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Parlez vous Fromage?

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By MARY A. KEITH

Tribune correspondent

Published: December 28, 2008

What is comte cheese? This recipe looks good, but I can't find any cheese with this name.

Comte is a variety of Gruyere. It is made in just a few certain regions of France. It is described as having a sweet, nutty interior and a firm rind. If you can't find it, Gruyere should be an acceptable substitute. It might not be allowed to be imported since it is made from unpasteurized milk.

I'm trying a quick bread recipe that says it works with Splenda. But when I beat the butter with the Splenda, it looks like a curdled mess. What is wrong with it?

Nothing is wrong. The manufacturer says that the curdled look is common. Just continue with the recipe and it should be fine. It's a good idea when baking with Splenda to use a slightly smaller pan, so the batter is deeper, and to sprinkle a tiny bit of sugar on the top before you bake it. Or spray the top with a pan spray before you bake it. That will help it brown and look nicer.

One of my mother's old recipes says to use 3 cents' worth of yeast. There's a note beside that that says 1 ounce. I'm sure she was using the cakes of compressed yeast. How much is that in today's dry yeast?

Two packets will be just a bit more than needed, but should work fine. The conversion of compressed yeast to dry is 3/5 of an ounce of compressed equals 1 packet or just barely 1 tablespoon of dry yeast.

I'm trying out a food dehydrator that has six shelves. I want to preserve as much as I can of my own food this year. Can I put different foods on each shelf, or do I need to fill the whole thing with one food?

You can do different foods, carefully. You would not want to put something with a strong flavor or aroma in with something mild. You could end up with green pepper-flavored banana chips. And you need to choose things that will dry in about the same amount of time. So something dense like bananas and something very moist like apples would be a poor combination. The moisture from the apples will make it take longer for the bananas to dry.

I found some little ceramic Christmas trinkets from last year. They are filled with hard candies. The candies are individually wrapped, and then in a plastic bag inside the ornament. Would they be safe to use?

They should be safe if they are hard candies, just sugar and flavoring. If they are chocolates or are filled or soft candies, they might be rancid or dried out by now. And even the hard candies might have absorbed enough moisture to get sticky. But the hard candies will be safe. If they're sticky or you decide not to give them away, you can crush them to use in cookies.

How well is sea salt cleaned?

There should not be bits of other things in it. But it is not purified. The other minerals that were in the water are what give it the unusual colors and flavors. There are enough impurities for that, but not enough to have any significant health benefits.

My fudge recipe was just fantastic in my old microwave, but it was only 1,000 watts. The new one is 1,200 watts. I've tried decreasing the time by a minute, but it comes out grainy and coarse. What should I do?

According to the Web site www.microwave

cookingforone.com, you need to decrease the time. If it was 12 minutes in your old oven, it should be only eight minutes at the new, higher power. There are tables for lots of conversions at that Web site.

Mary A. Keith, a nutrition and health agent at Hillsborough County Extension, can be reached at (813) 744-5519 or mkeith@ufl.edu.

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