title, what title?

Before I found real love, I would use the word "love" somewhat excessively. Skiing? I love it! Garcia Marquez? I love him. Artichokes? I love them! Not anymore. I am careful not to use this word out of context. However this delicacy Ricotta Salata, I discovered recently, makes me very close to using the L word. You don't know what to make of it: Is it cheese, or is it not? If it looks like feta, why doesn't it taste like feta? Is it hard, is it soft? Is it fresh, is it old? Then you cannot stop thinking of it. It is not love, but I will have to admit to my love and all the readers that I have an affair with Ricotta salata. What is it then? For those food enthusiasts like me, the production process is very important. I had written about the properties of milk and related products in my previous post . Shortly, milk has fat solube and water soluble proteins. Normal yogurts and cheeses contain mostly the fat solubles which make up %70 of the protein mass. Whey is what ...

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 ...