TracyFood

Cheese party! Pasta with myzithra, browned butter, and sage 11 September 2008 9:48 am

Posted by Tracy in : cheese, cooking, pictures, vegetarian , trackback

This post is my contribution to Loulou’s La Fête du Fromage event, the results of which will be posted Chez Loulou on Monday, September 15. I look forward to the roundup! (Loulou, I’m sorry I didn’t choose a French cheese this time around. I hope this fête becomes a monthly event so I can have another chance!)

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First things first: Apparently there is or once was a pasta dish with browned butter and myzithra on the menu at The Old Spaghetti Factory, but I’ve never had it so I can’t speak to its goodness (or lack thereof) relative to what I made here. Sorry about that. If anybody reading this is inspired to make my version to compare the two, I would of course be very interested in hearing your opinion. Write me!

Now, on with the cheese! Myzithra (also spelled Mizithra) is a Greek cheese with a mild, salty flavor and wonderful crumbly texture. Like ricotta, it’s made with the whey left over from making other cheeses — in the case of myzithra, it’s often the whey from another one of my favorites — feta! (And like feta, myzithra really shines in the company of sun-dried tomatoes.) Again like ricotta, myzithra has fresh and aged forms — I look forward to trying the fresh kind someday, but the dish described in this post uses the aged form. Aged myzithra shares many of its excellent qualities with ricotta salata; it has a similar semi-hard crumbly-chewy texture and is good for grating, which is how I used it in this dish. Like another of my favorite Greek cheeses, halloumi, myzithra doesn’t really melt, which is especially nice if you’re not trying to cook a giant ball of pasta glued together with melted cheese (not that there’s anything wrong with that every once in a while).

For this dish I wanted to keep things a little lighter than Sexy Mac and Cheese, but no less flavorful: just cheese and pasta tossed together with browned butter and sage. Simple! Yay! Browned butter is what you get when you heat butter just long enough to foam away some water and let the milk solids toast, but not burn. It’s got a delicious nutty, savory flavor, one which I look forward to trying in pretty much every way I use regular butter, like Amanda Gold did for the San Francisco Chronicle. Because browned butter has such a nice rich flavor, I think you can get away with using a little less of it than you might with less-cooked butter, kind of like you don’t need to use as many nuts if you toast them to bring out their flavor (this is a very good thing, as I usually end up with fewer nuts when I toast them because they are so irresistably tasty to snack on… but I digress.) Further inspiring my adventures in browned butter is Michael Ruhlman’s take on it, as reproduced on his blog from his book The Elements of Cooking. (Note to self: I’ve enjoyed this book so much every time it’s excerpted online that I should really check out in paper form one of these days.) Also he has way nicer pictures than mine.

But speaking of my pictures, click on any of the following to see a bigger version on Flickr….

I had already started grating the myzithra when I thought, “Hey, I bet this could make a great-looking TracyFood post.” So I here’s my first and only picture of the cheese on its own: grated, next to the freshly-browned butter, just taken off the heat so it wouldn’t burn.

Next, the pasta, tossed with the browned butter and sage (I crumbled dried sage leaves into the butter just as the foaming was starting to subside, then took everything off the heat because the sage browned very quickly and infused the butter with its deliciousness).

Last, I scattered on the grated cheese and gave everything another toss before finishing it with a bare scattering of salt (I was cautious, since myzithra’s plenty salty) and lots of freshly ground black pepper.

I served the pasta alongside a simple salad of mixed greens, grated carrots, and shallot-balsamic vinaigrette. Yum!

And that’s all I have to say about myzithra (for now).

Loulou

Great post about a wonderful cheese. Thank you for joining in La Fête du Fromage, Tracy. I plan on making it a monthly event (or maybe once every 2 months) so you'll have the chance to try some French cheese too.
The pasta looks delicious. You can't go wrong with browned butter in my book!

And I remember the myzithra pasta at the Spaghetti Factory when I was a kid. I wonder if they still serve it? I wonder if there are still Spaghetti Factories?

Shaula

That just looks remarkably good.

Is Myzithra made from (whey from) goat's milk?

The weather is overdue to turn cool and I find my heart is turning to thoughts of cheese and pasta. I would love to try this if we can find some Myzithra.

Karen

Spaghetti Factory still serves it, I had it last week, July, 2009. It was yummy. I found this post when I googled it so I could make it for dinner, tates the same...Thanks!

TracyFood

Hi Karen! Glad I could help you replicate a restaurant favorite! Also, thanks for calling my attention to this old post; I just found a few typos to fix, and had somehow forgotten to reply to Shaula's comment.

Hi Shaula! Sorry for the late reply; I think myzithra could be made with goat milk whey, but I think of feta as more of a sheep's milk cheese (but maybe that's just because my favorite fetas are all sheep-milk...)