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Part 11 of this series
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A supplement to Food and Society
Sweet-and-Sour Cheese Dessert Sauces

16 July 2011

I don't like the slimy, pasty, gooey texture of either dairy cheeses or vegetarian cheeses, but I think the cheeses are good as flavoring agents for sauces, or when sprinkled on other foods. In this file, I want to show that it is very easy to make a "sweet-and-sour dessert sauce" by combining any cheese with some Stevia and white vinegar. Even the strong-flavored blue cheeses become a dessert sauce when mixed with vinegar and Stevia.

In these examples I'm using only the common, ordinary, white vinegar, but, of course, it's possible to create lots of variations of this sauce by using a different vinegar, or a combination of vinegars. And I'm using only two cheeses in these examples, but you could make these sauces with most dairy and vegetarian cheeses, or a combination of cheeses.

This cheese sauce is also excellent with the stinky cheeses, such as brie. However, I can use only the interior of the brie. The outer layer has such a strong smell of mildew that I can't tolerate it.


 
1) Feta cheese dessert sauce
 
Stevia and vinegar transform feta cheese into a dessert sauce
There are lots of different dairy and vegetarian cheeses, but I have only experimented with a few of them as dessert sauces. Feta cheese makes a wonderful sweet-and-sour sauce, and it goes well with a wide variety of foods. It can be used on sandwiches, pizzas, salads, and even on fish.
Put some feta cheese into a bowl, and crush it up a bit.
Add some vinegar and some Stevia, and mix it up.

Those three ingredients are all that you need to make a delicious sauce.

Of course, you could create varieties by adding additional spices or food items.

The photo below shows two halves of a small piece of bread that I just baked and spread some olive oil on. The bread is still warm, and I am spreading some of the sweet and sour feta cheese sauce on the top of one half of the warm bread.


For this example, I added a lot of lemon rind and a small amount of shredded carrots.

The carrots are mainly for color. Their mild flavor will be dominated by the lemon rind, the feta cheese sauce, and the bread.

The final result is a lemon-flavored, feta cheese dessert pizza.
 

In this photograph, I am mixing some shredded carrots into the remaining sweet-and-sour feta cheese sauce.
This photo shows the carrot cheese mixture on top of the other half of the bread, and then I sprinkled some more shredded carrots on top.

Since this pizza doesn't have any lemon rind, the flavor of the carrot will be noticed, creating a carrot-flavored, feta cheese dessert pizza.

2) Roquefort cheese dessert sauce
 
Stevia and vinegar can transform even Roquefort cheeses into dessert sauces
The Roquefort style of cheeses have incredibly strong flavors, and it is debatable as to whether their flavor is "delicious". However, as strange as it may seem, they can be transformed into delicious sweet-and-sour dessert sauces. Unlike feta cheese sauces, which tastes good with a wide variety of foods, I think the Roquefort cheese sauces have a more limited use.

The process of making the Roquefort sauce is exactly the same as with the feta cheese sauce; namely, just blend some Roquefort cheese with some vinegar and Stevia. The result is a blue-green liquid.

 
Although the flavor of the Roquefort cheese sauce is delicious, the blue-green appearance is rather bizarre and unusual, so when used as a pizza sauce, the pizza will be visually more appealing if something is added on top of the sauce so that it doesn't look like you are eating a blue-green food. In the photo below, I sprinkled on some pieces of the Roquefort cheese.
 
The photo below shows a Roquefort sauce made from a different style and brand of Roquefort cheese, which has less of the blue-green mold, and so this sauce has a less intense blue-green color (and a less intense Roquefort flavor). I added some tomatoes to the sauce, and then sprinkled some of the Roquefort cheese on top. This creates a "Roquefort tomato dessert pizza".
(The warmth of the bread has caused some of the grated cheese pieces to partially melt, and this makes the sauce look lumpy and obscure some of the tomato pieces.)
3) Salmon skin dessert pizza
 
The undesirable salmon meat is delicious as a pizza topping!
In my article in which I describe the low temperature cooking of salmon, I point out that I don't like the taste of the dark meat or skin of the salmon. Instead of throwing it away, I combine it with some type of sweet vinegar sauce. In the photos below, I am making a Feta cheese dessert pizza, and I will put the pieces of salmon skin and dark meat on the pizza as a topping!

This particular sauce is lumpy because I added some azuki bean sprouts (the oval-shaped lumps). It also has a little bit of grated carrot for color.

 
The photo below shows the finished pizza. The grayish material is the salmon skin and meat, and I also sprinkled on some grated lemon rind on one portion of the pizza, and some grated carrot on another area of the pizza. And I also added some more azuki sprouts on top of the sauce. (I removed the outer, brown skin of the sprouts, which is why they are white.)
It may seem strange, but when the skin and dark meat of the salmon are used as a pizza topping, they become merely flavoring agents that give the pizza a nice salmon flavor. They do not dominate the pizza. The sprouts add a bit of flavor, also, but mainly they had crunchiness. As I've mentioned, I prefer food that I can chew on rather than the pasty, slimy, or "baby food" textures.

As I eat the pizza, the crust continues to absorb the feta cheese sauce. In the photo below, which shows the last slice of pizza, you can see that the bottom of the pizza crust is still dry. This coarse, whole-grain bread is very absorbent, so it is excellent as a crust for pizzas.

I am only one of many people who dislike the salmon skin and dark meat. Therefore, if we were to alter society so that restaurants can provide these type of meals, then a restaurant could provide us with a low temperature salmon dinner, but without any skin or dark meat, and then, for dessert, the restaurant would bring out some type of dessert pizza in which the dark meat and skin is a topping. This reduces the waste of food, and there are probably valuable nutrients in both the dark meat and skin.