Cosima Underwater

…is German fresh cheese, in case you wondered, and it’s impossible to get in Hong Kong. There are other fresh cheeses of course: Philadelphia cream cheese, Italian mascarpone, Indian paneer but they are just not the same as my beloved Quark. Quark is light, has no E numbers, makes terrific airy cheesecake, and is lovely and healthy with fresh herbs mixed in over a baked or boiled potato. I grew up with it, it was always available and cheap, it’s used as an ingredient in many dishes I love.

If you can’t buy it, make your own, I thought. I already bake my own sourdough bread, why not have a go at Quark?

I came across this old instruction:
1) milk a cow
2) let the milk sit in a covered bowl in a warm place
3) when it has turned into soured milk and set after a day or two
4) put it into muslin cloth and hang it over a bowl, separating cheese from whey
5) next day you have quark

I don’t have a cow, I only have a supermarket with milk imported from California, Australia, and other various places. So I went onto the internet, and other German expatriates told me that your average bought milk will not turn sour these days, because bacteria (good and bad) are none existent in homogenized, pasteurized, sterilized from udder to tetra-paked milk.

The only choice you have is to buy this non-bacteria milk and add lactic acid bacteria back into it. That’s what I did.

On the left, Californian milk which is relatively cheap at roughly US$2 per liter, and Australian milk on the right which costs more than US$4 per liter but actually tastes like fresh milk. Yep, milk products are expensive in Hong Kong, it’s soya territory.

I put a heaped tablespoon of high quality sour cream into each bowl (US$3.40 per tiny pot). Sour cream is cream fermented with lactic acid bacteria, exactly the bugs needed for turning sterile supermarket milk into soured milk. You can also try buttermilk.

The process for making quark is similar to making your own yoghurt, only the bacteria have a different name.

After a night and half day of sitting in a warm spot (blood temperature is ideal: oven heated to lowest setting and the cooled down a bit, place one foot away from central heating, etc.), the milk has soured and set, and the cream (from the tablespoon of sour cream) has set on top. The Australian milk set better than than the cheaper California milk, but both tasted the same.

Scrape away the cream (or leave it in for extra goodness) and put the soured milk into a double layer of muslin cloth or a squeaky clean kitchen towel, and hang it over a bowl (or measuring can, if your window hook is fairly high up like mine… yes, it took me a while to find a good spot)

After a day or two you will have quark or cream cheese or whatever you want to call it (with no E numbers nor xanthan gum). The fat content will be iffy, but wholesome.

I originally intended to bake cheesecake with it, but it didn’t last long enough. Half of it I ate straight out of the bowl with a spoon, some of it I served to my friends as a spread on my self-made sourdough bread, the rest little man ate for breakfast with jam mixed in.

It was better than any quark I have ever bought in Germany.

That’s the beauty of living thousand of kilometers away from your childhood home. You are forced to make the things you miss on your own and in this day and age of supermarket, indefinite shelf-life, E-numbers, genetically modified food stuffs, it will taste much better than what you can buy in a supermarket in your home country.