funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund a light as air never-fail recipe for Cheese Souffle a bubbly made from scratch oven baked farmer's cheese and a hearty dark bread with cheese baked right in the dough delicious recipes served up with lessons learned from a lifetime of food travel and writing I'm Bo Joe kangas cookbook author food writer columnist wife mother and grandmother I've spent my life learning about food and sharing my knowledge with others it's given me a certain perspective on cooking rooted in the flavors traditions and rhythms of life in northern Minnesota and a passion for sharing what I know welcome to my kitchen I grew up on a farm about four miles outside of flood would my father for some reason I don't know why and my mom didn't never didn't know why he wanted to name me Beatrice and there's no B in the Finnish language and there's no they don't use a C in the language they know what it is but they don't use them and so he gave me Beatrice and my mother said fine and Grandpa came over to visit and and that was my mother's dad and he said in Finnish you know okay had an immune and she said beat Beatrice the aces as snow human he said doesn't finish that's no human name that's a fruit and my mom Oh Pete see so I was peachy from that point on and all my relatives still call me peachy you know I'm the oldest of Tim we ate food that we grew we had big vegetable garden and that was important we froze and canned a lot of food grew up on venison I had heard that 4h was a good program to be in because you could win trips to the State Fair you could learn a lot and I was just really eager to learn about everything the first year I was going to do a demonstration on dairy foods and I thought well I'll do an egg salad sandwich and an eggnog there we were in the flood would Home Economics lab and I was on this table and I had everything aligned up ready to go and I crack open this egg and I in the egg yolk bounced out of the egg rolled down the counter dropped on the floor I didn't win any trips on that one so the following year I did another demonstration I thought I will do Cheese Souffle so I made a cheese souffle and and practiced it and practiced it and and that that fall I want a trip to the State Fair and now I make a cheese to play without using a recipe it is one of the simplest things in the world and it always it never fails don't I like to have a souffle that is will fill up the whole dish so if we have a great big souffle dish you might want to double the recipe and I'm gonna just spray this thing down with cooking spray okay then we take the foil and make a nice collar out of it and the souffle then will rise up and be supported by this by this collar so that's ready now we'll start out with the souffle itself the four tablespoons of butter or half a stick or you can go up or down without depending but I to me that's about the ideal and then we're going to add an equal amount or tablespoons or 1/4 cup of flour to that and we'll just stir it up until it's nice and smooth so now after about a minute or so it's it's fine we're going to add milk and it helps a lot to have the milk warmed up so I warm the milk up it's a cup and a quarter of milk then we're going to add a little pinch of salt and a little pinch of cayenne pepper just to give it a little bit of zest because Cayenne goes well with a taste of of cheese so now and this is so thick that you can you can stir the white zest and when you stir it you can see the bottom of the pan will turn the up turn the heat off and we're going to add 2 cups of shredded cheddar cheese and then we have to separate 6 large eggs the eggs really need to be at room temperature so what I often do is just put them into warm water and let them sit in the warm water for a couple of minutes I've got the egg yolks here and I'm going to add them to the to our sauce and our sauce has cooled off a little so it's not going to make scrambled eggs so we're going to add them one or two at a time and beat them into our cheese sauce now at this point when you've got the the sauce all made it can sit until it's perfectly cool you don't have to jump right in and continue with the souffle now we need to whip the egg whites okay now we're gonna take we're going to mix beat a little bit of the egg whites into the into our sauce and it's cooled down a little bit that's okay one thing kind of nice about a souffle is that once you get the soufflé mixture made you can actually let it sit for up to two hours before you bake it and now you notice it's not completely mixed in and it doesn't have to be it can be you can have little white right parts of this of the egg whites showing and that's that's a good thing so we'll pour the mixture into the souffle dish you don't have to be real gentle with it either and my recipe says that you should have a two quarts of flay dish well we made it a 2 quart supply dish by putting the the collar on this can go right directly into the oven and then it'll take about 30 minutes or so half an hour for it to be baked it isn't that pretty then we simply cut into it a little bit of grapes and we've got I love me so play let's see if we remembered everything hmm well that was 1952 that I graduated from high school there were some teachers at in flood wood who were encouraging me to go to college and they said you know University of minnesota-duluth is a good place to go and it's not too far away and I got a hundred dollar scholarship to go to UMD I went into home economics enrolled in the home economics program at UMD I was a freshman I was staying at the dorm I worked you know in three different places on campus so I was able to pay my dorm and Dick was