I was born in Oxford, Mississippi to two parents who were in the process of getting their college degree, and when I was two years old, I moved to Desoto County where I attended Desoto County Schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade. My family still resides in Desoto County, and my little brother now attends the same Desoto County schools that I attended. As an Olive Branch resident, I had the pride of being from the fastest growing city in the country and in one of the most populous counties in my state. Desoto County is greatly blessed, and its proximity to both Memphis and Tunica has made it exceptionally affluent- Desoto County has the highest median income in Mississippi and the second highest mean income in Mississippi. I have been incredibly blessed to grow up in a stable, loving home, but I did not grow up in a home with significant income. When I was very, very young, my family received state assistance by the way of food stamps. This crucial government program was an incredible aid to my parents as they graduated from college and started a home together as a young family. Food stamps helped my parents get on their feet, and I have always felt an incredible debt to the government for helping my family in such a formative time- a debt I have been proud to repay in taxes and community service. Welfare and food stamps are truly a boon to struggling families- whether they are just getting on their feet for the first time or they are encountering extraordinary trials.
Given your truly horrifying comments regarding who receives government aid, it may surprise you to learn that I am white and both of my parents are college educated. Despite your statements that "all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call 'welfare crazy checks,'" only 1.4% of Desoto County receives cash public assistance and 9.4% of Desoto County receives Food Stamp/SNAP benefits, according official census information gathered from 2009 to 2013. The census also cites that 7.4% of households in Desoto County live in poverty, as opposed to the state percentage of 17.8%. Only 17.8% of African American residents of Desoto County received food stamps/SNAP, another number sourced from the U.S. Census Bureau, working from data gathered from 2010 to 2012. Incredibly, this number is quite far from the "all" that you mentioned in your ignorant comment.
Perhaps what is most terrible about your comment is the fact that you seem to begrudge this crucial assistance to the people you are elected represent because they are black. Perhaps if they were white, they would be worthy of food.
I am also deeply offended by the fact that you claim to be of the Methodist faith because there was no greater advocate for the help of the poor than Jesus Christ himself. I think of Deuteronomy 15:11- "For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, 'You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land." I think of Luke 6:20- "And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, "Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God." I think of the Sermon on the Mount. These are the words of the Lord, your God, and you bring shame upon yourself and others of your faith when you work to take food from the mouths of the hungry because you are blinded by your hatred of others based on the color of their skin. Your comments betray a blighting racism that harms your constituents.
There are so many superheroes, an ocean of them with weirdo powers and strange backstories. There are so many that are unfamiliar, that are new and strange, and there are superheroes that are iconic. There's superheroes who can be evoked without actually calling them by name- Earth's Mightiest Mortal, The Bat, the Fastest Man Alive, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, The Merc with the Mouth, the Man Without Fear, the Spirit of Truth. Beloved characters, adored characters, idolized characters.
And then there's the Man of Steel, the Big Blue Boy Scout, the Last Son of Krypton, the Big Red S, ol' Supes. When I talk to people about comic books, one of the first things they tell me is how much they hate Superman. He's too perfect, he's not real, he doesn't feel the struggle, he doesn't understand what it's like to suffer, he's too good. They'll ask me if I've read Red Son, Mark Millar's 2003 soviet-Superman alternate-universe thought-experiment. They'll ask me what I thought of Injustice. They'll smile, they'll nod- Now that's a real Superman story. It would seem that to many people, the real Superman stories depend on a casual removal of so many of the things that make Superman so good; to many people, it seems that the real Superman stories do not actually star Superman at all.
Where Superman loses people as a character is Clark Kent.
Clark Kent grew up in a small town. He made good grades, he had friends including a beautiful girlfriend. He went to college and did well enough to land a solid gig writing at one of the best papers in the world. He's a bit of a dweeb but he's well liked and he's got a good, healthy relationship with his parents, who are supportive of him and his big-city aspirations. The backbone of Clark Kent, and by extension Superman, is emotional health. He's loved, and at the end of the day his motivation is compassion.
That's not always relatable and that's not always an easy sell. It's corny and people don't like corny. People don't like heroes that wear their underwear over their leggings. People don't like characters without a hint of irony to them, because there's nothing less ironic than wearing a costume because your mom made it for you. There's nothing less ironic than telling the people that you've just rescued from a plane crash that, statistically, it's still the safest way to travel. There's nothing less ironic than talking someone down from a ledge. People don't like corny. People like unironic.
