Feelin Cheesy

Last summer, I read an article in the Wellesley Magazine about fellow alumnae who gave up their high paying jobs to pursue their real passions of cheese making.  And just like that I had the desire to drop everything I was doing, give up dental school, and make cheese.  As Veronique Chau Kherian ’05 said in the article, “Cheese attracts thoughtful people.”  I’m thoughtful, right?!?!  I too could be a brilliant cheese maker, right?!?!  These thoughts (see, thoughtful = full of thoughts like these) raced through my head, but it wasn’t until 7 months later that I would get a chance to prove both my thoughtfulness and my cheese making skills.

(Sometime in the span of reading that article and having my cheese making dreams come to fruition, I met my boyfriend!  Without his excellent camera and even more excellent photography skills, these pictures would not have been possible.)

Thanks to the good people at Urban Cheesecraft and How About We for Couples, we were hooked up with our very first mozzarella & ricotta DIY kit.  A Friday night in the middle of finals week turned out to be the perfect chance to try our hand at being urban cheese makers ourselves.

We were super excited when we found this milk at QFC since our recipe called for whole, non-homogenized, normally pasteurized milk!  We also felt like Seattle urban local organic hipsters for buying this bottle, but it was so beautiful and so perfect that we could not resist. The entire gallon was poured into a pot and was warmed up to a particular heat (95 degrees F, I think) after being mixed with some citric acid.  Then dissolved rennet was added, the cheese continued heating to 105 degrees F, and then CRAZY CHEMICAL REACTIONS STARTED AND CURDS AND WHEY AND OMG everything happened so fast.

See? The white stuff is the curds, and the yellow liquid is the whey!

We nuked the curds in the microwave. The instructions then told us to knead and stretch the mozzarella, microwaving again if necessary to keep the temperature up. That cheese was so darn hot, which may have been why the instructions had rubber gloves on the supplies list…

… and tada! After we rolled the kneaded cheese into a ball, we tried (partially in vain, partially successfully) doing some food styling. The picture above is my attempt at it, and the picture below is my boyfriend’s.

We ate our cheese with basil plucked from our new plant (which my boyfriend creatively named Basil), grape tomatoes, crusty sourdough bread, and an olive oil-balsamic vinegar dip. The texture of the cheese was a little weird/abnormal, but my hope is that for future batches we’ll be able to fix it. The flavor was pretty subtle and served as a good complement to the foods we paired with it!

I don’t know that cheese making is my new found passion or that I have proved my thoughtfulness through this exercise, but we gave it a fighting shot and enjoyed the process very much (and our stomachs seemed pleased as well). And we still have the raw materials to make 9 more batches of mozzarella…so more cheese making lies ahead!