ot: Quark - the cheese - not the ferengi guy
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
in The Commons
Quark isnt in my local market, >.< becoming an odyssey to mail order this stuff
how delicious is Quark?
heard raves it makes deelish german cheesecake

Comments
It does, and lots of other stuff. :-)
I'm using it for desserts (add milk, a bit sugar and either jam, or fruit), on bread (tastes especially good if you spread it on the bread and add jam on it)... there's tons of usages.
But you can make it yourself:
http://www.food.com/recipe/how-to-make-german-quark-476124
and
http://germanfood.about.com/od/resources/r/Homemade_Quark.htm
Aren't quarks very, very, tiny though? How do you find it? ;)
I once read a blurb about "the famous quarker, William Penn"... I judged it, but silently.
not to be confused with quasars?
Are its flavors Up, Down, Strange, Charmed, Top, and Bottom?
or Truth and Beauty.
Not only are quarks very tiny but they never go out in the real world alone.
Its charm, strangeness, truth and beauty aside (and resisting mightily the urge to say anything at all about those other qualities) ...
Actually, looking at the recipe, I think it may be available as "farmers' cheese" from Whole Foods in the US, if that's where you are. There's no flavoring shown in the food.com base recipe other than the lemon juice, which fits. Whole Foods sells it for about $4 per pound, in the dairy section with cream cheese and cottage cheese (logically enough). Tastes like very very mild cream cheese/cottage cheese combination, with a very very fine curd cottage cheese texture. (Whole Foods describes the texture of quark as being between yogurt and cottage cheese, which is just about exactly the texture of their "farmers cheese".)
And yes, highly recommended with jam or preserves on bread/toast/bagels.
EDIT: And after doing a touch more research, farmers cheese and quark aren't quite the same thing, though they're probably close enough for gubmint work. The farmers cheese that Whole Foods sells is made by adding buttermilk to regular whole milk, instead of adding lemon juice. (Explains the ingredient list on the cannister: "contains milk". That's it, nothing else.) Other than that, the process is pretty much the same. Quark probably has a slightly stronger more sour/tart taste than farmers cheese.
Also, since quark isn't a hard cheese, mail order is going to be crazy expensive, if not impossible. It would need to be shipped overnight in dry ice to have any chance of arriving without going off.
I'd read somewhere it was actually up, down, sideways, sex appeal, and peppermint.
Excellent research! But since the taste of plain Quark is more or less neutral (lactic acid makes the slightly sour taste, not lemon juice!), in Germany we make it sweet or salty, and even spicy. Herbs (chives, parsley, ramson, etc.) and spices (paprika, caraway, etc.) are very common, as well as cucumber (like the Indian Raita or Greek Tzatziki) or horseradish. Try it!
I don't think it tastes great, it's very bland and like tasteless oatmeal and I find heavier than cream cheese or yogurt, it's very filling and just sits in your tummy.
You can find it in QFC, PCC, Whole Foods, some Northeast grocery stores and apparently some Wal-marts?
You can buy it online from:
Vermont Creamery - http://www.vermontcreamery.com/quark-1
Eli Quark - https://www.elliquark.com/
misha - http://www.mishadairy.com/#home
and Amazon will ship
Odd thing is Arla sell it in the UK but not the US