Furthermore, it's hard to identify with a character whose basis is love and a positive relationship with his parents. Batman, whose basis is formed around parental absence and rage is a lot easier to see yourself in. Spiderman's money problems and status as a social pariah is known for being the first relatable superhero, the first one you could live down the block from. And as time has gone on, Superman's powers have made him seem more and more like a god and his kindness have made him seem false. The Man of Steel is 76 years old and maybe he has not aged as well as his younger counterparts- for what superhero in publishing today does not owe a debt to the Last Son for paving the way for superheroes in comics?
I grew up with Superman like an old friend. Superman was my most reliable moral compass, a model for control over anger and empathy. I felt isolated as a kid, painfully awkward and strange. I felt like an alien. I felt like there was no place for me in the small town I grew up in, which when you're nine might as well be the entire universe. I stood in the backyard sometimes, half expecting to find the pod that brought me here; I lay in the sun half-hoping that my batteries would charge and I could fly away. And then I'd go inside, and I'd eat dinner with Mom and Dad.
I get why people don't like Superman, but that isn't going to stop me from recommending what I think is the singular best Superman series. Jeph Loeb's 1998 Superman For All Seasons demonstrates the best things about Superman stories and Superman as the character while being a great place to start with the character as a new reader. The story is split into four books- one for each season- and follows Clark's move to Metropolis following his high school graduation and his donning of the cape. Tim Sale's art has become someone infamous, but it's some of my favorite. Sale draws heavily from Norman Rockwell to build the kind of soft comfort of Ma and Pa Kent's house and Smallville. His pastels and watercolors are sweet and dear and his chunky figures have an action-figure quality that far more reminiscent of a toybox than the swole monstrosities built by many artists working in comics.
It's a story I grew up reading and it's the first thing I read at the start of my freshman year. It's a story about growing up and leaving your hometown. It's a story about making real, conscious decisions about the kind of person you want to be. It's a story about falling in love with a place. It's a story about love.
It's corny, but that's Clark Kent. That's Superman.
I had been angry and I had been upset about the presence of Lewis & Clark students at Reed events, and then I read a comment the website for their student paper.
The comment was fairly innocuous. It read something like, “I’ve been going to Reed parties since my freshman year, like Beyonce Ball and their Talking Heads dance party.”
And it was at that point that my anger boiled over into something far more akin to rage.
I have multiple friends that have been bothered and assaulted by inconsiderate Clarkies on campus- whether by constant asking if they had drugs or by actually being grabbed or touched. But it’s that comment that has let me put my finger on why I’m not ready to make peace.
I pay to go to Reed. My parents pay and I have taken out loans. I applied to get into Reed. I worked to get into Reed. I work while I’m at Reed, spend hours and hours and hours studying and writing and reading. I agonize over papers and problem sets. I have wept at ten o’clock at night, realizing that I have read the wrong eighty page article.
By the time April rolls around I have earned Stop Making Sense.
To be entirely honest, I look forward more to Stop Making Sense than I do Renn Fayre. I love Renn Fayre, don’t get me wrong, but I have listened to the Talking Heads since I was a kid. I remember driving home in the dark with my dad listening to “Swamp.” I recall cleaning the house listening to “Slippery People.” I remember the volume knob going all the way up when “Burning Down the House” came on the radio. I have history with the Talking Heads, a kind of goofy, deep-seated love that comes from mumbling in the French part of “Psycho Killer” and downright shouting my way through the rest of it. I wait for Stop Making Sense all goddamn year and when it comes, it’s like surfacing after diving down deep, deep, deep in the bottom of a pool. It is like taking a burden off my shoulders. It makes me feel connected and real and in place in a community full of people who love the big suit and the eerie breathlessness of “Genius of Love” as much as I do. Stop Making Sense makes me feel like I belong.
So no, don’t call it a Talking Heads dance party.
You don’t write the papers. You don’t go to the conferences. You don’t cry the same tears, you don’t work the same problem sets, you don’t do the work, you didn’t do the application, and you don’t pay to go here. You are not entitled to our spaces, our resources, our parties, our community safety officers, our buildings, our bodies, our property, our music, our dancing, our shouting, our joy.
And then you call Stop Making Sense “the Talking Heads dance party.”
I’m angry. I don’t care that our respective leadership groups have gotten together and had pizza or pasta or cake or whatever. I don’t care. Apologize. Apologize and stop coming.
A few reasons: my father loves comic books. My father collects. In my parent’s closet, there are about eight long boxes full of single issues. There is a bookcase that stands ten feet in the air, three feet wide, full of graphic novels. When I learned to read, it was with an issue of Golden Age Batman clutched in my small hands, pulling together the way the words and the pictures worked together.
More Reasons: A collection of Golden Age Captain Marvel (or Shazam! if you’re seven years old or a rebooted universe) comics that were always in my living room, easy to reach. Bright, colorful artwork drawing from Art Deco. Space Dragons, trips to Venus, a wizard kept captive on his throne by a great stone suspended by a single thread.
