It started with paneer. Paneer's not easy to find throughout most of the US, so I've been making it from scratch for years. Then I tried making queso fresco for some tacos one night and noticed that both recipes are almost identical. Then it got obsessive. 

I began hunting down other cheeses that were basically acid and milk. Mozzarella wasn't quite it, but cream cheese was! That recipe came together after attempting a cheesecake for a friend's birthday. The ricotta? Just a result of tasting my cream cheese recipe before I was finished whipping it to high hell.

The real beauty of these types of cheese is that you don’t need any special milk to do it. Cow, goat, buffalo, raw, pasteurized, whole or skim will all work (just be sure to avoid "ultra-pasteurized" because the extreme processing will make it nearly impossible to form curds).

There are two proteins in milk that make cheese what it is: casein and albumin. The key to making a firm, fresh cheese is to target the albumin. Albumin acts just like an egg white (coincidentally also known as albu

). It's liquid at room temp, but solid when heated to a certain point, and doesn’t go back to a liquid state once it’s heated.

So, if you heat milk at a lower temperature, say 90°F (32°C), the casein protein will coagulate but your albumin won't — great for custard, bad for cheese. If you heat milk to 190°F (88°C), you’re allowing both proteins to denature, giving you a higher yield of firmer, more flavorful cheese. SCIENCE.

Once you get your milk up to temperature, just pick your acid of choice — I prefer fresh squeezed lemon, but you can also use distilled white vinegar, white wine vinegar, fermented whey, or whatever else you've got kicking around (maybe not balsamic) — just slowly add it to your heated milk and watch your cheese form.

Whichever acid you choose, homemade cheese is massively more flavorful than storebought cheese and with only an hour or so, you can easily make enough cheese for a week or more. If you're looking to take your first steps into cheesemaking with low effort, low risk, and high reward... give these recipes a try!

Salt, Vat, Acid, Heat: Making 4 of the World's Greatest Cheeses at Home

Mayonnaise — that tangy, beige sandwich glue that everyone but Belgium seems to hate. Well, count me on Team Belgium because Hollandaise and its child sauces — mayonnaise and aioli — are some of the greatest condiments ever invented. The real problem is that egg emulsions — like many things — just aren't built to last. They're beautiful, fleeting memories.

Those memories are built on a truly remarkable foundation: lecithin. Egg yolks carry it in spades and the sheer amount of oil and water you can bind with a single egg yolk is incredible. The problem is that the more oil and water you add, the less flavor you get. It's a lesson in quality over quantity, because the true luxury lies in having a small amount of something remarkable rather than a flat, squeaky gel.

How to Make Hollandaise Sauce

Thanks to Jim for asking today's question!

It can be difficult to figure out which ingredients will give you a fighting chance to tackle your new cookbook or a recipe you stumble across online - let alone improvise something from scratch in a pinch.

Well, today, we've got some versatile suggestions to help you cover a wide variety of cuisines in a pinch and some ideas for how to adjust to account for your tastes!

What ingredients should I keep in my pantry?

Thanks to Matan, Lewi, and Igor for their questions!

The spice aisle can be super overwhelming even if you're already a pretty good cook, but the depth, complexity, and the sheer number of flavor combinations that spices enable make it well worth the endeavor. We've got 10 recommendations to help you build a versatile spice cabinet quickly and easily. The spice must flow, after all...

Which spices are worth buying?

Few things can match the pure, nostalgic joy of eating a warm, homemade chocolate chip cookie - no matter how poorly it’s baked. Who among us can be trusted to sit next to a plate of cookies and not slowly consume them like some kind of treat-centric black hole?

But that’s no excuse for the sheer number of awful drop cookie recipes out there. They’re often packed with so much sugar they’ll make your teeth hurt and the only clue that there was even an 

 at balance is the bitter, metallic tinge of baking soda.

So, we synthesized a recipe for an average drop cookie from some of the most popular sources online. Something that would fit the traditional expectation of a drop cookie and give us a simple starting point to get to the heart of just what makes a cookie tick (Cult Favorite does not endorse eating ticking cookies).

Then, we systematically worked our way through batch after batch of these cake-y little bastards to find out what defines the essence of not just what a cookie is, but what it can be. Over 40 batches of cookies later, the results turned out to be simple: leavening, sugar, and fat.

Crafting the Ultimate Cookie

Stock is the flavor powerhouse behind most restaurant dishes you love. It's invaluable as a base for sauces, soups, stews, braises — really any savory dish that calls for water can be improved by stock.

Every culture has its own type of stock and, whether that's a rich French-style veal stock, a crystal-clear Sichuan superior stock, or even a simple Japanese kombu dashi - they all work the same way. Extract the flavors you want, then reduce the liquid to increase the strength of that flavor.

How to Make Any Stock from Scratch

 simple when you first think about it. I mean, the main ingredients are right in the title. There's cream, and you've gotta freeze it.

And... originally, that's basically all it was. But, I for one am glad that we as a global community decided that frozen butter just wasn't good enough, because modern ice cream is fucking incredible.

If there's a category of food that can get pretty complex, desserts would be it, but even the most over-engineered ice creams aren't *that* complex and yet, the result is consistently greater than the sum of its parts. Even bad ice cream is better than the best pie (Editor's note: The only good pie is pizza. Or ice cream pie.).

So, how does this culinary Voltron work? What makes it the world's greatest dessert? We're going to dig into the three key ingredients to find out: fat, sugar, and stabilizers.

Developing a Perfect Ice Cream

Imagine being responsible for some of humanity's greatest achievements - perhaps even its very evolution - and yet only being known to most of earth's population because some people find you hard to stomach. This has long been the fate of gluten: the widely derided miracle worker behind many, if not most, of the world's greatest culinary hits.

Actually, let me rephrase that... miracle 

. Gluten is basically just the celebrity couple name for two specific classes of proteins found in some types of grasses: glutelins and prolamins. Glutelins are super flexible spring-like structures that just like to team up with each other to make long, stretchy coils. Prolamins are the more rigid part of the equation that keep the glutelins in line and bind them together to fix everything in place.

When you combine these wheat-derived wonder twins with water, they'll begin to link up and flex their combined muscle leaving you with a dense rubbery mass of pure gluten. Now, there are a lot of great ways to consume gluten hail 

, but add a little starch to the equation and you get something a bit more versatile...

Dough. Or batter, if you really soak it. That's kinda up to you. I'm not your dad.

Beyond hydration, just about anything you change about your mix - the amount of starch, salinity, sugar, fat, pH balance, kneading, whipping, even if you just let your mix sit for a while - each of these will affect your final gluten structure.

These tests dig into just three factors, but they're perhaps the three 

 important factors to gluten development: hydration, protein, and time.