the plight of the curds
By Todd Stadler · Saturday, November 9, 2002 1:37am
What follows is a selection of entries from The Food Scientist's private journal. This week, The Food Scientist* experiments with cheese curds.
Sunday, 1:45pm ? Hey, Food Front has cheese curds! I don't think I've ever had those. Was it Christy who told me about them once? They seem like a Wisconsin thing. I'll buy them.
Monday 7:37pm ? Mmm, I think I'll have some cheese curds for a nice after-dinner snack. I'm really excited! I've never had cheese curds before. I bet they make a really great after-dinner snack. Wow!
Monday 7:41pm ? Hm. Okay. I guess they're kind of good, but not as good as regular cheese. They're a bit too ... chewy? Man, I'm kind of down now.
Monday 8:03pm ? Great. Now what am I gonna do with a whole pound of cheese curds?
Wednesday 2:17pm ? Sometimes I worry about the minority populations in Iraq. Are we concerned enough about their oppression?
Friday 1:30am ? What the heck is a cheese curd, anyway, and should I have known that before I purchased them?
Friday 1:37am ? I mean, what's the point of supporting labelling genetically modified foods if you don't even know what the food you're eating is? Really!
Friday 10:02am ? You know what I could do? I could fry the cheese curds! Yeah, frying has never let me down before! Okay, except that time when I was thirteen and bored from being home alone all summer so I decided to make doughnuts by ripping the crusts off of wheat bread, balling up the rest of the bread and putting it into hot oil. Not that that was bad, but it rather disappointingly failed to make doughnuts. Still, this time will be different.
Friday 12:41pm ? I mean, what is frying but sticking things in hot oil? Right? And I guess you need a batter of some sort. I wonder what that involves. I'll look it up later.
Saturday 10:58am ? Okay, I don't really feel like looking up any batter recipes. Let's see, I've got an egg here and some flour. Sounds good. I'll dip the cheese curds in the egg and then in the flour.
Saturday 10:59am ? So my friend says things fry best when the oil is really hot, and that you can tell the oil is hot enough by flicking some water into it. Man, I'm really excited about this. This time, the cheese curds are gonna rock!
Saturday 11:00am ? I'll bet Neil Armstrong felt like this the minute before he stepped onto the moon.
Saturday 11:01am ? Here we go. I'm dropping the floured curds into the hot vegetable oil. Four, three, two, ... one! Wow, those puppies really are, um, frying! Look at 'em go. So I wonder how long I should do this for. I guess I'll look for that telltale golden brown hue. As a side note, I'm really impressed with my ability to keep such detailed journal notes while I'm busy frying things. Kudos to me!
Saturday 11:02am ? Okay, that was quick. I guess they're done. What was that, a few seconds? I guess they're ready to eat, then. Man, I'm excited! I bet Neil Armstrong felt like this right before he took a big mouthful of moon dust when Buzz Aldrin wasn't looking.
Saturday 11:03am ? Oh. My. Gosh. These are so good! Wow! Frying is nature's miracle process. It has transformed cold, chewy cheese curds into light, golden, fluffy, um, nugget delights! Where did all that flavor come from? Certainly not from the oil itself. Have I violated the law of the conservation of flavor? I'll bet Albert Einstein felt like this when he first had something deep fried.
Saturday 11:05am ? Okay, well, I've still got lots of egg and cheese curds left, so I might as well fry up the rest. What a great discovery!
Saturday 11:09am ? Ready for the second batch. I could eat just fried cheese curds for lunch! And here we go! Hmm, the oil isn't as clean as it was before.
Saturday 11:10am ? Okay, things aren't happening as nice as they did the first time. The curds are still frying, but the oil seems to be smoking more.
Saturday 11:11am ? Yes, the oil is definitely smoking more. And I don't like the ... ack! The spatula! It's melting!
Saturday 11:12am ? Abort! Abort! There's a pot of smoky oil with black gunk in it, and a severely damaged spatula! What do I do? What do I do? Oh why isn't there a section in the cookbook for "what to do when your frying experiment has gone horribly, horribly wrong"?
Saturday 11:14am ? Okay, um, this pot of oil needs to cool down, but it's still putting off too much smoke. And yet, if I let it cool down too much, who knows if the pot will ever again be useful? Think, Todd, er, I mean The Food Scientist, think! What would Jeff Smith do?
Saturday 11:15am ? Crisis averted. Everything is fine now, except the small patch of dirt under the stairs in the backyard where there is a suspicious patch of black gunk.
Saturday 11:18am ? You know, even with the smell of smoke in my nostrils, these remaining fried cheese curds are still tasty. But what am I going to do with all the remaining breaded pre-fry curds?
Saturday 11:23am ? I wonder what would happen if I pan-fry the curds, instead?
