Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Ruined your Cream Cheese in the Freezer? Here's the fix

I bought a 3 pound block of Cream Cheese at the wholesale club a couple weeks back.  Being obsessive and compulsive about keeping food fresh, I thought lets cut it down into pieces and freeze that. 

Don't.

If you do you end up with some of the whey leeching out of the cream cheese and the texture gets lumpy and gritty.   It tastes the same and you can use it to bake a cheese cake, but sometimes you just don't want to eat a sweet confection. 

Besides I bought bagels with the cream cheese.  Yum.

After suffering through some bagels where the cream cheese was gritty and rolled off the bagel like a pile of sand, I decided to try the only suggestion that sounded plausible.   I put the lot into the food processor and pressed "ON".

It worked.   Not only did I get back my cream cheese in a creamy cheese, but the added benefit was that it was now aerated.  The cream cheese was now easier to spread than the original brick.  It only took about 90 seconds.  You may take longer or not - this depends on just how smooth you wanted it.  Mine looked like a rich fluffy white icing when I was through, much better than that crumbly mess that distantly resembled feta cheese.

It turns out that cream cheese will keep for three to six months in the refrigerator.  You really don't need to freeze the block if you actually do eat the stuff.

So keep it in the freezer, or put it in the food processor to pump some air back into it and make it easier to deal with.  The choice is yours.

I know it worked because the food processor is in the dishwasher now getting cleaned as a result. 

2 comments:

  1. It didnt work for me, even after adding a bit of cream... maybe my machine wasn't powerful enough?

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  2. Worked for me, thanks for the tip!!

    ReplyDelete