Halloumi has a high melting point which allows it to keep its shape and firm consistency when cooked. It is a fresh cheese, prepared much like mozzarella from goat’s or sheep’s milk. While it comes from Cyprus and is common throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East, I first encountered it when I lived in Brazil where it is served as a beach snack. A good place to look for Halloumi is a Mediterranian or Middle Eastern grocery, but some supermarkets have started to carry the cheese. I’ve even found it at my farmer’s market, where one of the vendors is like-minded when it comes to grilling. Preparations after the jump.

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There’s always a better whey.

A Wisconsin cheese producer, Joe Van Groll of Stratford, Wisconsin, has a way with whey.

For nearly a decade, Van Groll experimented using the waste product of cheese manufacturing, whey permeate, to manufacture ethanol. During the past four years, he’s been doing just that, and believes his process can produce ethanol for less than $1 a gallon.

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Ingredients

Hummus (store-bought or made from scratch – see below)
8 corn or flour tortillas
½ cup chopped green onions
1/2-1 cup favorite salsa

Directions

1. Spread a tortilla with 2 to 3 tablespoons of hummus and place in a large non-stick skillet over medium heat.

2. Sprinkle with chopped green onions and salsa. (You could also eliminate the salsa here and instead top the finished quesadilla with it.)

3. Top with a second tortilla, and cook until the bottom tortilla is warm and turning golden brown, about 3-5 minutes, depending on how high you have your flame. Turn and cook the second side for another few minutes, until it, too, is golden brown.

4. Remove from pan and cut in half or into triangles. Repeat with remaining tortillas.

Basic Hummus Recipe

1 15-ounce can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
½ cup water-packed, roasted red peppers
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon tahini (sesame seed butter)
1-2 garlic cloves, peeled
¼ teaspoon cumin
Salt, to taste

Place the beans in a food processor or blender with roasted peppers, lemon juice, tahini, garlic, and cumin. Process until very smooth, 1 to 2 minutes. You may add a little water to thin it out. Salt to taste.

Serving suggestions and variations:

• Serve with a side of rice and beans.
• Great for breakfast, brunch, lunch, or dinner – or just as a snack.
• Serve as party finger food; though they really are best served hot!
• For some extra spice, add minced jalapeno peppers to the hummus. Or add a pinch of cayenne.
• You can also serve these with guacamole and non-dairy sour cream.
• Non-dairy sour cream: Wildwood or Tofutti brand sour creams are both delicious. You can find them at Whole Foods or other large health food stores. (Or ask your grocer to carry them.) If you want to make your own, simply add one 12-ounce box of silken tofu to a blender or food processor along with 2 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice. Add a dash of cayenne for some color and "bite."

Copyright © 2007 Compassionate Cooks, LLC – All rights reserved

Advance Preparation: Pesto freezes very well. Defrost pesto at room temperature, about 20 minutes. To reinvigorate frozen or refrigerated pesto, add a drizzle of olive oil and stir.

Ingredients - Pesto
3 cups loosely packed fresh basil leaves
6+ tablespoons pine nuts
2-4 cloves garlic
1-3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon salt, or to taste

Ingredients - Pasta and Veggies
1 pound penne pasta (or any pasta of your choice)
Bunch of chopped spinach, raw or blanched
Fresh, seasonal tomatoes, chopped
Fresh basil, chopped

Directions
Combine the basil, pine nuts, and garlic in a food processor, and blend until the ingredients are finely chopped, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Add salt, to taste.

Add the oil slowly and a little at a time, and process until smooth and creamy. (You don’t need a lot of oil – just add enough to smooth it out a little, but very little is needed.)

Prepare your favorite pasta according to the package directions (penne works great!). Drain. Toss the pasta with the pesto and remaining ingredients.

Serving suggestions and variations:

• Toss the pesto with roasted vegetables.
• Use walnuts instead of pine nuts.
• Add ¼ cup oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, drained and rinsed.
• Replace half of the basil with parsley.
• Add a squeeze of lemon while you’re grinding all the ingredients together.
• Make a pesto pizza, spreading a layer of pesto on your dough and adding some fresh tomatoes and minced fresh herbs.
• Use as a cracker spread. Add non-dairy cream cheese and use as a spread for bread and crackers.
• Prepare it as a dip for chips or raw veggies. Just add it to non-dairy sour cream (Tofutti or Wildwood brands are great.)
• Make garlic pesto bread. Spread pesto on bread and bake like you would garlic bread.
• Grill it. Coat polenta squares, vegetables, or tofu with pesto and grill.
• If you’re not using it immediately, you can store tightly covered in the refrigerator for up to 2 days or place in ice cube trays (or a regular container), cover tightly with plastic wrap, and store in the freezer (for no longer than one month for the best flavor).
• To make extra, for every cup of loosely packed basil leaves, add the following to the above recipe: 2 tablespoons pine nuts, 1 clove garlic (or to taste), ¼ teaspoon salt (or to taste), and 1 tablespoon of olive oil.
• For an oil-free version, eliminate the oil and replace it with 1-2 tablespoons light miso. Add a little water to thin it out a little.

