Milk (26 page)

Add the sugar to the pan of milk, stirring to dissolve it with a wooden spoon. Bring just to a low boil. Remove the pan from the heat while you stir the baking soda into the reserved milk, then add that to the hot milk, which will froth up at once. Set it over medium heat and continue to cook, stirring frequently, for about 30 minutes. The mixture will start to look more like a syrup as the water evaporates and the temperature rises. Now you must stir constantly, gradually reducing the heat as the syrup darkens and thickens, for about another 30 minutes (less if it seems about to burn). When a stroke of the mixing spoon exposes the bottom of the pan and the syrup is slow to close in again over the track, remove the pan from the heat and let sit until the molten stuff is partly cooled but still liquid enough to pour into small containers. Let cool to room temperature before covering. It will keep for weeks at room temperature, for months in the refrigerator. It may, however, crystallize like long-stored honey. If this happens, set the container in hot water until the crystals melt.

E
veryone in Latin America is familiar with the convenient version of cajeta, or dulce de leche, made by immersing an unopened 14-ounce can of condensed milk in enough boiling water to cover it thoroughly, simmering it for several hours, and opening it when the contents have slowly cooled. (Not just in Latin America, either; the prison-camp inmates in
Solzhenitsyn’s
The First Circle
knew the same trick.) The method works fairly well, and some people even prefer the result to dulce de leche from scratch. But it has been known to end in serious injury when a sealed can exploded, either because it was defective to begin with or because the forgetful cook let the water boil away so that the contents of the can became superheated. Some commercial manufacturers now provide directions for cooking the milk out of the can, which is safer. This version is based on a method suggested by the Borden Company.

YIELD:
About 1½ cups

Preheat the oven to 425°F. Scrape the milk into a shallow heatproof glass baking dish such as a 9-inch pie plate. Cover it snugly with several layers of aluminum foil. Place the dish in a slightly larger ovenproof vessel, put the arrangement in the oven, and carefully pour enough boiling water into the larger container to come partway up the sides of the glass dish. Bake for 1 hour, lift out, and let cool as for
Cajeta Mexicana
.

T
he mom-and-pop restaurants in mixed Hispanic neighborhoods seldom do much in the line of wine and beer. The choice of beverages usually boils down to good coffee, a few freshly squeezed juices, some bottled or canned fruit and cola drinks, and a multitude of blender specialties. In my town—which is in effect a New Jersey outpost of Miami—the blender drinks come in milk-based and milkless varieties. Cubans call the milkshake kind
batidos.
(I have given up trying to remember all the names used by people from different parts of the Latin tropics;
licuados, refrescos,
and
vitaminas
barely scratch the surface.)

The Miami-on-the-Hudson batidos can be made from some pretty unexpected materials, the most unexpected perhaps being puffed wheat. But most use fruit, anything from strawberries or peaches to remote Amazonian exotica. The tropical-fruit batidos are almost universally based on frozen fruit. Our local stores carry a huge array of imported fruit pulps or chunks in 14-ounce packages. These are not mediocre “convenience” ingredients; they usually have much fresher flavor than the whole fresh fruits would after being shipped from Central or South America, and they are the first thing people reach for when they want to make most batidos. Passion fruit, tamarillo, pineapple, cashew fruit, mango, guava,
guanábana
(soursop), cherimoya, tamarind, papaya … the list of possibilities seems to expand every year.

It is impossible to give one fixed formula, since every kind of fruit will vary in sweetness (always start with a small amount of sugar and cautiously add more to taste) and intensity. A very rough rule of thumb is about 3 or 4 cups of milk to a 14-ounce package of frozen pulp; you may want to halve this for a maiden attempt. Here is a model recipe of sorts using my favorite among the frozen tropical fruits that reach these parts, mamey sapote, which everyone except botanists calls simply “mamey.” Now and then fresh mamey sapotes in good condition briefly show up in our stores from Florida, especially at the end of summer. Seize the moment if you see this wonderful fruit. An exterior like a furry tan football conceals salmon-colored flesh with a custardy avocadolike consistency and a perfumed sweetness, so good for simply eating with a spoon that you may never get around to making a batido.

YIELD:
About 3 cups

Combine the mamey pulp and milk in a blender with half of the sugar. Process for a few seconds and taste for sweetness. Add the ice and more sugar to taste; process to combine thoroughly. Add a little more mamey pulp to thicken it slightly, more milk to thin it. It tastes best served at once, straight up or over ice cubes.

VARIATION:
Batidos are often enriched with ice cream. Omit the crushed ice and add half a scoop (or more to taste) of slightly softened vanilla ice cream to the fruit pulp and milk, reducing the amount of sugar to compensate. Process just until combined.

S
outheast Asia is among those parts of the world where “milk” as generally understood means only the
canned kind, either evaporated or condensed. Introduced by French and Dutch colonists who also hoped to strike it rich with coffee plantations,
canned milk became a favorite addition to coffee as drunk hot or iced in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and other ex-colonies of the region. Eventually American restaurant-goers fell in love with the iced version.

