Abigail M. Schilling

Several weeks ago I was out to dinner with friends (before the midnight showing of Harry Potter) and somehow we got on the topic of cheesecloth. Usual dinner table banter:

What the hell is cheesecloth anyway?
Where do you get cheesecloth?
What does it look like?

I suggested that you used it when making cheese. To squeeze all the water out of the cheese.

Everybody looked at me incredulous.

"What?!" I exclaimed! "It makes sense doesn't it? Cheese ... cloth? I mean it's not rocket science. Besides I remember it in this book I had when I was a kid. These people lived in a cave and they made cheese. And they had to squeeze the cheese until it was solid."

The childhood anecdote convinced my friends and with one obvious edit (the cloth squeezes out milk, not water) we all agreed that cheesecloth was for making cheese.

Problem solved, now on to world hunger.

Fast forward to last week when I was painfully procrastinating on a freelance job. I have an entire tab of websites that I visit solely when I'm procrastinating. (Reason: if I checked all the websites every day--a technical possibility--what would I read when I was avoiding things?) My first thing to sink my teeth into: food blogs. Top o' the list: TasteSpotting. TasteSpotting lures me in with blips of amazing food photography and one-line slugs, allowing my eyes to overlook the only-barely-dead fish and settle on cake or pie or bananas foster (85 pages of 36 posts and counting).

And I learned last week that making your own butter is all the rage. There was even an article in the NY Times about it.

And when something is all the rage, I have to do it. And lo and behold! I got to use cheesecloth. Julia was my trusty assistant in this endeavor. Please enjoy our photo essay.

Ingredients:

-large mixing bowl
-beaters
-3 cups heavy whipping cream

-cheesecloth

1. Whip the whipping cream.

2. After 5-10 minutes you'll notice the cream go from whip cream to... not attractive.

3. Shortly thereafter you'll see the butter begin to form in a crumbly manner.

4. Cut a piece of cheesecloth.

5. After the cream has clearly divided into solid and liquid form use your hands to form the butter crumblies into a ball. Wrap the ball in cheesecloth and squeeze squeeze squeeze the milk out.

6. Once the butter is truly solid, rinse in cold water.

7. Form your butter into your favorite shape. Refrigerate. (Chef's note: For some reason, I didn't take a picture after this one so you'll have to imagine my butter solid, in a perfect rotund circle on a very cute butter plate. Also, this butter could have used a little more squeezing but it was too hot to tell the difference between melting butter and milk.)

Sidebar:
Once the project was complete we were left with some buttery cheesecloth and a bowl full of milk. As we all learned in the third grade, cream makes butter + milk. I was tempted to keep this butter, having received proper education and feeling guilty for wasting. But then I remembered that I had some milk in my fridge and it was 2007.