Yet More Reasons: The Bruce Timm/Paul Dini cartoons that aired when I was small, with Kevin Conroy as Batman and Timothy Daly as Superman. Watching them after school, after doing my homework with my dad holding me close and my mom right next to us. A safe place.
Reasons: Trips to the comic book store with Dad after watching Thundercats on Saturday mornings. Browsing through the titles and looking at the strong fists, the spitcurls, the bare chests, the incredible powers, the lightning bursts, the abandoned laboratories. Getting to pick out one or two issues to be lovingly read and re-read and re-read until their cheap paper gave up the ghost and finally tore.
Finding The Legion of Superheroes (or Legionnaires if you follow the other storylines) as a teenager and enjoying all of the different heroes, their different powers, their different interactions with each other.
Arguing (screaming, red faced, enraged arguing) in preschool about whether or not Superman is an alien or human (I was right).
Writing college application essays about the Sandman comics. Explicitly mentioning Jimmy Olsen in other ones.
The Flash t-shirt that I’ve had since kindergarten, now sitting in my drawers fifteen years after it was given to me (we bought it very large; it still fits me).
The unfinished script for a story sitting in my google docs right now.
Crying when Christopher Reeve died.
Crying while reading Superman as he talks someone down from a ledge, knowing that if all else fails, Superman still believes in you. Superman knows this gets better. Come down from the ledge. Put your demons away.
Printing out Matt Fraction’s beautiful discussion of his own struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts and how waiting for that next issue saved his life. Hanging it on my wall to read when things seem too big.
Now I’m going to tell you that I’m a woman.
Tell me that my reasons are less valid. Tell me that I don’t really love comic books, I just saw the Christopher Nolan movies and decided I loved Batman because of Christian Bale’s dreamy voice. Tell me that when I walk into comic book shops, I have no right to be there. That I’m invading your safe space, made just for men. Tell me that because I’ve watched movies and enjoyed them, I don’t really like the books or the characters.
Quiz me. Ask me about specific issues or writers. Challenge the fact that I don’t like the way these things are characterized because it’s like an Elseworld, you’re just not getting it! Tell me that I just don’t see things the right way. Sigh heavily. Cross your arms. Roll your eyes. Tell me that Injustice isn’t canon so it doesn’t matter that it makes literally no sense.
Tell me you know more about Hal Jordan and Parallax than I do because I had blonde braids in my hair and was wearing a sundress when I read that particular storyline (I was eight, the braids made me feel pretty and it was a damn cute sundress). Ask me if I saw the movie because of how much I liked Ryan Reynolds in that romantic comedy.
Ask me if I'm there to buy something for my boyfriend.
When I say no, suggest the My Little Pony titles to me. Steer me towards Ultra (it's about women! She's going to fall in love! It's just like a romantic comedy!).
Sound and place- close enough that the scent of other diner’s meals waft over across from their tables. Something spicy and acidic, suddenly bursts of brightness like fireworks on the air.
It’s a loud enough place that you can dodge conversation at your table, if you really want to. It’s close, intimate like a house full of relatives is intimate. You can become comfortable invisible in the sound of other people and just watch.
Long, blue-grey aprons on the waitstaff. The thick edge on cut-wine-bottle water glasses. The muffled sound of something on the stereo- upbeat, but not the cloying sound of retail upbeat music. A place full of organic noise, the way really good diners are always full of noise.
Hog & Hominy’s menus are artfully non-descriptive. They give a sparse list of the main ideas of the dish, just enough to incite great excitement but not enough to really give the game away. There is nothing that can properly anticipate the beautiful caprese- the words “buffalo mozzarella” do not properly describe the moist, tangy, creamy puffs that dot the bright and juicy tomato salad like clouds. The noun “poutine” is hardly a proper descriptor for their dish, nor is the simple statement of its essential parts (“fries, neckbone gravy, chili oil, caputo cheese curd”.)
I think it is the poutine that is most indicative of what makes the cooking at Hog & Hominy so special. It is rich, gorgeously rich, but it is not heavy food. After tearing through a better part of a bowl of their poutine, I did not feel like the end was nigh. It was practically airy for a dish I normally describe as a natural disaster. It had to do with the art of the neckbone gravy and the way chili oil, which normally grounds dishes, seemed to give the thing wings. It was filling and comforting but it was beautiful in its execution. Everything on their menu is like this. It is at once familiar and new and strange.
