So, here goes. This is the moment before I become a cheesemaker. It’s just after 6.30pm on a Friday evening in October 2018, Radio 4 is on. All is as it should be. I am incredibly nervous. I can’t really explain why except that these moments of moving from fantasy to reality are daunting. I have spent so long getting to this point that the prospect of it all being rather a let-down and/or me being a totally useless cheesemaker are just too close for comfort.
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Out on the other side… It’s been an interesting few hours. I am, firstly, really proud of myself. It’s not something I often say so I feel I should say it again. I am proud of myself. It’s been an exciting but challenging time. For starters there was the starter… Seriously, it was a nightmare. Turns out the place where I bought the starter and yeast from don’t measure the packets they sell in the same units that a cheese recipe would use. They give an estimate of how much milk the amount per packet should cover which is hugely irritating as different types of cheese need more/less starter and frankly I don’t want them telling me how much they think I need. Anyway, I improvised… who knows if it has worked but we’ll see, seems okay so far. I was incredibly thrown by that hiccup though. I knew it was impossible to prepare and work everything out in advance but felt incredibly threatened by the possibility of it all falling apart because I couldn’t get my head around estimating tiny amounts of sand like particles to the nth degree in the right way. An exhausting panic of insecurity but apart from that things generally seem to have gone okay.
Here’s a little timeline of my first cheese make… it takes days not hours, more of that later, and is a slow old make. I like that though, slow is the kind of pace I feel comfortable with…
The question of what milk to use and where to get it from is something that I will come back to properly another time but for now I’m going with the principle that the critical factor is freshness. So, I’ve tracked down a delivery line of a local milk round. The milk round runs on the morning of the day the cows were milked which is great and it’s from Ayrshire cows which is the next tick – it’s a breed of cow that produces milk good for cheesemaking – and it’s unhomogonised, another tick.
Lactic cheesemaking is a waiting game. After warming the milk to around 22 degrees I added the starter and yeast (the measuring bit I panicked about) and then the rennet (calf rennet in case you’re wondering, a tiny amount – about 1/8 tsp). The milk then sat in my little study (which I kept warm at 22 degrees) to acidify over the next 20 hours or so.
At pH 4.60 the curds and whey are ready for moulding. When I got to this stage I was a bit concerned. I’ve never moulded curds that were this soft before. They felt fragile but not in the soft slippery way I’ve come to expect from making cheese with other people, more in a ‘this is almost like yoghurt’ way that was worrying…
Lots of turning and 24 hours later there is something that can definitely be said to have moved from curds to cheese! Young, just fully formed cheese but cheese nonetheless. ‘Yoghurt’ fears thankfully averted…
Aside from the cheese the other thing you might notice in the image below is a rather complicated looking leaflet. This is the second stage of cheesemaking that almost broke me. I don’t know why but numbers are not my friend. Words I don’t mind, in fact feel warmly towards, but numbers on the other hand… It’s like we fell out in school – probably around the time I needed extra support to get my head around fractions – and have never made up since. This, combined with the fact that the leaflet relates to callibrating the most expensive item I have EVER bought (excluding a house) and the whole thing was a showdown waiting to happen. I am crediting an uncharacteristically patient husband (mine) for saving the day.
I don’t know how to express how exciting it was to see these little cheeses come into being. By this point I could handle them properly, turn them, salt them – they were definitely real! It’s quite a thing to get to a point where you know you have definitely done something right. This moment was full of the magical promise of success, I’ll be honest – I was thrilled. Proper baby cheese had been born.
Another 48 hours of salting and turning and drying and the cheeses were ready to go into the wine fridge aka my improvised cellar. Salting threatened to be another moment of meltdown and measuring scale confusion but actually went okay. A need for some kind of salt shaker was identified at this point, it’s all very well doing it by hand but not ideal. You’re left haunted by the cheeses that got too much salt because your hand shook at the wrong moment and the bigger cheeses that got too little.
The wine fridge was a very promising cheese cave…
Early days but beginning to look like cheese. I loved this moment. Having worked as a cheesemonger for years and with cheesemakers for several summers you know what to look for and what kind of rind formation is needed. It was around this stage that I could see the cheeses were getting where they needed to be and on the right track. It was also around the time that I realised I just couldn’t get the humidity right in the fridge. I’d hoped to be able to achieve a 70% or so humidity, added water bowls and sponges and even bought a small humidifier but all to no avail. It’s a particular kind of madness, when you know something isn’t right and is going to have a negative impact but you simply cannot fix it. Like the train is pulling out of the station in slow motion and no matter what you do it will always have left before you can catch it.
Almost two weeks later, humidity challenges just about overcome by using tubberware boxes, and they were definitely looking like proper little cheeses!
And finally, to the actual eating. It wasn’t terrible! In fact, it was rather good. This beautiful moment which I thought I might need to work to achieve for years – a cheese worth eating. In my humble opinion of course. And not perfect, but still, worth eating in my eyes.
The first cheeseboard outing, and in company! I was so chuffed when a friend sent me this. I’d given her a baby cheese for her birthday but it was only a week old so I was a bit worried about how it might taste… She gave it a proper cheeseboard with grown up cheeses and everything. First batch complete.