There is no single standard recipe. In most places, you simply brew the coffee ultrastrong, cool or chill it, and drink it with the canned milk—though cream has some recent adherents—and ice. With condensed milk, further sweetening is optional (though it’s supposed to be ferociously sweet); with evaporated milk, you sweeten the coffee with sugar or sugar syrup before putting in the milk. Some people combine the sugar and coffee from the start, in the brewing.

A somewhat different approach arose in Thailand, where coffee drinkers invented a unique preground combination of roasted coffee beans with other ingredients, usually roasted corn kernels,
sesame seeds, and soybeans. This mixture, called
oliang,
or
oleng,
is commonly brewed in a “coffee sock,” a sock-shaped cotton filter on a metal rim that also happens to be much used in parts of Central America and can often be found in pan-Latin stores.

There is no substitute for oliang. But if you can’t find it, lavishly sweetened strong coffee brewed by any preferred method, combined with canned milk, and served over ice makes a refreshing drink in the right spirit.

YIELD:
About 6 servings

Measure the oliang into a coffee sock set over a carafe or heatproof pitcher. If you are using evaporated milk, add about 2 tablespoons sugar for a slightly sweet or 4 tablespoons for a very sweet brew. Pour the boiling water over the oliang and sugar and leave it to steep in the carafe for 8 to 10 minutes before removing the sock. If you don’t have a coffee sock, simply put the oliang and sugar in a small saucepan, pour the boiling water over them, let sit 8 to 10 minutes, and strain through a coffee filter into a carafe or pitcher. If you are using condensed milk, either omit the sugar or add only about 1 tablespoon.

Let the brewed coffee cool to room temperature. In hot weather, you may want to chill it. Taste for sweetness. If using evaporated milk, fill tall serving glasses up to the brim with ice cubes or crushed ice and pour in the coffee, leaving a good inch or two at the top. Add evaporated milk to taste, gently pouring it over a spoon so that it will gradually eddy down into the coffee in pretty swirls.

Condensed milk needs a lot of mixing, which is best done by adding about ⅓ to ½ cup of the thick, heavy stuff to the carafe of cooled coffee and stirring vigorously. Taste for sweetness, fill serving glasses with ice cubes or crushed ice, and top up with the coffee-milk mixture.

I
t’s high time for the food-minded to discover that despite much confusion in labeling, hot chocolate is not the same as hot cocoa. The latter is made from a mixture using ground cacao partly denatured by removal of the cacao butter that is an intrinsic part of real chocolate. I can see the point of cocoa in a few uses—but not in chocolate for drinking, which has been one of the finest fruits of Old World–New World cross-fertilization since Spanish conquerors returning from Mexico with cacao beans and reports of native chocolate-drinking traditions inspired the nations of Europe to develop their own counterparts. To have the right body it has to be made with full-fat chocolate. Unfortunately, there is no formal labeling requirement.

Cows’ milk, which was unknown in pre-Columbian Mexico, probably didn’t enter the picture during the first few generations of European chocolate drinking. (Until the late nineteenth century, chocolate was scarcely used for any purpose
but
drinking.) To this day there are fine versions of hot chocolate made without a drop of milk. But where the tradition of milk-based hot chocolate took hold, what people loved about it was the effect of marrying two remarkably similar forms of fat. Cacao butter happens to be a closer match for the saturated/unsaturated lipid “profile” of milkfat (see
this page
) than any other culinary fat, which is why the “mouthfeel” of chocolate somewhat resembles that of butter. Put them together as a hot drink, and you have something utterly luscious.

This kind of hot chocolate is better approached as an idea than a recipe: Melt some chocolate and mix it with some previously heated rich, creamy milk. (Since rich, creamy milk has all but ceased to exist, I recommend the best whole milk you can find combined with a little light or heavy cream.) The chocolate can be as recherché or ordinary as you like. When I first started making hot chocolate, the usual base was Baker’s brand unsweetened chocolate, to which you added a little sugar. Nowadays most fans probably would opt for some version of semisweet or bittersweet eating chocolate. Follow your general taste in chocolate, whether it’s for one of the superdense and superexpensive kinds (Scharffen Berger, El Rey, Valrhona) or one of the humbler European or American brands. Most people prefer dark chocolate, but there’s no reason not to use milk chocolate. Here is a general scenario:

For one large serving, allow 1 ounce of semisweet, bittersweet, or unsweetened chocolate per cup of whole milk or milk-cream combination (say, 1 tablespoon heavy cream or 2 tablespoons light cream to a cup of milk). Real chocoholics probably will want to use more chocolate for greater intensity, but I recommend first trying the 1 ounce per cup ratio so that you’ll have a standard of comparison for next time. If the chocolate is unsweetened or on the very bitter side of bittersweet, allow 1 to 2 tablespoons sugar per ounce of chocolate (less or more to taste). Otherwise, omit sugar.

Break the chocolate into small pieces, and put it in a small saucepan with a few tablespoons of water and the sugar (if using). Put the milk in another small saucepan. Start warming both over low heat, keeping an eye on the milk to prevent it from scalding. Whisk together the slowly melting chocolate and water; when the chocolate and optional sugar are smoothly dissolved, start gradually whisking in the warmed milk. Heat to just under a boil, whisking constantly, and pour into chocolate cups or small mugs.