During my service as a gluten guerrilla, I have explored many new culinary avenues - mostly, I suppose, to fill the sucking black void that now exists where my baking energies used to reside.
The most recently acquired of these enthusiasms is cheesemaking.
My new-found passion had its genesis in a perfectly innocent confluence of events, as these things so often do. On a snowy morning in January, with an hour to spare before it was light enough outside to make shovelling the sidewalk a sensible proposition, I decided to try my hand at the ricotta cheese recipe in the big Green Gourmet cookbook. Extensive experimentation with mozzarella cheese inevitably followed, resulting in a product easily as delicious as - and only slightly more expensive than - the fresh stuff available in the finer supermarkets round and about.
If not mozzarella, why not Brie? or Reblochon? or Cambozola? A healthy interest soon turned into a full-blown obsession, aided in no small part by the good folks at the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company and my friendly neighbourhood UPS man, who dutifully brought to my door the bugs, molds, other kinds of molds, and rennet I required. A weekend spent studying at the feet of Jim Wallace - sage, guru, and cheesemeister extraordinary - and I had the intellectual luggage I needed to begin my journey.
Now I am a woman in possession of a cheese vat (actually, a large stainless steel maslin pan that holds two gallons of milk exactly), a small press, and an honest-to-goodness cave à fromages, currently housing six different species of aged, mold-ripened, and semi-soft beauties. Some have been tremendously successful, others less so. Several have yet to be tested. As a doting parent, I perceive awesome potential in each and every one.
I would be remiss if I did not at this juncture acknowledge one final group of contributors to my current curd craze - the gals without whose sterling efforts my formaggio fabrication would be impossible. I refer, of course, to those doe-eyed Jerseys and Holsteins who work so tirelessly on my behalf, providing full-fat, creamy, completely and udderly (get it?) raw milk. Thank you, ladies of Keepsake and Klein Farms - I promise to do you proud!
(or, the Wit and Wisdom of Jim Wallace)
The Story of My Cave