Cheese Making Class with Sue

Making cheese is SOOOOO EASY! Sue taught us how to make cheese while holding a baby in one hand. I imagine that it is even easier with two hands.


We learned how to make two different kinds of cheeses: Soft Cheese and Farmer Cheese. Soft Cheese requires a culture, so it needs to incubate for 12-24 hours. You also need some rennet, which is "a natural complex of enzymes produced in any mammalian stomach to digest the mother's milk" Back in the day, ancient people discovered cheese because they used to store milk in the stomach of cows. (This is not a joke.) So one day, the cheese turned into curd and whey (because of the rennet from the stomach it was sitting in).
Now a days, an ordinary bowl will do just fine.


Farmer cheese is my favorite because it takes only 15 minutes! (farmers don't have time to make cheese!) You just add vinegar to steaming milk. And then eat it, of course. This cheese is a bit more bland, but you can add some rosemary, salt and other spices to give it a punch. The longer a cheese ferments the sharper it tastes. Sue is going to wait until her baby is grown up to cultivate cheeses that ferment over several weeks and need daily attention.
But then again, she can always hire a cheese-sitter!

Here are some great resources on cheese making:
Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz
www.cheesemaking.com (to order rennet--unless you want to remove it from the cow yourself.) *Actually, they make vegetable-based rennet now!


-Mariel