Milk is a weekly staple in my grocery basket. To be honest, when I think milk, I think cow’s milk. We also some soy milk in some drinks and as an emergency breakfast staple : mix soy milk and plain flour to a pancake consistency and this is it, you have a quite reasonable pancake mix much better than the powder stuff from the shops but, and this will be no surprise, not as soft and voluminous as a ricotta pancake. For those, I recommend the Donna Hay recipe pancake recipe!
I have never tried goats milk as such, but I love it in goat cheese! Who wouldn’t? Same for sheep milk, my favourite is the old mountain cheese! I was given fresh camel milk while once working in the Sahara Desert. It tastes very different to cows milk, feels very rich and cures all tummy bug you may have (this is why the local driver in charge of bringing me to site got it – local medicine!). It was a great experience.
Milk and derivatives
For cows milk, the list seem endless: butter, creams in different forms, yogurt, ricotta, mascarpone, cheese of many types…My cooking being essentially based on European cuisine, I use many of those products. In my fridge today, you would find some light cows milk, a 2 L bottle of full cream cows milk cream on top (so nice!), a number of butter blocks (I freeze them if too many), a tub of thickened cream, a small container of mascarpone and a number of cheeses: plenty to last at least the week.
The main dairy consumers are the children, especially with the butter. A lot of it is used around breakfast, the rest goes in cooking.
Plant derived milk
Plant derived milk are only so called because of their colour. Each come with its own usage and properties. We use soy milk in drinks at times, I like to use soy milk mixed with my bisher muesli (1 cup cow’s milk, 1 cup natural yogurt and 2 cups rolled oats prepared the evening for the next morning and served with a drizzle of honey, a bit of soy milk and nuts and fruits if desired – serves 4).
I tried a recipe from George Calombaris with almond meal recently, an oat and cherry pudding desert likened to a french clafouti. It was not bad but I was not thrilled, it is very close to porridge and definitely not a clafouti.
I am not going into the details of coconut milk here. Have you had the fresh one when just prepared?
My weekend milk challenge
You will now wonder why I am speaking so much about milk. Here is why. I like to do my groceries at markets. Living in Sydney, this means for us Paddy’s Market. The food there is fresh, good market (at least half of the supermarket cost) and of good quality(we do not go just before 5pm on Sunday). There is no “deli” section at the market, so on Friday, I quickly went to the local supermarket and bought my 2 bottles of 2 L of milk for the week and a few other items. Sunday at breakfast, I realised my two 2L milk bottles were both with best used dates in 2-3 days time! Milk turns to bad very quickly, I was not going to waste this nice milk (especially since I had bought a good brand). What to do?
The first thoughts were creme caramel and a pile of crepes. The story goes otherwise. I decided to use 1 L doing some “confiture de lait” (milk jam). It takes for ever but definitely tastes good. One litre of milk only yields 2 small jars! In one of them, I added some cocoa (I have not yet done the labels).
Now that I have a KitchenAid (thank you Qantas frequent flyer points and store!), I can go for sponge cakes easily. I tried a hazelnut and raspberry sponge cake, a recipe found in Gourmet Magazine. Great cakes, perfect, same as on the magazine picture! But to have two cakes similar and cook them simultaneously (I did not want to do 2 batches to avoid loosing some of these bubbles), I used 2 tins (one silicone, one spring tin) of identical diameter. It ended up in a quite tall cake to the delight of the children! They helped with the filling and the ganache process, somehow I lost them as soon as there was equipment they could remove the remaining chocolate off. 🙂
The story does not stop here. While I was doing the sponge cake, by mistake, I added with the eggs and sugar, the melted butter, before beating. Silly thing to do! So, I transferred the eggs, sugar, butter mix in a bowl and started again for my sponge cake. I was wondering what to do with that mix, and with the rest of my milk! I decided to add 1 L of milk and some vanilla seeds and make a custard, the proportions were perfect for this. I had 8 eggs, 1 L milk, about 200 g of sugar. I was not so sure about the added butter. As you may know, butter is added in some creme patissieres used for filling cakes and pastries, so it did not seem to far fetched, why not try? Note that I did not add flour at this stage. What came out was a thick custard. Once cool down, I decided half will go in ice cream and half in a flan dessert (basically a baked custard). It was more like one third/2 thirds.
For the flan, I soaked some raisins in chai tea and fruit spirit (plum brandy). I then buttered and floured a tart tin, mixed the drained raisins with the remaining custard and 1 spoon of flour (2 would have been better) and poured the mix in the tart tin and baked until slightly golden (it could have been a bit more cooked, my husband was on oven duty and was afraid to overcook it). It was delicious. And the ice cream also tasted delicious!