working he was working there for the Statesmen he was selling advertising and that's where I met him he knew I found out I lived in flood wood and he lived in Grand in Barbra and he wanted to give me a ride home on the weekends and I say no I'm staying here this weekend and we went home on opposite weakens finally he changed his weekend I graduated from UMD on Friday night and got married on Sunday and I made my own wedding dress I made it while I was in home management house then the following Thursday we dick dick came home from England where he was stationed with with the Air Force and I we flew to England the officer in charge of the base his wife said now girls if you want to win a bunch of money you can enter the Pillsbury bake-off and I didn't think too much more about it but this one time we were coming back from London we were driving through these little villages from London to Oxford and dick says you know I should drive on the left side of the road you know he says keep me awake keep me on talk about anything just keep me awake and so I said well okay well what should I enter in the into the Pillsbury bake-off do you think I should send a recipe what recipe should I send and we started talking about that and he said well why don't you why don't you send that recipe for for bread that you've been baking because I was baking a dark bread so he got home got back to our apartment and as soon as I could I made this bread and I put a layer of cheese in there and the cheese all failed to the bottom I thought I could cut the cheese up into cubes and work it into the dough before I let it rise and bake it you let's call a cheesy picnic bread and so I did that and I mailed it mailed the recipe and didn't think anything more of it and in the meantime the dick wants to get out of the air out of the airforce early enough so he can enter the university and go for his master's he had asked the base commander how he could possibly get out early and he says well the only way there's no way but the only way would be is if your wife is pregnant and it turned out I was so we got an apartment in in Duluth anyhow we got this call one day from Pillsbury saying congratulations are you mrs. Richard odjick Angus yes congratulations you have are one of the 100 finalists in the Pillsbury bake-off oh really when is the bake-off what's October 14th and I said that is the day the baby is due I got all this in from all this advice from all over the country saying you have to go you have to go once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it turned out that the baby was born on the 1st of October instead of the 14th which was very fortunate except that I really it was really hard to leave the baby so I went to Los Angeles and won the second grand prize $5,000 that put dick through a master's degree at the University of Missouri we cook up some cornmeal with 1 and 3/4 cups of water and 1/2 a cup of cornmeal we're going to start this half a cup of cornmeal it goes into it and we add a little bit of salt 2 teaspoons of salt to the pot one two okay what we do now is basically bring this to a boil and then cook it until it's thickened and I'm just gonna turn this off and add a half a cup of molasses and into the mixture you can see how dark it got you think oh my goodness is this gonna make a decent bread but it will it's really good okay then we add two tablespoons of butter and since this is fourth 1/4 of a cup of butter 2 tablespoons of factly half of it and we're gonna let this cool down so that it won't kill the yeast but I've got to stop the yeast next and we're gonna add a tablespoon of yeast and a tablespoon is well it's just a scant tablespoon it's a little bit less than or in one package a yeast is a little bit less than a tablespoon but I just go ahead and use the tablespoon okay and we let it sit until it gets begins to foam we've gotten this down to a hundred and ten degrees which is like almost perfect and you look at that we're adding the the cornmeal cooked corn meal base to the yeast which has started to bubble we've got a mixture here and we're gonna start adding flour and we're going to use about four to four and a half cups of bread flour or you could use all-purpose flour all-purpose flour you probably end up using a little bit more because our purpose flour doesn't absorb quite as much liquid as it does the bread flour now at this point if one has a weak wrist I put it into the electric mixer you need to mix the bread dough until it feels like wet paint when you wet paint on a wall and so we've got it just about it the right point right now and at this point then we're just going to let it rise until it's doubled in bulk and then we'll mix in the cheese I like to cover it with plastic wrap or with a dry towel and you can tell when it's risen enough when it you can punch nice holes into it look at the big bubbles coming out Wow okay and in shaping these it's a little bit easier if you just spray the counter top with a little bit of cooking spray and we turn that out and because this makes to two loaves of bread we're going to cut the dough into two parts and then we're going to we're going to work but cheese into each I try to do it evenly but sometimes I don't think I ever get it really even unless I'd weigh out the parts and this is one pound of cheese cut it's a sharp cheddar cheese and it's cut into like half inch chunks and when I first did this recipe and won the bake-off with it I used Velveeta cheese which is very very soft I've gotten so I like to use a lot of different kinds of cheese in the chunk of cheese bread and so I'll put try to divide it evenly between these two and again I could weigh it out but you can use your