Curd Your Enthusiasm 2: Fry Fry Curdie

The cheese curds on my last post were delicious, but, as this pandemic rolls on, we are learning that we aren’t necessarily going to be able to keep doing things the way we used to do them. That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy things almost the same way though. For example, I’m now getting my MLB fix by watching a few innings of Korean baseball each morning before work.

The initial curds experience fell back on my familiar method of breading cheese to fry it. Now it’s time to expand my repertoire and try out a new approach. So for this sequel post, I’ll beer batter and fry them.

Longtime readers may know that I’ve done a little beer battering back in the day, including fish, oysters, and avocados, to name a few. This is my first foray into beer battering dairy, however.

I was raring to go and deep fry some beer-battered cheese curds, and, while doing some of the prep work, I asked the Fry Gal to pick out a good online recipe.

She wasn’t aware of my method of picking out an online recipe: find whatever is closest to what you already think and is easiest for you personally to follow (this is also how everyone does politics online). If you have absolutely no idea what a recipe might look like, and no experience or qualifications to guide you, just imagine what you wish it looked like and find whatever most closely matches that (still how everyone does politics online).

The Fry Gal was a little too thorough in evaluating recipes to be sure she picked the very best one, and we ended up with a recipe that required one of my least favorite things — a step involving waiting. In this case, the recipe we went with called for the curds to sit in the freezer for an hour to cool down. (But as usual, the Fry Gal was right. I checked her work, and other recipes also recommend this step.)

That meant we faced another all-too-common experience in our current world — time to kill. The oil was already heating, and we were hungry. What could we fry in the meantime?

We had recently dug into an Iberico ham leg over Easter:

The properly carved meat looks like this . . .

. . . and even I would argue it’d be criminal to deep fry such delicious, tender cured ham.

The leg does produce a bit of waste, however — the skin and fat that in better times would just be discarded.

As these are not better times, we put that to use, making pork cracklins. (I realize that on my last post, I joked about tearing barely usable scraps off an animal carcass, and here I am only weeks later doing exactly that!)

I cut those strips of skin and fat into smaller bites and into the fryer they went. No other prep is necessary (though I have learned you can add sugar and salt beforehand and give the pork scraps time to soak those up).

After a few seconds, they start floating to the top of the oil. From there, you can stir occasionally, but mostly just leave them be for several minutes.

Then I strained them out of the fryer and drained on paper towels. If you taste them right out the fryer, you’ll say, “meh.” But if you hit them with some seasoning and, most importantly, salt, they come alive instantly. I used the same Lazy Susan’s seasoning I use for chicken tenders.

In a handful of cracklins, you’ll get some skin, which will have become crispy and light; some fat (OK, plenty of fat), which will be soft and almost buttery; and some bits of actual meat, which will be a bit chewy but a good complement to the rest of it.

In writing this post, I learned that cracklins are different from pork rinds, which are just the skins, trimmed closely without the fat attached.

This batch didn’t make a whole lot, but that’s a good thing. I can’t eat too much of these without getting very dehydrated from all the salt and a little bit disgusted from all the fat.

If you haven’t recently imported an Iberico ham leg from Spain . . . I’m sorry to hear that. But, you can buy pig skins and scraps for VERY cheap at the supermarket. They’re found in the leftovers/scraps/super on-sale section of the meat aisle. I think those will turn out even better than these already cured and aged pig skins.

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OK, that was a fun diversion while we waited on the cheese curds, but now let’s get back to it.

We still had a little more time, so I mixed up a dipping sauce from another recipe we found. It was made of mayo, hot sauce, and garlic powder, specifically:

• 1/4 cup light mayo
• 2-3 tsp (or more to taste) Franks Red Hot
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder

I put it all in a bowl, mixed it up, and set it aside for later.

Next, I mixed all the ingredients for the beer batter. Those were:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup beer (Jack’s Abbey House Lager)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 eggs 

My working space was set up with a plate of the curds, a bowl of flour, and the beer batter. Once everything is ready, and the oil is hot, you roll the curds in flour, then dip them in the batter, then transfer them right to the oil.

The recipe suggested frying 5-6 curds at a time, but I didn’t think I was overloading the fryer too badly with 10 at a time (for about 2 minutes per batch):

Beer batter is tough to keep totally covering whatever it is you are deep frying. It drips off quickly during the transfer to the oil, and you lose a little more batter before it starts to solidify in the fryer. Those loose drops of batter need to be skimmed out of the oil on an ongoing basis.

I also lost a few curds to the depths of the fryer. If you don’t have a strong coating of batter, the cheese will seep out as it melts, leaving behind an empty beer batter shell.

Here’s my batch:

And here’s a picture I dug up from my trip to Wisconsin (these were yellow curds, not white ones):

All in all, these were enjoyable. That said, we had a few issues with these that, taken all together, meant we preferred the breaded curds from Part 1. We also thought the dipping sauce was OK, but we could take it or leave it.

The first problem was that I waited slightly too long to serve them. They cooked in three batches, and I brought them all out together. The third batch was very good, and very gooey, but the first two batches had already started to cool and the cheese in those had re-solidified. It’s a small window of time in which you need to enjoy these. I’m impressed at how reliably restaurants can get them out to us on time.

Another problem was that the fryer hasn’t been cleaned in a while. This is also no fault of the curds, but the sludge of many meals past had accumulated on the bottom of the fryer, and that gunk keeps the oil from getting as hot as it needs to. This causes the food to be less crispy (which is particularly important for a beer batter) and to absorb more oil, which makes an already dense dish like fried cheese even heavier.

These are all avoidable problems, so under better conditions, these might have rivaled breaded curds. But even so, I think we would still have preferred breaded curds, mostly because of their similarity to mozzarella sticks. I mentioned the Fry Gal’s soft spot for mozzarella sticks last post, but I still understated it; mozzarella sticks were actually mentioned in our wedding vows.

The important takeaway for me was that the fryer was greatly in need of a cleaning. It’s the perfect time for that too, because 1) I’ve got plenty of time on my hands, and 2) in my next post, I want to fry something that would really benefit from cooking in clean, pure oil.

Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, even if things aren’t quite as good as the way you’d like to be doing them — like beer battering your cheese curds instead of breading them — I hope you all are finding new ways to enjoy a new normal!

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!