Thus concludes this week's installment of The Food Scientist. Join us next week when we'll hear The Food Scientist say, "Jumping Jehosaphat! Who knew you could melt cast iron?!"
*Not his real name. Names have been changed to protect the identity of those involved.
8 comments so far
1 Nov 13 '02 9:18am:
Xy replied:
"Ah, yes. I thought I had mentioned the frying as being a crucial element (although, once you've learned to love curds in any stage, I steadfastly maintain that they are also good raw, especially if you are also eating bratwurst, slathering pretzels with mustard and/or port wine cheese spread, and washing it all down with beer).
Here are some of my other favorite fried cheeses:
Sma?en? s?r (with mayonnaise, no less!)
Saganaki (in restaurants, they often *light it on fire* at your table before serving)
Sorry about the spatula, though."
2 Nov 13 '02 11:12am:
amar replied:
"you call yourself a food scientist? FOOL, i'm a food science OG!! "
3 Nov 13 '02 12:27pm:
paige replied:
"Cheese curds are great! We get them in Iowa all the time. How can you not like them?!"
4 Nov 13 '02 3:55pm:
tODD replied:
"Amar, why you gots ta front? I ain't need no playa hataz 'round here.
'Sides, why you think you be all that for writin' some humorous internet piece on some pseudo-scientific-method experiment involving putting food in a blender? It's not like you were the first person I know to do that.
Fool! Respect yer elders! All hail the rizneal Food Scientist! Word!
As a side note, the fact that we were both experimenting with blending food within months of each other without yet having met is obvious proof that the government was experimenting with mind-altering drugs in the water supply at the time."
5 Nov 13 '02 4:28pm:
amar replied:
"aight, it's all good, one love, one love. on the real doe, my blender joint wasn't even on the internet at the time. it was a zine. now that's oldskool. you know my steez"
6 Nov 13 '02 5:39pm:
tODD replied:
"You know, I always end up looking stupid when I find myself pretending to be a thug (and you'd be surprised how often that is).
Sure, I can recite the first half of Outkast's "Bombs Over Bagdad" by heart, but my lingo usage skills are mainly limited to a small set of street sayings I probably learned from a Time magazine article five years ago, or, more recently, from the Boondocks.
I suppose I could pillage the lyrics from my rap CDs, but they are small in number, sadly, and one of them's in French. Yes, I think I have more TMBG CDs than rap. The gig is up. I'm no longer cool.
And I almost had you all fooled, too."
7 Nov 20 '02 12:23pm:
Elise replied:
"Why does this all vaguely remind me of the diet I've been attempting lately.
A bunch of my friends are on the Atkins diet. http://www.webterrace.com/fad/atkins.htm
and miraculously seem to be loosing weight.
Now I don't personally AGREE with it's philosophy. Any diet that claims that eating all the meat and fat you want while vigorously avoiding such things as carrots, peas, any kind of bread or pasta, orange juice, any fruit whatsoever and half of the "healthy" vegetables I know of seems highly suspect. Who ever heard of oatmeal being "bad" for you?? I ask you?
Basically - the diet has you living like you were allergic to sugar in any form. I'll buy that Americans eat WAY too much sugar and that cutting sugar out of your diet can be a big help towards getting rid of a few pounds - but avoiding sugar to the degree that you would have to avoid milk for the lactose it contains seems extreme.
But after carrying around sixty extra pounds for an indeterminant amount of time - I felt like I would try anything that had a chance of working.
At first - it didn't seem too bad - though I felt like I was pretending like I was a diabetic while at the same time - eating things like a bowl of cheese and sausage for lunch. (try convincing someone you're on a diet when they spy you trying to consume half a ham...)
The part where this ties back to the fried curds experiment (yes...I was getting to it) is when I heard Joe and Chris exchanging Atkins recipes that consisted of a ton of fat, meat and splenda (a popular Atkins sugar substitute). A deep-fat frier wouldn't be out of place in an Atkin's kitchen.
But it was when I was in a restaurant - watching Chris just eating a bowl of (what looked like) melted cheese-whiz like it was a bowl of cereal - that my logic circuits finally revolted and my taste-buds went on strike. I think my neural pathways finally became saturated in oil and subsequently shorted out after an brief electrical fire.
Out of general protest - I just ate some chocolate. No - not the healthy alternative - but very much missed. I think next - I'll go and get a BIG glass of orange juice.
One thing that the diet HAS done for me - I've been deprived so much from some fruits and vegetables that they now have seductive forbidden appeal. I would have never thought of a grapefruit as a guilty pleasure before...
mmm....
"
8 Mar 30 '05 8:02am:
Anonymous replied:
"f*** off your the gay scientist not the food scientist"