Food, Home & Lifestyle

Cheese

Lesson time 17:53 min

In France, cheese and salad are served toward the end of a meal to cleanse the palate. For your final exercise, make a cheese mousse to be served in stylistically cut lettuce.

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Topics include: Cheese * Cheese Sauce * Cheese Mousse * Lettuce

Dominique Crenn

Teaches Modern Vegetarian Cooking

Turn vegetarian dishes into statement pieces with celebrated chef Dominique Crenn. Explore her techniques through a tasting menu of elevated recipes.

Preview

[GENTLE MUSIC] - Okay, so as you know, I'm French. And cheese-- fromage-- is something that I grew up with. This is a part of my culture. It's a part of my DNA. I want to show you a way to enjoy it in a different way than perhaps you are used to. When I came to America, I was a little bit confused about eating salad and cheese sometimes at the beginning of the meal. When in France, the cheese, it's just this beautiful creaminess that ends the meal often. So I'm going to show you a way, more like a modern way to do it. In this chapter, we will make a cheese sauce on the stove, whip, and refrigerate the mixture until it turns into a mousse, then cut and style lettuce. [CHEERFUL MUSIC] So today, the cheese that I'm using, it's a semi-soft cow milk, slightly aged with rum. It has a lot of taste to it. It's not too difficult to the pallet. But there is a sense of texture, and also a flavor that is absolutely delicious. You're looking for something that is not too hard, but it's not too soft. Because it's going to help you to emulsify. If it's too soft, then you're going to have cream on cream. If it's too hard, then it's not going to emulsify properly. So semi-soft cheese is the best cheese to use. This is a cheese we get personally from a farmer that we've been working with for many years outside of San Francisco. Once again, you can go to the farmer's market, go to a creamery, and ask them questions. Try to find something that is not as commercial that you can find on every shelf in every market. Just find something that is made, maybe, locally, or maybe very close to where you live. But you know where the cheese is made, and you understand the story and the making of it. You can use sheep milk. You can use goat milk. And if you get this texture, then it's a winner. So it's up to your liking to do that. But you could do this with vegan cheese and with nut milk. So the way you start, you get a pen. You add your milk. Once again, we're not going to cook it high heat. But you want to warm that up, and you want to incorporate your cheese into it. So milk first, and then a little bit of cream just to get the texture, and then you let that kind of get to a point of simmering. Make sure you whisk it so it doesn't scorch together. You just whip it. And you just want to make sure that you don't over boil it, because it's not going to be good. And when this starts to be warm-- --what I do, I just add the cheese to it, and kind of incorporate the cheese into the milk and cream mixture. I can see the milk getting really, really hot. So I am taking that out of the heat. And then I'm going to add everything in right now. And then what we're going to do is, we're going to start to blend it little by little so we can have paste to it. So I think it's-- yeah, it's getting soft. Okay, so now we're going to bring it to-- and what you're going to do, you don't want to, like, bring everything...

About the Instructor

With three James Beard awards and a three-Michelin-starred restaurant, Chef Dominique Crenn has transcended traditional vegetarian fare by treating cooking as a kind of poetic expression. Now the celebrated chef invites you to discover inspired vegetarian cooking. Following a full tasting menu of recipes, learn how to elevate your techniques, minimize waste, and turn vegetarian dishes into works of art.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Dominique Crenn

Turn vegetarian dishes into statement pieces with celebrated chef Dominique Crenn. Explore her techniques through a tasting menu of elevated recipes.

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