There was also the Johnnycake (something like a corn pancake) with cherry tomatoes and cream cheese and catfish gravlax, a dish I resented sharing with the rest of the table. Normally creamy catfish had been changed into something salty and chewy and intense, and paired with the bright tomatoes and warm johnnycake, it flew.
It all flew. It defied what felt like heaviness of their ingredients and made for bright and delicious food. There was not a bite of it that was not well made or truly enjoyable to eat. The parmesean gelato flew. The buffalo pork tails flew. The mushroom and smoked gouda pizza flew.
Sitting there, amidst the incredible noise and the perfect food, it is hard not to agree with the crooning of David Byrne- Ah yes, this must be the place.
Crawfish (or crayfish or even crawdads), for the uninformed, are like tiny, evil, freshwater lobsters. Larger than shrimp but with less edible material, crawfish are the absolute proof that people will eat whatever they can when they are hungry, and then they will call it a delicacy and trick the gullible into paying obscene amounts of money for it at top restaurants.
In Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett describes the phenomenon best-
The point was that a good...cook could more or less take the squeezings of a handful of mud, a few dead leaves and pinch or two of some unpronounceable herbs and produce a meal to make a gourmet burst into tears of gratitude and swear t be a better person for the rest of their entire life if they could just have one more plateful.
While Pratchett was not writing about any real chefs, or even any real places, he was accurately describing chef David Chang;s reaction to crawfish, who included a preparation he found in China in his acclaimed Momofuku cookbook (stir fried in a wok with chilis and sichuan peppercorns).
Crawfish as I know them are dark red black, with purplish red spots along their hard exoskeletons and jet-black eyes like beads on the sides of their heads. They have six legs and claws and hairlike antenna.
Sometimes, in the hot August, a large truck will park outside of the local library and sell them by the pound. You give the purveyor however much money, and the man shovels the hard shelled animals into large paper sacks. You sit in the car and eat them, like an animal, with your bare hands. The whole thing is like nothing else so much as a particularly sordid drug deal.
Sometimes, if you are particularly lucky, a local supermarket will sell them live out of steel bins. Looking down, you can smell their ichor and their muggy wateriness. You can see them squirming angrily on top of each other, more belligerent than is sensible for a creature that is so small. It is their rage that makes them delicious- that and the angry flavor of crawfish boil that makes them more spicy than you can actually stand.
This is the correct way to eat them: Buy them live and boil the hell out of them in furiously spicy liquid. Pull them out of the water and burn your fingers as you pull the curled tail away from the body (now bright red with the cooking). Yank the tail and the meat along with it out of the cage-like torso. Suck the brains out of the head and peel the rest of the shell from the tail. Hurt yourself with the heat of the thing- creamy and rich and spicy and hot, unbearably hot. Repeat until you have eaten more than you probably should.
Lie back in your chair content in the knowledge that you have been initiated. You know better, now, that sometimes the best food are not recognizably foods.
Memphis is a cheated city. Between the affluent Nashville to the north and the collegiate Oxford to the south, Memphis is largely ignored unless someone wants to make a movie about crime or the first twenty minutes of a film about an American musical great.
Memphis is an ugly city. It is flat and beige and brown and grey. It has no glittering skyscrapers, no stunning bay. Even the river which made it a delta hub has a reputation for being dirty- Old Muddy.
I am from Memphis, and it is a place I love not without my degree of bitterness. I am defensive of Memphis. I am defensive of Elvis, and our zoo, which was rated the best in the country a few years ago. I am constantly rallying against the artistic insistience that the parts of Memphis that aren’t populated by Matthew MacConohghey or evil rich white people are the hood.
More than anything, though, I am defensive of Memphis Barbecue, or as I refer to it, Barbecue.
In eleventh grade, I told someone that I loved barbecue, and they said, “What kind?” I was baffled by the question.
“Barbecue,” I said, unsure how to elaborate. It was not until a friend came in and clarified that I meant pork, probably ribs or shoulder, smoked low and slow for six to twelve hours, dry rubbed. I did not mean something you did to vegetables, or something you did to chicken with a bottle of italian dressing and the best of intentions. I meant pork.
That’s where my brain defaults, with barbecue. It is never wet- the sauce is always on the side,so that the true quality of the meat can be judged. It is pulled, not chopped. It is always dry rubbed. It is usually smoked over hickory, it is usually done with an unholy quantity of pork, it is so tender it can only be likened to butter. It is flavorful, with that dark smoky crust of burned and caramelized sugars and spices. It is a taste of home. When I come back from college to see my family, I always want barbecue, and that first pork sandwich or those first couple of ribs always make me tear up.
Barbecue is not vinegary, and it is never beef. It is glorious pork, sweet and spicy and crunchy and moist and good. So very good.
