Pillar to Post with Mysost

Friends and family members - particularly those of scientific mien - have shown great interest in and enthusiasm for my recent cheese adventures. I like to think this is a result of intellectual curiosity rather than what Sir calls 'cupboard love' - but heck, what does it matter? It's been great fun sharing my successes and near misses (no total failures yet, touch wood) with curious parties who have displayed a gratifying support for my latest obsession.

Now the requests are starting to come in - and I am happy to oblige. I currently have at my disposal the cultures to coagulate goats' milk for fresh chevre; ash (food-grade activated charcoal, actually) for Valencay; and Penicillium roquefortii for blues and bleus of all descriptions. Of butter muslin, sushi mats, and supporting paraphernalia I have an abundance. I am, as they say, good to go.

Or I thought I was - until HSR, all innocent-like, asked me if I had the means to make one of his favorites, gjetost.

I had to tell him truthfully that I had no idea. Although I was pretty sure it had something to do with milk solids and Maillard browning, I hadn't come across a procedure in any of my reading - and since I am not over-fond of the product myself, I had not really given fabrication much thought. I decided to look it up so I could at least give him the satisfaction of an answer.

Last Saturday, since I had a bit of free time whilst keeping tender watch over my CurdNuggets®, I dug out my cheesy resources and had a look see. They all agreed: to make gjetost, all one requires is the whey left over from goats'-milk cheese production and a big pot in which to boil it. There was also mention of a caramelized cows' milk cheese called mysost, which in all other respects looked identical.

And what did I just happen to have sitting in two huge bowls on my dining room table? Almost two gallons of raw Jersey whey, that's what, distilled not three hours previously.

Talk about synchronicity! I got to work with a will, determined to surprise HSR with both my thoughtfulness and my ingenuity. If Norwegian housewives can do it, I reasoned, so can I.

What hubris! What foolishness!

My recipes stipulated that all one has to do is reduce the whey (any amount will do, they claimed) until it's creamy and thick and looks like a brown brick. My sources agreed that the particular characteristics of the final result are up to the cook - whether the cheese is the color of light caramel or dark molasses, for example, or scoopable with a spoon as opposed to sliceable with a knife. What could be simpler or easier? After all the messing around I'd been doing with cultures, flocculation, and brine baths, I thought a simple boiled cheese sounded like the most straightforward thing on earth - and with plenty of room for error, too.

I was not really sure what to expect as I decanted the whey into my maslin pan. I didn't know the concentration of milk solids in my whey or to what degree the sugars alone would be sufficient for browning. My destructions were silent on these points, unless you count the rather casual aside in one of them that said, basically, 'Boiling can take a few hours depending on how big a batch you are making.'

At about 11:00 am I cranked up my Wolf and let her rip.

At 2:00, the pot was still going with no end in sight - although by that time, the liquid had reduced by about a third.

At 4:00, I was down to less than half the original volume but there was still no sign of thickening or color. I began to worry about my gas bill.

Two hours later, the mixture was reduced to about an inch in my pan and had acquired a vague sort of sepia tone. The entire kitchen smelled like caramel and the windows were completely steamed up. The cheese was a grainy mess, but one of my recipes advised putting it into a blender to make it smooth and silky. This I did, with predictable results - geysers of mad hot liquid mysost erupted all over the place, scalding dramatically the palm of my right hand and splattering the kitchen cabinets to oblivion. I rethought my strategy and, working in small batches, was able to salvage a fair amount of the sticky goo. This I returned to my smaller round-bottomed chef's pan for additional cooking.

When the cheese started to scorch (it was well past seven o'clock by this point and I was approaching hysteria), I poured the bubbling lava into three four-ounce preserving jars (yes, from one and a half gallons of whey to twelve ounces of cheese at the cost of goodness-knows how many units of gas) and placed them in the fridge. What would happen next? Frankly, I was beyond caring.

On Wednesday, I discovered the cheese had separated and gone weirdly crystalline - as though small shards of icy particles had somehow found their way into the jars. They tasted disgusting, too.

I was dismayed. But when my pride is wounded and my reputation at stake I tend to go into determined overdrive. I decided HSR was going to get his mysost no matter what.

I thought about my predicament for a couple of days, visited the cheese counter at Wegmans to see what gjetost is really supposed to look like, and concluded in defiance of all logic that I had cooked mine insufficiently.

Back onto the burner! I cooked my twelve ounces of shard-filled glue over low heat in a desperate bid to salvage the situation. After about an hour and a half of patient stirring and whisking (during which the glassy orts disappeared and the cheese returned to utter smoothness) the mixture suddenly got very, very thick - it looked a lot like creamy peanut butter, in fact. It also started to taste rather good. I was onto something!

I added a pinch of cinnamon and kept stirring madly. I was now able to roll the cheese around in the bottom of the pan like a big lump of burnt-umber-tinted choux pastry. It was velvety, soft, and held its shape.

Just as I was considering what I was going to do next it began to seize up - clearly, I had done too much of a good thing and dried it out.

Curses! I quickly removed the ball from the pan (its surface cracking slightly in the process) and pressed it into a muffin tin, where it filled one aluminum dimple almost to the top. That's right - one and one-half gallons of whey and something like ten hours of boiling (with the associated CCFs charged at an outrageous 73 cents each by my gas company) over two days had yielded one muffin-sized block of cheese weighing exactly 4.5 ounces.

Gjetost may be purchased with ease at my local cheese counter for nine dollars per pound.

Believe me. It's worth every hard-earned penny.