In hot weather, I can’t think of many cheeses that appeal to me more than manouri. What an underappreciated Greek cheese, forever in the shadow of feta. Would it do better in the U.S. under another name? Does it sound too much like a soil amendment?
Manouri owes everything to feta. Like ricotta, it’s a byproduct, made with the whey from feta production. To make it, producers combine whey with cream from sheep’s milk, reheat the blend and harvest the fluffy curds that float to the surface. Drained in cloth bags that are twisted into a log, the curds coalesce into a fat white sausage. The bags are strung up for 10 days to allow the cheese to drain further and ripen a bit, then the logs are removed from the bags, packaged in plastic and shipped. Most stores cut these roughly five-pound logs crosswise into thick disks and rewrap them for sale.
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