It is a thing Memphis does better than anyone else, and it is a rare point of civic pride among all Memphians. It is something we can call our own. It is something that cannot be dirtied by a long record of startling poverty or racism or violence. It’s not only Memphis at its best, it’s what we do better than anyone else.
The kitchen is the most comforting part of my house. It has always been the centerpoint of my family’s life, and by extension, my life. It has been the safe, warm spot in my mind that grounds me and makes the world safe. In times of crisis or stress, my first reaction in to go into the kitchen and cook.
In high school, I participated in many summer programs. I would spend a month or so away from home and live on college campuses. I learned lots of things, met lots of people, and encountered the necessity and agony of institutional cafeteria food for the first time.
My separation from kitchens was like losing an arm. It made eating a chore- vegetables boiled within an inch of their life, a disturbing fondness for white sauces, a worrying overabundance of greasy pizza with overly sweet sauce. All of the worst traits of both cafeteria food and my home state’s Southern cooking seemed to be present in everything I ate, and there seemed to be no escape in sight.
I had been spending a month at the University of Mississippi learning Chinese when dumplings came into my life.
She was a petite woman who came to teach us how to make Chinese jiaozi. She’d come to the United States from Taiwan about fifteen years ago. She spoke patiently in accented English, explaining to us the particulars of dumpling making. It was as good a demonstration for about twenty disinterested high schoolers could be, and we were provided with an individual portion of filling and an allotment of wrappers to work with. Most of my classmates could only be be pulled away from the final game of the women’s world cup long enough to make about ten dumplings, and then they returned to the game.
I, however, was hooked.
Although I was not allowed to handle the knives or peel the garlic or grate the ginger, but just being able to work with my hands and smell that warm bloom of scented steam was such a comfort to me.
I have continued making the dish in the three years since that cooking demonstration. It is incredibly cheap to make, and easy. A bottle of soy sauce purchased months ago, a node of ginger kept in the freezer, a little container of chili paste that was leftover from a friend all become useful and used and eaten. Generally, making dumplings costs me maybe fifteen dollars all at once, and because the dish requires so little by way of equipment,, even the modest assortment of tools I have brought with me to college will suffice.
I have since forgotten the name of the woman who taught us how to make the fragrant little dumplings, but I will be forever indebted to her. Her small dish entered my life and quickly became my favorite comfort food. When I feel my life falling down around my ears, I take two hours to myself, and I sit and I grate and chop and squish and fill. I boil the dumplings in batches and fish them out with a slotted spoon and I eat them, scorchingly hot, there in front of the stove. I fish them out with a slotted spoon and slide them onto platters and serve them to my dorm mates. My habit will feed on any given day four to fifteen hungry students, and it their company will be as comforting as the cooking is. The dumplings make the comforts of the hearth as portable as they can be. The dumplings allow me to move the centerpoint of my life and re-establish it wherever I go. The dumplings are home.
Recipe Under Cut
Chinese Dumplings
1 ¼ pounds ground pork (turkey works well, too)
1 Medium sized Napa Cabbage, tough core removed and leaves shredded finely
¼ cup soy sauce
6 cloves of garlic, grated
3 tablespoons fresh ginger, grated
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 teaspoon chilli garlic sauce
2 packages dumpling wrappers (between eighty and a hundred wrappers)
Make sure the dumpling wrappers are at room temperature, but do not remove from packaging (they are easier to seal and handle when warm and moist).
Mix the soy sauce, garlic, ginger, sesame oil, and chili garlic sauce in a large bowl. Add ground pork and cabbage. Mix mixture together until the cabbage is fully incorporated into the pork- the mixture will lose significant volume.
Put a pot of water on to boil on the stove. Salt liberally.
Fill dumpling wrappers with roughly a tablespoon of filling at a time. Moisten one edge of the wrapper with water and fold in half, sealing tight. Be careful of air bubbles.
Boil dumplings until cooked through- the dumplings will float and the meat will look done when a dumpling is cut in half (about four minutes).
When I was very young, my family had a garden in the backyard. We grew herbs- rosemary and basil and parsley and oregano- and we grew tomatoes. There were other things, too, like our mostly unsuccessful attempts at cabbages and corn and beans, but in reality, our backyard garden existed to provide us with tomatoes and basil.
I don’t much like tomatoes. There is something to their texture that I find off putting, but I enjoy their flavor intensely. I’ll eat tomato sauces, I’ll eat tomatoes in things. I’ll even eat fried green tomatoes, which are a true delicacy and a national treasure more of our nation should embrace. I am unusual in my family because of this. I have witnessed my mother and father eat a whole tomato, sliced, with salt. They ate it like it was manna from heaven while I watched them, horrified.
