Curd Your Enthusiasm

In the last post, I enjoyed some delicious comfort food. That’s important in times like these. Equally important, though, is taking advantage of opportunities. This post shares a fun combination of the two!

In this vaguely dystopian world of disrupted supply chains and empty grocery shelves, you need to jump at the chance to treat yourself when you spot it. That opportunity recently presented itself to me as a Midwestern treat, but if this pandemic drags on long enough, one day stumbling upon a fresh carcass with some usable meat remaining may come to be a similar stroke of good fortune.

Until recently, I could never find cheese curds around Boston. That changed a few weeks ago, however. While quarantine shopping at Aldi, I spotted two varieties — white cheddar and Cajun — and I knew I had to buy both.

Even in the best of times, you can’t hesitate if something catches your eye at Aldi. There are intriguing products I've only found at Aldi, and when I’ve returned to purchase more, I’ve never seen them again. I don’t know if that will happen with these, but I’ll certainly enjoy them while I can.

What exactly is a cheese curd and what makes it different from simply being cheese? The explanations I found on the Internet ranged from bafflingly unhelpful to quite technical. According to the latter, cheese curds stop just short of officially becoming cheese: “once the curd is pressed it is called cheese.”

Pressed? Does that mean the key step is... flattening the curd? (Thank you. Thank you. I’ll be here all week, folks. Literally. We’re not supposed to leave the house.)

I first had deep-fried cheese curds on a trip to Wisconsin last year, and I couldn’t get enough of them. This turns out to be a very good problem to have in Wisconsin, because every restaurant served some type of fried cheese curd — white, yellow, battered, breaded, etc. I had a whole new experience every time I ordered them.

For this attempt at deep frying cheese curds, I went with a trusted method — breaded, like I do with mozzarella sticks. I have been deep frying long enough now that I have an efficient assembly line for this process, which involves the curds moving (mostly) from left to right in my setup.
Those steps are:

1. Coating the cheese curds in flour.
2. Dipping them in an egg wash.
3. Coating them in bread crumbs
4. Dipping them back in the egg wash.
5. Coating them again in bread crumbs.

Curds come in all different shapes and sizes. I tended to pick the largest ones for frying. Once a batch went through the above steps...

I deep fried them for about a minute and a half, and they came out looking just like the mozzarella sticks I know and love:

The first round were the white cheddar curds, which were excellent. Round two, the Cajun curds, turned out even better in my opinion. They even looked a little more like those I’d gotten in Wisconsin. (The Fry Gal preferred round one; I think because they were more like mozzarella sticks, which she has a soft spot for.)

There are a couple reasons why I think the second batch was better. The Cajun seasoning added extra flavor, of course, but, also, the Cajun curds tended to be a little smaller than the white cheddar ones. While I figured bigger would be better, the smaller pieces made for perfectly sized bites and a good ratio of breading to cheese.

Another possibility is that the second batch had been out of the refrigerator longer and got closer to room temperature, which the package did suggest was a better way to enjoy them. I don’t think that matters as much here though, since they were eventually submerged in 370F oil.

Overall, they were delicious, gooey, and very stretchy. Mozzarella sticks are great, but unless you use the whole milk mozzarella string cheese (most string cheese varieties in the stores are made with skim milk), you don’t get a really good stretch from each bite. The curds have plenty of fat in them, however, and really stretched out.

The only decent picture I got doesn’t do it justice, so here’s a video:

 

A good, fresh curd will “squeak” when you bite into it. I had no expectation for Aldi brand cheese curds to rival those straight from a Wisconsin farm, but these did actually have a slight squeak to them, which was a nice surprise. We didn’t feel the need to dip these in anything, but some popular options are marinara, ranch, or a spicy or tangy aioli.

Two baskets of fried cheese curds between the Fry Gal and me was very filling. We’d planned to follow up this appetizer with a real dinner, but after both batches of fried curds, we didn’t need anything else to eat. That’s good, because I was too full of cheese to get up and cook anyways.

That made me think: If we need to feed restless Americans something to keep them sluggish and inside their houses for just a little longer, cheese curds might do the trick. Maybe the next government stimulus should simply be a basket of deep-fried cheese curds delivered to every household.

Until next time, stay safe, stay inside, and #flattenthecurd!