Olympic™ Ski Cheese

Photogenic Olympic™ skier Lindsey Vonn has created a culinary opportunity, trying to heal her bruised leg by applying fresh curd cheese. She calls the soft stuff by it’s Austrian name, topfen, but the cheese is also known as quark, quarg,  Tvaroh, Tvorog and curd-cheese. Fresh cheese aroma is too subtle for a marketable celebrity fragrance, so it’s time to profit by cookin’ up some celebrity ski cheese recipes.

 From The Cook’s Thesaurus:

 “This versatile fresh cheese resembles soft cream cheese. Germans (who call is quark) and Austrians (who call it topfen) use it to make everything from cheesecake to gravy. To make your own: Combine one quart whole milk with 1/2 cup buttermilk in a clean container, cover, and let the mixture stand at room temperature for two days. Gently cook the mixture for about 30 minutes. It’s done when the curd has thickened slightly and begun to separate from the whey. Let it cool and pour it into a colander lined with several folds of cheesecloth. Put the colander into a larger container, wrap with plastic, and let it drain overnight in the refrigerator until the quark is reduced to the consistency of yogurt. Makes about 1 cup. Substitutes: fromage frais (very similar) OR yogurt cheese (more acidic) OR two parts ricotta cheese and one part sour cream OR strained cottage cheese OR mascarpone.”

The therapeutic effectiveness of topical topfen application is dubious.; perhaps this is a folk cure developed by Austrian skiers. Who knows; maybe Swiss skiers try to heal injuries with warm cheese fondue. 

 

The very word Olympics™ is a registered trademark of the IOC, an athletic organization which endorses junk food, some of which contains glops of melted dairy by-products. The term is used here under the parody clause of the Fair Use Doctrine.

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com . Yes, we know that’s Emmenthaler —  fresh cheese makes a lousy cartoon.

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Tags: alternative medicine, bruise, cheese, folk medicine, food, health, injury, Lindsey Vonn, Olympics, sking, topfen, Winter Olympics