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My first shot at German Harzer Käse. It is a sour milk cheese, which means all you need is Lactobacteria, which are abundant in milk already. One drains low fat, and I mean low fat %1, quark or cottage cheese, mixes with salt and baking soda, and wait 7 days for the bacteria to work their magic. Not bad for a first try. The salt was a little too much, still it was edible with walnuts, and would have made an excellent grating on Pasta alla Norma.

In my book the perfect desert is Middle Eastern specialty Künefe: it is made out of very thin vermicelli -little worms in Italian- like pastry called kadayif, a specially flavored soft cheese and a light citrus flavored syrup. This soft non-salty cheese is hard to get in most parts of Turkey, and to eat a salty desert may turn this culinary ecstasy into a nightmare. This is what used to happen to me in Turkey when I ordered künefe in restaurants I didn't know. Surprisingly, the quality of künefe I ate in Berlin has been exceptionally good, which made me wonder. I mean how can the Berlin restaurant owners find this special cheese, and the most of them in Turkey can't? The answer is they can't. But they use fresh mozzarella instead! Being a fresh cheese itself mozzarella fills all the requirements -except mahlab flavor- of a good künefe cheese. Italian cheese substituting South Anatolian cheese! Well that is just another walk of life that binds people from different corners ...