Fromage Fort For Charcuterie 2024 - Homemade Potted Cheese Spread

Welcome to Creative Cooking. Today we're making fromage fort. It's a nice appetizer using old cheese. Imagine that. And what I have here is some monster cheese that I've had cold aging for almost a year in a sealed package. It just makes it so much better. I'm going to put that over there and cut it into small cubes and then I have this extra sharp provolone which I have many uses for. It's very strong so we're not going to put too much of that in there because every cheese in here is pretty much sharp like this cheddar which I always have on hand. So we're going to just like the others cut them into small cubes because this is all going into a food processor. And yeah I had some Land O'Lakes American cheese. Three slices of it just wrapped up at the bottom of the fridge. I said well let's use that and that is in the true spirit of making a fromage fort. And here we have some garlic. We have one small clove and one very large which equals about three. You can actually add more than that but no need to chop it. Fine. Just leave it coarse like that. And I have some gargonzola which is an Italian blue cheese. It's not left over. I actually bought it for something else but I wanted to put it in. Now to make this you want to take the garlic and the hardest cheeses you have and put those into your food processor first. In other words we want to give them a little bit of a head start. Okay because they are harder they're going to take a little more processing so to speak. So I like to put the hard stuff in first especially the garlic and then add the rest of the cheeses. Okay now what you see here isn't all of what's going into this recipe it's just the more solid cheeses. We're also going to add some butter. You might say butter. Yeah butter. And we had some leftover cream cheese. I'm going to throw that in too. That's going to lend a nice creaminess to it. Yeah it's just the best way to do it. The more cheeses you put in the better as far as I'm concerned. And then you just need to process it right. But not so fast. We have to put in some black pepper. Lots of it. You gotta put in the black pepper. You know me. And you could also season this with a little bit of thyme or something like that if you want to. But I think the black pepper is enough. So to process this you want to start off by just pulsing. Pulsing allows the larger pieces of cheese to get to the bottom and come in contact with the blades. And keep doing that until it's roughly done. And then we'll add the white wine. Any white wine will do. That was not a pinot grigio. That was a sauvignon blanc. Which is pretty good. It's a mild white wine and that's exactly what I wanted to use. But you could use a chard too. So continue pulsing that until this is looking pretty good. And then you want to keep adding liquid because what we're trying to achieve here is something that has the consistency of ricotta. So I'm adding a little bit of heavy cream as an added liquid to the wine. And you can also use broth like chicken broth and something like this. It'll work out just fine. But once it gets to that consistency you want to put it into a container like this. You can see it looks like ricotta. Cover it and leave it in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours. And now for the caramelized onions. And these aren't just any caramelized onions. They're a little bit different. There's a process here and some seasonings that go into it. So we'll start off with my usual olive oil and butter to do the saute. Again you know me and olive oil with butter. I'm going to put one medium onion in there because you're going to be surprised. This will reduce to almost nothing. I should have probably doubled it but that's all right. We want to cook them until they start to brown around the edges. Not fully caramelized but just browned and lightly browned at that because the rest of this process is going to turn them very dark. So I'm adding tamari which is a Japanese style soy sauce. It's a little bit thicker and a little bit darker but not that salty. It's actually pretty good. It makes a nice browning medium for gravies and things like that. So we're going to go ahead we're going to stir them all around and then we have to deglaze with water. And there's a good reason for this. Not only do we want to deglaze we need some liquid because now we're going to add about a half a teaspoon of brown sugar. We want to add just a little extra sweetness to it. And you could use just regular white sugar that's fine too. And a pinch of salt. Okay and then you just mix it up and allow that water to evaporate and what you'll end up with is a nice syrup that's slightly sweet and delicious. Look at that. Delicious. We're going to use this as a topping and you'll see why in a minute. Okay so you can use crackers or you can use bread. I'm using a French baguette. I'm going to cut that into fairly thick slices. I want to put some butter on it including my fingers. Butter finger. Okay so you want to put the butter on both sides. We want to grill this. Normally I would do this in the oven but I find that doing it on a griddle actually works out better. It doesn't dry out the bread as much. Unless you want it that way then do it in the oven. It'll work out just fine. And you need to flip them and you may have to flip them more than once. And the goal here is to get it nice and crispy. And if you run a fork along there you can hear it's like a nice sound you know. And this is what they look like. So to serve it you take your cheese and you spread it on there. Of course you could eat it just like that. And indeed if you were using this on a charcuterie board you would have that cheese probably at room temp. And then you would take these caramelized onions in a separate container on the board and people have the option to put some on their toast. So you don't have to make them this way in advance. Some people may not like the caramelized onions right. But we're going to take this just one more step. Okay we're going to go ahead and we're going to put caramelized onions on the remaining bread that I have here with the cheese. All right and we're going to put that in a toaster oven on broil. And that's going to melt that cheese. It's going to crisp up the edges of that bread. And this is what they're going to look like. Absolutely fabulous. So I hope you give it a try. You might even want to check out the Swedish meatball tartlets or the holy smokies with bacon. But whatever you do I hope you come back each week for more great videos made for people who like to cook. Until then, bon appétit!