judgement so it'll just work the cheese in and you want to be sure you work it in so that it isn't all in one lump in in the loaf so we're going to work it out like so and keep and I'll do this with the other side too and then we're gonna work in a little bit more cheese once we get that blend it in because we don't want to we don't we want to be sure that it's they're evenly dispersed in the dough so that we have a nice-looking cut but you need too much then it starts coming out the other side you don't want to do that either then this will we'll set these on a pan to rise and it'll take about an hour for them to rise to the right until they're well doubled and then we'll put them into the oven to bake okay here's our a chunk of cheese bread ready to be baked and it has risen until it's approximately doubled that's an approximation you know you can kind of use your eye for that and this goes into the oven at 350 for approximately 40 minutes Oh smells so good let's take a nice since this is still warm I'm gonna cut a really quick slice oh that's very nice very nice look at that so there we have it we have chunk of cheese bread and you know you almost don't have to put butter on it it's so good this way next we're going to make well we call it finish squeaky cheese but in Finland that's called labor you stopped in Finland when they make this they often we were there a couple of weeks ago and people served us the squeaky cheese but they made it with the with the first milk from a cow so that it was very very rich but to stimulate that we're gonna make a rich milk mixture and to to really enhance them the milk we're gonna use 3 cups of powdered milk and a gallon of skim milk that goes into the pot and I'm turning that the heat on so that it has a chance to warm up a little bit and one gallon of milk 3 cups of powdered milk or dry milk and also here's my court 2 cream because it has to be rich the the the cheese that we had in Finland was made from the first milk of a cow which they called the colostrum milk but it's it really is a very rich thick milk and it makes a delicious cheese we really enjoyed it then we're going to add some rennet to it now when you have colostrum milk you don't need to use the reddit because it's already in the in the cow's milk itself but we're dissolving the rennet in a little bit of cold water okay once the rennet is dissolved we're gonna stir it into the milk and I the reason I have it over a burner is so that the milk won't be perfectly cold as the milk has warmed up the rennet will work a lot better we're gonna put the cover on and just let it sit for the few minutes that it takes for the rennet to set the milk I ideally I let it sit for an hour or two because it works into my schedule I can run off and do some laundry or grocery shopping or something and then come back and complete complete the process but I'll just let it sit here now we let this sit for about 20 minutes until it begins to look like this and you can cut right through the milk almost like as if you're cutting through custard and you can see the way is beginning to separate that's fun and I well I like to do is cut it into into chunks into squares and you can see that the way is separating now what we're going to do is dampen a piece of cheesecloth and cheesecloth you can buy at a at a regular fabric store and then all we have to do is be really brave and pour it out and it will and catch the juices in a pan underneath we may have more juice in that pan can hold but will will deal with that as it happens this is just the way that all cheese starts out they will make a bag out of this and let it drain so we let it drain until until you can't see any more of the of the way just sort of sitting there and I'm cutting through it again to make room for the way to come out ideally I'll let it sit in the refrigerator overnight and it and it turns out a much heavier thicker more compact cheese this is the curds that have been draining overnight and there's still way in there that it needs to come out but what I'm going to do is turn it out onto this board around to this pan and then we're going to put it under broiler and broil this and we can just press it down it doesn't matter if it breaks up like that because we're going to put it into the oven and bacon that's why it's called bread cheese they pay you so because it was it has been baked we're baking the cheese until it gets a nice browned nice brown spots on top and you need to press down the cheese so that it kind of extrudes check it out and take a look and see if it's okay it now you see it's still a little bit jelly-like but we're going to drain off the way that has accumulated and see and oh it smells so good and this is the way they do it in Finland - and there are some kinds of cheese that are broiled right on a plank that they leave it at an angle so that it will drain out but this is the easiest way for us to do it and I think we'll Braille this a little bit longer but it gets so that the the finished product will be about like this the way it is on the edge here that it's so good mmm I'm gonna put this back in the oven though typically we would serve this cut up into pieces or sometimes into small pieces sometimes people put a chunk of this cheese into their copy or we might serve it on a piece of bread or you might serve it just a plain by itself with some fruit it's pretty versatile next time we'll be celebrating Finland with savory Butyrka fragrant bula and a mouth-watering Karelian by ste there's always something delicious cooking in my kitchen I'm Bo Jack Angus see you next time funding for bo j kangas welcome to my kitchen is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund