I visit her -- which, in fact, I think I just might do.

I do still wonder whether she likes cheese as much as a certain Babette. Babette hefts all her swaying furry bellies to come running when she smells chevre, or triple-cream brie, or a bit of feta still dripping with brine. Her complete abandon to epicurean enthusiasm leaves me a little breathless. How can a cat have such discriminating tastes -- eschewing milk and yogurt and creme fraiche in favor of "cheese" -- if cheese isn't, in fact, a distinct biological entity? It's not like she knows a damned thing about the coagulation of proteins, or the action of bacteria on milk sugars, but her little, little brain can put leathery romano and pickled sheep's milk feta and runny brie in the same category, and discriminate them from creme fraiche. Can she really taste the agedness that (usually) distinguishes cheese from other cultured dairy products?

I know; it's very tedious when people ascribe wonderful intelligence to their pets. But I'm doing just the opposite. Bless her, Babette isn't such a clever one -- leaving me to think it's the cheese that's so very smart. After all, the strangest thing about cheese is that it tastes like cat piss and soiled garments -- eminently nasty things -- but somehow dupes us into enjoying those same fungal flavors. And not without some advantage to itself. Think of the nice treatment we give our favorite cheese cultures (VIP petri dishes, nubile young cheesemongers). Rather a useful leg up in the cutthroat world of bacterial survival, no?

It's a clever cheese, I tell you.