As I have gotten older, I have become strangely attached to the summer tomatoes. There is something completely right to the feeling of a tomato on the vine, warm from the early morning sun, full of life. There is something perfect to its smell and to the way it gives to a gentle, careful squeeze.
Eating a tomato, holding it, is as close as one gets to eating a part of the sun.
So starting in about mid-June, when the tomatoes have come in and the basil stands tall and shiny, my family starts making a pasta dish. It’s a handful of whatever long, straight pasta we have in the house (spaghetti and linguine work best) cooked al dente is water we have salted aggressively. A handful of basil leaves washed and shredded. A large tomato (or two), cut into generous chunks (cherry tomatoes cut in two or romas that have been quartered are also good). Olive oil, salt, pepper, parmesean.
It all gets tossed together in a large bowl, maybe with a squirt of lemon, or maybe we saute a little garlic in the oil before hand. The point is, the whole thing comes together almost effortlessly, and it’s beautiful. It’s perfect. It’s what we dream of in cold January when the tomatoes have gone and they seem impossibly distant.
Somehow, we have become brainwashed. We have been told, for so long, that buttermilk breakfast biscuits come from a cardboard tube we buy from the most evil section of the grocery store: the refrigerated dough section.
Usually situated betwixt the eggs and the yogurt, the refrigerated dough section contains nothing but bad, painful decisions. The pre-prepared dough section carries such great hits as “I anxiety ate an entire tub of chocolate chip cookie dough on my kitchen floor” and “there is no happy medium between woefully overcooked or disolvingly underbaked for these Christmas tree sugar cookies.” Next to the cookie dough, tube biscuits pick up a fine patina of sin and only adds to their burden of tasting vaguely chemical and turning effectively stale within twenty minutes of leaving the oven.
The popularity of this astoundingly bad breakfast item is even more insulting given that making your own biscuits is easy, cheap, and can put breakfast on your table for about two weeks, depending on how many you eat at any given time.
Recipe(s) under the cut
You’ll need buttermilk, which can be hard to find in the grocery store if you’re not in the South. If you can find it at the grocery store, you’ll need cultured buttermilk, and if you can avoid it, don’t go non-fat. If you can’t buy buttermilk in the grocery store, it’s time to make your own butter.
To make butter, you’ll need three quarts of cream, a large jar (if you have one big enough to hold all of your cream at once, that’s super ideal. If not, splitting the cream into a series of smaller jars works, too), salt, greek yogurt, a strainer, and a spatula.
Pour your cream into your jar. Add about a tablespoon or so of greek yogurt. By adding yogurt, you’re adding live cultures to your cream, which will add a tanginess to your end product. Loosely cap your jars- you want to let the gas created from the cultures inoculating your cream escape so that your jars don’t explode. Put them in a cool, dark place for a few hours (I like to leave them overnight, but you can leave them for about four and be good).
After a few hours, secure your lid onto your jar very tightly, and instead of shaking the thing up and down, put it on the floor and roll it back and forth. It’s easier on your arms, and it causes the butterfat to glom together a little more effectively, meaning that you’ll have to press less buttermilk from your butter.
Your cream will turn after about ten minutes or so- it’s a change you can’t miss. Not only will your butter become visible in the jar, but the density of the jar will change noticeably. After it turns, roll it around for a few minutes more just to make sure it’s as cohesive as you can get it. Unscrew the cap and strain the butter from the buttermilk. Dump the butter from the strainer to a large bowl and use the spatula to press it around. Notice how little beads of buttermilk come up when you press at it? You want that out. Press and drain the buttermilk out of the butter, and then salt it. Start with about a half a teaspoon of non-iodized salt (iodized salts can process when heated in such a way that puts off flavors in food) and mix in thoroughly. Thoroughly. Give it a little taste on a piece of bread. You want it to be salty but not too salty. Remember than you can always add more but can’t take it out.
Now that you have butter and buttermilk, you’re ready to make biscuits. I like to make biscuits in giant batches and then freeze most of them so that I can toss a couple in the oven in the mornings while I get ready.
You’ll Need:
-5 ¼ cups all purpose flour
-1 ½ teaspoon salt
-6 teaspoons double-acting baking powder
-3 teaspoons sugar
-1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
-¾ cup lard, shortening, or butter (I like to use one part lard to two parts butter, but plain shortening also works quite well)
-2 ¼ cups buttermilk
If you’re planning on making any of your biscuits immediately, preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Prepare a rolling surface- either clean a counter thoroughly or make sure you have a clean cutting board. You’ll also need a rolling pin and a cutter- a small glass or a medium-sized cookie cutter both work well. Dust your surface with flour. You want it to be a little more dusted than it would be for a bread or cookie dough because biscuit dough is much damper than either of those.
