Here is a picture of our completed, perfect mascarpone:
It is difficult to do justice to a picture of mascarpone. Especially when you are a poor photographer like I am. But this mascarpone was special.
Cassandra is a 13-year-old cheese hipster. She adores artisan cheese. The more obscure, the better. I gave her a subscription to the artisan cheese-of-the-month club for Christmas. Plus a book about making cheese. The book is designed to build on your cheese-making skills and techniques; so begins with the "easiest" cheese. Mascarpone.
The picture above is our fourth attempt at making this cheese.
Attempt 1: Cassandra was in the kitchen trying to make the cheese while I was playing "Let's Dance 3." The recipe is simple, bring 2 cups of cream mixed with 1/3 cup nonfat dry milk powder to 180 degrees. Then stir in lemon juice, refrigerate for 8 hours, and drain liquid. At least it should have been simple. While I was "busy" dancing badly to various songs, Cassandra was struggling in the kitchen. The thermometer kept falling into the pan. Her entire leg got burned by molten cheese. It was very upsetting to her. I finally came into the kitchen to look at what was going on, and discovered that she had a pan of very nicely caramelized milk. It was pretty, but it was not mascarpone. The $30 dairy thermometer I bought for cheese-making purposes read 140. Since I knew mascarpone cheese is supposed to be white, I knew this had to be wrong. I pulled out my cheap grocery store thermometer, stuck it in the brown caramelized milk, and it shot way up. We threw that away.
Attempt 2: I tried a different pan--a 2-quart Le Creuset pan. This was on my instinct that it would be easier to tell if the milk was starting to change from white in that pan, plus the cast iron would be a better conductor of heat. We tried to find out what the boiling temperature of cream was, but could not find a reliable source for that information. So I just made the executive decision that the 180 degrees was probably the boiling point and brought the cream/dried milk to that point, since the thermometer was continuing to be a huge problem. It would read 140, then go down to 100, then back to 140. It was all over the map and super frustrating. Put in the lemon juice, stuck it in the fridge, waited 8 hours, and found a pan of slightly thickened liquid. It was very tasty, but more like salad dressing than mascarpone. Threw that away.
Attempt 3: I discovered, by accident, that there is a cheese- and wine-making shop in San Diego called
Curds and Wine. Cute. So I dragged Pete and Sam there on a Sunday to buy a new thermometer. This on the assumption that my expensive thermometer was defective. Used the same 2-quart Le Creuset pan. And found that the new thermometer did exactly the same thing as the prior thermometer. Once the mixture got to about 140 degrees, the thermometer stopped reading it accurately and moved all over the place. Never to 180. When I noticed that the mixture was starting to move from white, I took it off the heat, added the lemon juice and stuck it in the fridge. 8 hours later, I had a ball of "cheese" which was the consistency of frozen butter. I tried it on toast. It wasn't good. Threw that away.
Attempt 4: I thought and thought and decided that the problem was that the cream mixture wasn't deep enough for the thermometers to get an accurate reading. So I used my 1-quart Le Creuset pan. Mixture came right up to 180 degrees. And came out perfectly.
I looked through the cheese-making book, and at some cheese-making websites and saw nothing at all about this problem. I have the feeling that this is one of those things that is so basic to people who make cheese that they would never think to specify the size pan that should be used. Well, they should!
