I don't know how many people know this little trick but do you realize you can make cream cheese out of yogurt? Get a really nice high protein, nonfat yogurt and dollop a cup of it into cheesecloth that you have lined a wire strainer with. Make sure you cover it well so that flies don't get it. Then leave it overnight and allow the whey to drain into a bowl below.
In the morning what you will have in the cheesecloth is a nice thick concoction that you cannot tell apart from cream cheese. I'm not sure how well it cooks or bakes though. I can tell you for sure that it has no discernible yogurt taste and I haven't I haven't done the nutrition numbers on it but it has to be a lot less fat and a lot more protein.
If anyone has any ideas about how to use the whey that you have now extracted, please let us know.
And I know some people use yogurt to make tuna salad but that really does not appeal to me. I wonder if anyone has any ideas about mayonnaise and how it can be made harmless.
If anybody here is acquainted with the trend called molecular gastronomy, there is a powder called sodium citrate. It has zero calories zero fat zero protein zero everything except sodium a serving has 470 mg of sodium. However, I don't know how much to use for my purposes yet, the serving size is 1/2 teaspoon.
You can take some milk and some cheese and melt it together on the stove top. Then you add a little sodium citrate. It gets thick and creamy like the cheese they put on the nachos at the Ballpark. And the only calories you have are in milk and cheese, which you're going to be eating anyway. Two times I have tried to do something with it oh, I have ended up using way too much and making it super thick and unbearably salty.
But you could make a cheese sauce like this and pour it over asparagus Spears or broccoli or if you can find no starch pasta oh, you can make a form of macaroni and cheese. And if you just use milk and sodium citrate, you would have a lovely bechamel sauce or a white sauce for whatever you would use a white sauce on.
We don't usually think and luxurious terms like that, waiting for the day that we can have some sauce and have it be really thick and creamy. But it occurs to me that you could take something like potatoes and boil them and mash them, then add the white sauce or the cheese sauce and have mashed potatoes that have no additional calories from butter or cream cheese or whatever. Potatoes are not off limits oh, but they are something that you really need to budget for if you are counting calories. Still, once in a while you just got to have some mashed potatoes.
And now that I think of it you could probably make a cup of beef bouillon and bring it to a boil or use bone marrow stock and add a small amount of calcium citrate to itch and it would salt the sauce and thicken it as well. You would have gravy to put over your potatoes. And if you were going to have the mashed potatoes anyway oh, you have added zero calories to it and yet it will taste like a thousand.
I only have a mild interest in Molecular Gastronomy and quite honestly the only reason I learned about sodium citrate was because of the fact that I had seen a recipe four cheese sauce that was not lumpy, never separated, never dried up on the macaroni and could be baked in the oven if you wanted to and it would still be smooth as silk.
But just as sodium citrate is a food additive you don't even realize you're already eating there are at least a dozen other food additives you can buy if you want to make haute cuisine. I hate to give Jeff Bezos a penny of my money but I did find sodium citrate and all the other food additives in pouches on amazon.com. if you're into cooking, you probably can't find a less expensive source for these materials.