Sift your dry ingredients together. Using two knives, a fork, or a pastry cutter (my weapon of choice), cut your fat into your dry ingredients until the fat is evenly distributed and the mixture looks rather sandy. This step can also be done on a stand mixer to great success.
Form a well in the center of your mixture, and slowly pour the buttermilk into the well, using a spatula or your hands to incorporate the buttermilk. Once again, this work well on a stand mixer.
The trick to biscuits (much like muffins) is to not overwork your mix. Stop mixing once the dough just barely holds together. To prevent from overworking all of your dough, rolls it out in sections.
Starting with one third of the dough, roll out to about a quarter to a half of an inch thickness, depending on your taste. Once you’ve rolled it out, fold it in half on itself and roll out once more. Apply flour as needed to prevent the dough from sticking to the cutting board and the rolling pin and the cutter.
The biscuits freeze well in ziploc bags or between layers of wax paper. You want to make sure you don’t stack them on top of each other without something between them, because they do like to stick.
If you’re baking from fresh dough, bake them at 450 degrees for ten to twelve minutes. If you’re baking from frozen, drop the oven to 400 degrees and bake for about eighteen to twenty minutes.
It’s frankly a fiddly, frustrating process with lots of very exact directions and measurements and requirements. Of course, it’s like that because it’s intensely chemical- like many old-art cooking processes (beer, wine, sourdough bread, a good baguette, yogurt). Like other old-art cooking processes, it’s passed from being something everyone does to something only a handful of crazed enthusiasts do. It’s time consuming, and who has the luxury of time to work?
The thing is, though, making cheese or butter or bread is time consuming in that involves a rather lot of waiting. The work of it isn’t active work, it’s knowing that what you’ve made won’t be food, not really, for several days or several weeks or several months. It’s intensely satisfying to be able to look at this thing curing in your pantry, though, and know that your labors will pay off one day.
There’s also something to be said for instant gratification, however, so I find cheese curds are an excellent compromise.
Recipe and Instructions Under the Cut
To make cheese curds (and cheese, of course), you’ll need a large stock pot, capable of holding at least two gallons, if not more. Having some space at the top of the pot is quite nice, so one that is a bit bigger is good. Make sure you can still fit the pot in your sink, however. You’ll also need a very large slotted spoon, one that can reach all the way to the bottom of the pot. You’ll need a very large bowl, capable of holding several gallons of whey and a colander. If you don’t have a good thermometer, invest in one. The one I use is a big dial-type thermometer- you’re going to want one that you can hang on the side of you pot with a clip so that you can monitor temperature changes pretty closely. A colander is also important so that you can strain your curds from your whey. You’ll also want butter muslin (which is like cheesecloth but with a tighter weave) and twine. A knife to cut your curds and you’re good by way of equipment.
You’ll also need non-homogenized cow’s milk. You can generally find this at Whole Food’s and other markets that carry alternative foods. If you can get it raw (unpastuerized) and you make cheese using this method, please let me know how it turns out (in the states near me, I legally cannot get raw milk without bribing a farmer). You’ll also need mesophillic starter, which is a bacterial organism that makes cheese delicious. You can make your own (which is not something I’ve yet experiemented with), or you can buy starter online.
Ingredients List
2 gallons whole milk (non-homogenized)
1 packet direct-set mesophilic starter OR 4 oz. prepared mesophilic starter
½ teaspoon liquid rennet (or half of a rennet tablet) diluted in ¼ cup cool water
Cheese salt
First, take your milk out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature. Give it a couple of hours on your kitchen counter. This will make your life easier a little later on. Then you’re going to want to clean your kitchen. Really clean it. Empty both of your sinks and wipe them out with whatever you clean your countertops with. Clean your countertops and stove pretty aggressively, too. Because cheeses are a food made by carefully culturing bacteria, you want to have some control over what gets in there. Having a pretty clean kitchen is the first step to that. The second step is to just use common sense- wash your hands before starting and don’t sneeze directly into anything.
Plug your sink so that it can act like a basin. Fill it with water just barely on the warm side of lukewarm. We want to avoid sudden temperature changes, which is why we let our milk come to room temperature earlier. Dump your milk into your stock pot. Cut open the jug so that you can get all the butterfat out. Clip your thermometer to the side of the pot and start keeping an eye on the temperature. Put your basin into the sink full of just the warm side of lukewarm water. Stir your milk, keep an eye on the temperature. Bring the milk up to ninety degrees fahrenheit. You’ll need to change the water a couple of times. Once you’re up to ninety degrees, add your starter and cover it, letting it ripen for forty five minutes. Check twenty minutes in to make sure that you’re still roughly at ninety. You can fall a couple of degrees below, but be careful about going too far below and be vigilant about going above. Anything about ninety-two at this stage is worrying, so if you’re floating a little too high, add two or three ice cubes to your sink.
After forty-five minutes, add your diluted rennet. Stir it in with an up-and-down motion for one minute. Check your temperature. Are you still at about ninety? Stir your butterfat into the milk with the flat of a ladle, held only ½ inch deep in the milk (this is tricky. Do it to the best of your ability.). Cover it and let it set at ninety degrees for another forty-five minutes, or until your curd gives a clean break. It will look and jiggle kind of like flan.
Take your knife and cut your curd into ½ inch cubes. Cut your curd horizontally in half-inch sections, holding your knife perpendicular to the bottom of the pot. Cut all the way down. Now turn your knife and cut into vertical sections, again, cutting all the way down by holding your knife perpendicular to the bottom of your pot. You’ll have something that looks like a piece of graph paper made out of flan, with whey coming up around at the edges. Now cut your curds diagonally, but as you do so, angle your knife so that you go deeper and deeper into the pot each time. The goal is to cut your curds from being tall ribbons into manageable chunks, so your guide as you move your knife diagonally isn’t the bottom of the pot but the sides. Now cut diagonally from the other side.
Drain your sink and re-fill it with more water, this time not lukewarm but just warm. You want to heat the mix to one-hundred degrees, but at such a rate that you don’t go up more than two degrees every five minutes. As you’re doing this, you need to stir your curds and whey so that the curds don’t mat together. So place your pot back into the sink full of warm water and stir gently, once more in an up-and-down motion so that your bring curds at the bottom to the top. As you stir, your curds are going to expel yellowish whey and shrink considerably. Your butterfat is also going to clump together. You can skim that off the top of the mix with your spoon and either keep it (to add to other buttermaking ventures) or throw it out (which is a damn shame and a waste of cultured butter). Make sure you’re not heating too quickly, though. This process will take about thirty minutes.
Once you hit a hundred degrees, cover the pot and let it sit for five minutes. Line your colander with butter muslin and decide if you want to keep your whey or not. You can cook with your whey (use it as a base for soups, make crackers with it, make other cheeses with it) or you can throw it out. If you’re keeping the whey, place your colander in a large bowl. If you’re throwing it out, just place it in the sink.
After letting your curds and whey sit for five minutes, pour your curds into the colander and then tie your cheese cloth shut with twine and hang it to let it drain for an hour (place a container underneath, your curds are going to expel quite a lot of liquid). Don’t hang them somewhere drafty- you want to keep them relatively warm.
Place your drained curds in a bowl and break them up gently with your fingers into walnut sized pieces. Salt to taste (you’ll use about two teaspoons to a tablespoon of salt).
Here the recipe diverges. You can either go for the marathon and press your curds into a cheese, or the sprint, in which you keep the curds in a tupperware container to make poutine or just eat them with a spoon like an animal (my favorite method).
To make a cheese, pack the curds into a mound in your colander with your cheesecloth. Fold the cheesecloth over the top. Apply ten pounds of pressure for ten minutes (I use old barbell weights). After ten minutes, remove the cheese from the colander and gently peel away the cheesecloth. Turn over the cheese, re-dress it in cheesecloth, and press at twenty pounds of pressure for ten minutes. Repeat the process, but at fifty pounds of pressure for twelve hours.
Remove the cheese from the mold and carefully peel away your cheesecloth. Air-dry the cheese at room temperature on a wooden board until a rind forms and the surface is dry- about two to four days. Turn the cheese a few times a day so that moisture doesn’t form on the bottom.
And then you wax the cheese.
Stick the cheese in the fridge for a while (if the cheese is cold, the wax will adhere better). Melt the cheese wax in a double boiler (make sure you’re in a well ventilated area with a good hood fan- the wax vapors are flammable). To prevent mold from growing on your cheese, wipe your cheese with a cloth dampened slightly with vinegar, and then let it air dry. Apply the wax by dipping the cheese into the pot very quickly (to not melt previous layers). Be careful- the wax is slippery. Make sure you let the wax dry between coats. You’ll need at least two thin coats of wax to prevent the cheese from molding.
Let the cheese age in a cool, dry spot for at least a month.
Or, again, you could always go for the instant gratification route.
At any rate, this process isn’t nearly as intense or scary as the instructions make it seem. Give it a try. Let me know how it works out. Eat good food.
Recipe adapted from Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll
