Homemade cottage cheese, bouquet garni, baked chicken: how ordinary gauze can help in preparing these dishes and in the kitchen in general
Many housewives have gauze in their homes.
Most often it is used to cover windows and doorways in the summer to prevent insects from flying into the rooms from the street, or to make wet compresses from it for fever or headaches.
But the possibilities of gauze are not limited to this. It can be used with great benefit in the kitchen. Here are some options for this use.
The simplest solution for straining any liquid with foreign inclusions is to use cheesecloth for this. It is convenient to strain sour milk through it, separating curdled milk, broth or just water into which some kind of debris has fallen.
If you don't have a special brush for oil at hand, take a piece of gauze, soak it in oil and rub the bottom of the frying pan or baking sheet. The same technique works if you need to grease fresh baked goods with oil or sugar solution.
How about trying to make homemade cottage cheese yourself? You'll only need three ingredients: milk itself, some lemon juice, and salt.
The milk is heated, then lemon juice and salt are added, they wait until the milk curdles from the acid, and then strain the resulting mass through cheesecloth. All the whey will drain, and the soft curd will remain.
Speaking of lemon juice, how many times have you squeezed it out of half a fresh citrus fruit onto fish or meat and cursed because the seeds were squeezed out of the pulp along with the juice? Next time, try this life hack: wrap a piece of cut lemon in a layer of gauze and squeeze the juice through it.
Those who cannot drink cow's or goat's milk have chosen plant-based milk as an alternative. But store-bought options often contain a lot of sugar and few nutrients.
Therefore, it is best to make milk from almonds, pistachios or hazelnuts in your kitchen. And the nuts themselves, a blender and cheesecloth will come in handy for this. The nuts are soaked, ground with a blender until a white liquid is obtained, and then the milk can be easily separated from the pulp by straining and squeezing it through cheesecloth.
Want to add the aroma and taste of herbs and spices to your soup or sauce, but don't want to spit out black peppercorns or spoil the look of the broth with floating bits of greenery? This is where gauze comes to the rescue.
With its help it is easy to make what is called a "bouquet garne" - a mixture of spices in a special bag.
Take a little coriander seeds, dried thyme, jalapeno and black peppercorns, place them in a cheesecloth bag, tie the edges of the bag with a thread and then put it in any liquid or dish being cooked so that it acquires a characteristic spicy flavor.
Do you have Greek yogurt at home and don't know how to use it in cooking? If you're tired of it as a dressing, make a cream cheese called labneh out of it.
You will need Greek yogurt itself, salt and gauze. Yogurt is mixed with salt, then this mixture is placed in a colander, the bottom of which is covered with folded gauze, and all that remains is to wait a couple of days until all the liquid drains from the future cream cheese in the refrigerator. Labneh is usually served with hummus, adding fresh lavash and hot vegetables.
Finally, for those who have already despaired of cooking evenly baked chicken in the oven so that all its meat is juicy and appetizing, we can recommend one clever method.
Cover the cooking bird with a piece of cheesecloth folded in four and soaked in a mixture of butter and white wine.
This will prevent the tender breast from losing moisture and becoming too dry, while the dark meat of the chicken will not cook through properly.
Earlier we talked about how to easily remove bad smell from the trash can.