Copyright © 2006 Compassionate Cooks, LLC – All rights reserved

History

Tofu originated in China about 2000 years ago, and while the details of its discovery are uncertain, legend has it that it was discovered by accident when a Chinese cook added the seaweed nigari to a pot of soybean milk, causing it to curdle, and the result was tofu.

Tofu was introduced into Japan in the 8th century, where it was originally known as "okabe," but was not called "tofu" until the 15th century, though tofu did not gain its great widespread popularity in Japan until the 17th century.

Tofu’s popularity in the West has mirrored the increasing interest in healthier foods. First gaining more widespread attention during the 1960s, tofu has been skyrocketing in popularity ever since research has begun to reveal the many significant benefits of this food.

So, what is tofu? What is this white block of what is also called "bean curd?"

Little Miss Muffet

Tofu or Dofu (based on the Chinese spelling) is a food that is made in much the same way that people make dairy-based cheese. First, you coagulate soy milk.

Well, let’s back up. As with cheese, when you make tofu, the first thing you need is milk.

In the case of dairy-based cheese, in our crazy world, we use the milk of animals. To make tofu, we use soy milk. Now, most commercial tofu makers make their own soy milk, which anyone can do by soaking, grinding, boiling, and straining dried (or, less commonly, fresh) soybeans.

When you have your soy milk, you then need to add a coagulant. When you coagulate something, you cause it to curdle. In other words, you transform it from a liquid into a soft semisolid or solid mass. Most of us have seen curdling when cow’s milk starts to go bad and you see little semi-solid white lumps floating around. Those are curds. That’s a process of curdling to indicate that it’s spoiling, that it’s going sour.

But there are other ways to sour milk intentionally. You do this by adding an agent that will produce that souring effect. Acidic liquid substances are the most obvious, such as vinegar or lemon juice. For instance (and I talk about this in my new baking cookbook), to make "buttermilk," all you need to do is add some lemon juice or vinegar to your non-dairy milk, and you’ve got sour milk, i.e. buttermilk.

So that you better understand the process of creating tofu, let me first talk a little about curdling cow’s milk before I continue with soy milk. For animal-based cheese, what is most often used as a curdling agent is rennet. Rennet is essentially a bunch of enzymes produced in the stomach of mammals to help the offspring digest the mother’s milk. One of the enzymes causes the milk to coagulate, to curdle or separate into solids (curds) and liquid (whey). Now you understand what Little Miss Muffet was eating. Couldn’t tell ya why she’d wanna eat it, but now at least you know what it is: curds and whey are the solid and liquid results of curdled milk.

For cow’s milk cheese, the rennet is extracted from the fourth stomach of young calves. And where would you find an abundance of young calf stomachs? The veal industry, of course. The stomachs used to get rennet are a by-product of veal production. Each ruminant animal produces the special kind of rennet needed to digest that species’ mother’s milk, so there is kid-goat rennet especially for goat’s milk cheese and lamb-rennet for sheep’s-milk cheese.

Carcinogenic Casein

Let’s pause for a moment to examine a few health considerations. I mentioned that increased acidity in cow’s milk causes curdling. Let’s go a little deeper. What’s actually happening is that the milk proteins (the casein) is tangling up into solid masses or "curds." The rest, which contains only whey proteins, is the whey. In cow’s milk, 80%-87% of the proteins are caseins.

If you haven’t yet read T. Colin Campbell’s The China Study, I can’t recommend it highly enough. I urge you to read it. Campbell is a highly respected researcher and policy advisor in the field of diet and cancer. He is Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, and has had a long career in research, teaching and development of national/international studies on diet, nutrition and health.

Casein, he says, is the "#1 carcinogen (i.e. cancer-causing substance) that people come in contact with on a daily basis." We’re consuming, drinking, swallowing, digesting this stuff every time we drink animal milk or eat animal-based cheese. And in cheese its even worse, because the casein is super concentrated.

Vegetarian Rennet

So back to rennet: there is vegetarian rennet, and sometimes it’s used in the production of kosher cheeses. Just keep in mind that though rennet can be produced by plants that have coagulating properties, such as nettles, thistles, or mallow – as in marshmallow. You probably know that marshmallows that are made with gelatin (the boiled hooves, bones, and other leftover body parts of the slaughter industry), but they used to be made with the marshmallow plant!

Though plant-based rennet is technically possible to create, nearly all "vegetarian" kosher cheeses are produced with either microbial rennet or genetically modified rennet. Microbial rennet is produced by using certain molds that are fermented. Apparently, using microbial rennet produces a slightly bitter tasting cheese, so with the development of genetic engineering, scientists starting using calf genes to modify some bacteria, fungus or yeast to make them produce Chymosin, one of the enzymes found in rennet. Chymosin produced by genetically modified organisms was the first artificially produced enzyme to be registered and allowed by the FDA in the USA. In 1999, about 60% of U.S. hard cheese was made with genetically engineered Chymosin.

So that’s rennet – used to curdle animal milk to make animal-based cheese. Now we can return to tofu.

As I said, you have to add a coagulant to your soy milk to curdle it, and for commercial tofu, the two coagulant types most commonly added are acid-based and salt-based.

Salt Coagulants

• An example of a salt-based coagulant is calcium sulfate, which is essentially tasteless. Tofu that’s made with calcium sulfate is obviously rich in calcium, and such tofu is pretty common. Tofu made with calcium sulfate tends to be Chinese-style tofu, which is tender but slightly brittle in texture.
• Other salt coagulants used are Chloride-type Nigari salts - Magnesium chloride and calcium chloride. These are the coagulants used to make Japanese-style tofu with a smooth and tender texture. Calcium chloride is a common coagulant for tofu in North America. You’ll recognize this coagulant on the list of ingredients, because it will most likely say Nigari, which consists primarily of magnesium chloride. It’s produced from seawater after the sodium chloride is removed and the water evaporated.

Acid Coagulants

Another coagulant that’s used – mostly for silken tofu or soft – is Glucono delta-lactone (GDL), a naturally occurring organic acid, which produces a very fine textured tofu that is almost jelly-like. Think silken tofu.

Tofu producers may choose to use one or more of these coagulants, as they each play a role in producing a desired texture in the finished tofu. So when you notice a different taste or texture in tofu depending on the brand, this is why. A lot of it depends on the coagulant used. The coagulant mixture is dissolved into water, and the solution is then stirred into boiled soy milk until the mixture curdles.

So, now you’ve got your curds, which, like in the process of making cheese, you press these curds. The curds are processed differently depending on the form of tofu that is being made. For soft silken tofu, the soy milk is curdled directly in the tofu’s selling package. For standard firm Asian tofu, the soy curd is cut and strained of excess liquid using cheese cloth or muslin and then lightly pressed to produce a soft cake. Firmer tofus are further pressed to remove even more liquid.

In Part II, we talk about the various texture varieties of tofu. That’s it. Science lesson over.

(Visit CompassionateCooks.com for tofu recipes or for our DVD, in which we demonstrate various uses with tofu, such as our Veggie Stir-Fry with Peanut Sauce and Eggless Egg Salad.)

Image credit: Andrew Lih and Wikimedia Commons

Well, okay, almost never. Giving up the meat was far easier than I ever expected. Eggs? Never liked those much anyway. Milk? Soymilk made de-dairying a breeze. Even ice cream, you ask? Let me introduce you to Turtle Mountain and Tofutti. All was well in our vegan world, except for one thing: cheese. Even vegans have a recommended daily intake of pizza!

At first, we decided we would cheat with cheese and pretend we were vegans anyway. This became harder and harder to do as we learned more and more about the environmental harm dairy farms can cause. We tried vegan soy cheese alternatives, but found that most brands (but not all) were mouth-numbingly bland, didn't melt, and/or tasted like wet cardboard marinated in that water you pour out of tofu packages. Mmmm.

Clearly, it was time for something new. I first read about cashew "cheese" when I read Eric Marcus' excellent book Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating (now available as a free e-book download!). I thought the idea of vegan cheese made from cashews sounded crazy… Crazy enough to try!

Fast forward a few years, and I've now refined my own version of a cashew cheese recipe to the point where I actually prefer it over cow cheese. It's also one of my favorite DIY projects because I get to use my favorite power tool: the food processor.

As with anything you put on your plate, cashew cheese can be made even greener by using ingredients that are grown locally and grown organically.

Vegan Cashew Cheese

Ingredients:

• 2/3 cup cashews (raw is best, roasted is still great, and try flavored cashews too)

• 1/2 cup water (or slightly more)

• 1/4 cup red bell pepper (raw or roasted)

• 1/4 small red onion (if you're cooking for a date, or more otherwise!)

• 1/4 cup yeast flakes

• 2 garlic cloves (see "red onion")

• 3 tbsp lemon juice

• 2 tbsp Bragg's Liquid Aminos (on the health food isle everywhere, or use lite soy sauce)

• 1 tbsp sesame oil

• 1 tsp sea salt (optional) if the cashews are unsalted

Put everything in a food processor and blend it until it's creamy. If it's too thick, add more water. If it's too watery, add more cashews. It should have a Cream of Wheat-like consistency, or just a bit thicker. For a pizza, spread it thinly over pizza sauce (it's very rich, so a little bit goes a long way), top it off with your favorite vegetables, and pop it in the oven. If the cashew cheese becomes golden-brown more than a few minutes before the pizza crust is done, cover the top of the pizza with foil.

This recipe is plenty for a medium-sized pizza. I like making larger batches and keeping leftovers in the fridge.

Cashew cheese is also great in quesadillas, toasted sandwiches, or just about any other dish that calls for cheese. Lactose intolerant? You're welcome.

Enjoy! If you try the recipe, be sure to let us know how it turns out.