What to replace mascarpone in the preparation of Italian desserts

Italian cuisine is so tasty that it is time to declare it a cultural heritage of mankind and included in the list of UNESCO as an intangible monument. A lot of people, once having tried tiramisu or lasagna, risotto or carpaccio, fall in love with these masterpieces of Italian chefs forever and wish to cook them at home. But then they face a problem: where to get the ingredients for cooking these divine dishes? For example, how to replace mascarpone in tiramisu, or how to prepare a real pasta from those poor pasta that the domestic food industry produces? The products imported from Italy are too expensive and not everyone can afford. But, as the saying goes, "the goal is fiction": below are some simple recipes, how to cook mascarpone at home.

To understand what to replace mascarpone, let's briefly consider how it is made in the homeland. In Italy, this curd cheese was invented in the late 16th century. In Lombardy, when the Alpine meadows began to breed buffaloes. For cooking mascarpone is now used as milk buffalo, and the usual cow milk. So, fatty (at least 25%) unpasteurized cream is heated to a certain temperature (75 to 90 degrees) and add white wine vinegar for fermentation. After that, the mass is suspended in canvas bags to drain excess whey. Sacks are only slightly squeezed, so that the curd mass turns out to be gentle and as if "fluffy". The texture of mascarpone resembles a cream, and it can be prepared at home if you have fresh fat cream from cow's milk. Wine vinegar can be replaced with juice of half a lemon. A liter of cream is about half a mascarpone.

Of course, if you decide to cook tiramisu, then you can not wait for a few days while the serum is draining, and you need to think about how to replace mascarpone. Here is the recipe for a more or less similar analogue of the famous Italian curd for 1 hour. Take 800 grams of very fatty sour cream (preferably not from the store, with emulsifiers and other chemicals, and farm) and pour a glass of fresh milk into it. Stir thoroughly and place on a fire. Be careful: sour cream should only heat up to 70-75 C, and the main thing to watch is that it does not boil. Then in the mass you need to pour 2-3 teaspoons of lemon juice and again put the heat. Fire at the same time should be minimal, and the mixture should be stirred until it is curdled. Remove from heat, and let it stand for ten minutes. Colander lined with gauze in 3-4 layers, discard the mixture and leave for 45 minutes to make the glass serum. Lightly squeeze, and mascarpone is ready.

If you do not want to mess with cream and sour cream, solve the problem, you can replace mascarpone by purchasing a soft soft curd cheese such as German "Almette" or Finnish "Viola". But at the output of your tiramisu will also be like a real, like Russian cheese at Gorgonzola. Therefore, if you want the dessert to turn out delicious, you need to apply a little effort. The simplest version of what to replace mascarpone, it's just to beat in the electric mixer fatty cottage cheese with cream to a homogeneous mass. For the sake of similarity, add vanilla sugar, lemon juice (enough of a couple of drops), and gelatin dissolved in cream.

You can also try this simple recipe for mascarpone analogue: package the custard (semi-finished) mixed with condensed milk and put this mixture for 2 hours in the refrigerator.

Here is another recipe for substituting mascarpone: sugar and yolks are put in milk, mixed and boiled for a few minutes. The main thing here is not to overexpose the mixture on fire. After the removal, carefully rubbed unsalted cottage cheese and whipped cream of 35% fat. The mixture is placed in the refrigerator for a while. And you can just mix fat cream, butter and cream cheese like "Yantar". The taste of this mascarpone turns out to be quite original, but somewhat similar to the real one.