Posts tagged ‘puree’

Do you have any tips on effective straining? I’m trying to make my own baby food, which requires straining pureed peas to get out the skins. The recipe calls for cheesecloth, but I’ve been rubbing the peas into a fine-mesh strainer with a spatula, and it gets the job done. However, I’d love to hear any tips on straining food better, faster, and with less mess and drama (if that’s even possible), advice on using cheesecloth without going insane, and when you’d pick cheesecloth over a fine-mesh strainer.

Oh god, straining. It is awful, and also a good question to answer. (Tip: never read the Thomas Keller cookbooks if you have a fear of this kitchen technique.) There are a number of tools that you can use with varying degrees of splatter potential, but let’s tackle your cheesecloth query first.

Which is to say, don’t bother with it for your baby food recipes! Cheesecloth is a big pain for anything except making cheese or other related endeavors where you’re separating something extremely liquidy from something extremely solid. For thicker, more homogenous purees like the vegetable mixture you’re working with, the fine-mesh strainer method you’ve been using is a far better option. Through a lot of squeezing and squishing, you’ll eventually push the strained food sans skins through the cheesecloth, but with a lot of unnecessary effort.

The first alternative option to the strainer, which can potentially get just as messy but allows you to do more in quantity, is a food mill. With three discs for fine, medium, and coarse puree, the mill fits over a large bowl and uses a hand crank instead of a spatula to push the puree through while keeping seeds, skins, and other unsavory bits out. Though I curse the food mill every time I bring it down from its not-very-convenient corner cupboard location, I do appreciate the way I can tear through eight cups of tomato sauce or a huge pot of applesauce in no time flat.
>> If you want to strain like the pros, a few more options after the jump. >>