What To Do With Leftover Mascarpone

Leftover mascarpone is an opportunity to make canapes.

If you have had the occasion to use mascarpone cheese, or the rich cream-cheese-like cheese from Italy, and did not quite know what to do with the remaining few tablespoons left in the tub, you need not let it go to waste. While you may not have enough mascarpone to duplicate your recipe, you can still add it to a new dish where the cheese will lend its unctuous taste.

Make Gnocchi

In keeping with its Italian origins, mascarpone, even just a little bit of it, can bolster all kinds of Italian dishes. While it often accompanies desserts, mascarpone also works well with savory dishes. For pillowy potato dumplings, or gnocchi, you can use ready-made vacuum-packed gnocchi; boil the gnocchi, then add to it a mixture of cooked zucchini, green onions, 2 tbsp. of mascarpone and grated parmesan cheese.

Make Shrimp With Polenta

Another tasty take on leftover mascarpone blends the sweet with the savory to make an appetizer or main dish consisting of sauteed shrimp over a bed of mascarpone-enriched polenta. The assembled dish is drizzled with a spicy passion fruit sauce infused with cream and passion fruit syrup. The proportion of mascarpone to cornmeal in the polenta would be about 1 to 2.

Make Chocolate Cake

Leftover mascarpone lends itself to improvising with other leftover ingredients you may have on hand. In the case of a chocolate cake made of leftover mascarpone, you can use readily available orange juice, brewed coffee, cocoa powder and optionally, almond extract, along with cupboard staples like flour, sugar and baking soda. The mascarpone, eggs and butter add richness to the final cake.

Make Tomato Tartlets

When tomatoes are both rife and ripe, you may want to bake up a batch of rich tomato tartlets made from puff pastry shells. While the puff pastry is quite rich in itself and can stand up to the tomatoes without any cheese or herbs, you can use the opportunity to finish any mascarpone left over in the refrigerator by dotting the base of the tarts with mascarpone before layering tomato slices on top.

Tags: leftover mascarpone, passion fruit, puff pastry, with savory