This is a guess, but maybe butyric acid produced by anerobic bacteria? Butyric acid is ‘buttery and unpleasant’ vs Diacetyl which is a lot of the smell in good butter, and should be in Cheddar (and many other cheeses).
About smell being unpleasant, içm not really sure, because i’m not sure how cheese really should smell. For fresh cheeses they just smell like milk, but how should hard cheese smell when drying, after drying, etc
Also, in any case, if it’s that bacteria, and it smells weird, tastes bitter, should I discard it?
Hopefully someone with more cheesemaking experience will reply. I don’t know enough about it to say. I would not eat anymore of it without knowing more about the cause.
There are cheeses that are very strong and ‘bad tasting’ to many people, Casu Marzu and Époisses for example, but the smell and flavor is more of Ammonia, not at all what you are describing.
As a general rule, I would discard any product where an unpleseant and/or bitter aroma is not exlicitly expected. Our senses of tase and smell are very good at distinguishing “good”, that is energy dense and clean, food from " bad", that is mostly rotten or contaminated, food. I have little experience with cheese making but if any doughs or yoghurts I make start to smell or taste bitter or otherwise off, it is usually because the microfauna got out of hamd and malign bacteria started overproducing.
I got tricked into trying stinky tofu in Taiwan before the smell was able to hit me and I admit I liked it, but not enough to make up for the smell once it did hit me.
Also tried horse nigiri in Japan. Definitely the gamiest thing I’ve ever tasted
Grilled fruit bat in Indenesia. They “hunted” them by flying kites with hooks. Wouldn’t recommend. Cruel and disgusting.
Same country: on a trip to a volcano we ate some sort of fried rice brick with rendang or beef dip at a small road stall. It was the most simple, yet delicious meal I ever had. I still dream of that tasty brick of rice…
Deep fried haggis is much nicer than it sounds. I tried it a few years ago in Edinburgh on a rugby weekend.
I had what I thought was fried squid in Spain once. I’d tried squid a few years before, and it was flavourless and rubbery, but I later learned that it had been overcooked. When I saw Calamari on the menu in a seaside restaurant, I thought I’d try it again.
It had a longer name, but a badly translated conversation with the waiter convinced me that it was the same dish.
The same waiter brought out a plate of what looked a lot like deep fried baby squid or octopus.
It was very nice, but I got filthy looks from my young niece for ‘eating all the babies’, so I haven’t had it since.
Ribeye. Salt with kosher salt, let rest. Sous vide for about 2 hours at about 132 to 134 Fahrenheit. Let rest. Sear on cast iron skillet, ideally with butter, shallots, and herbs if you can manage not to burn them.
My chili powder (Alton Brown recipe and other stuff) goes into the pan with a little hot fat just before I brown the meat. This way it can borrow a truck from curry and fry the spices a minute before they come in contact with the meat.
Right before it goes into the pan/pot. You want to at least use salt at this point to keep moisture in the meat while cooking and allowing it to brown better before you start tossing in everything else.
Kenji has convinced me that it’s not worth trying to get a good sear on ground meat in chili and bolognese. In his recipes the ground beef is cooked with the chili paste, garlic, and onions (or with other stuff in the ragu). The lost maillard flavors can be recovered with soy sauce, fish sauce, marmite, and MSG.
So to answer your question, during. Kind of, since it gets flavored by the other stuff.
I think the only wrong answer is before, because that will give the meat a sausage consistency. I don’t want rubbery beef in my chili.
Also well done on asking a chili question that doesn’t start a war about beans.
Chicken bullion, soy sauce, msg, sesame oil, garlic, and a lot of hot chile. I kinda of just like hot. I want my nose running and eyes watering so much I can’t really taste anything, or if I can that’s not what I’m paying attention to.
Not Balkan specific but ‘The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean’ by Paula Wolfert is great. It’s older though so it isn’t Instagram worthy photos, just great recipes, and commentary about how things are done. Like baking/ cooking in large Tandoor in Georgia.
There is also ‘Croatia at Table’ by Ivanka Bilus. This does have the photos and explains about different regions, things like butter/ cream in the north, olive oil in the south etc. The recipes are fine, but no standouts to me at least.
I have Black Sea by Caroline Eden. It’s as much of a travelogue as a cookbook, so it does make for an entertaining read. You might guess that it doesn’t cover the entire Balkan region…just the parts around the Black Sea.
It’s certainly not grandmas secret, but everything I’ve made from there has at least been well received by Romanians. Then again, it’s as good of a starting point as an American BBQ cookbook if you read it with the understanding that similar ingredients might yield quite different results regionally.
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