Thirty Years at the Bench

I love cheese. I have eaten hundreds and hundreds of them over the years — which is exactly why it struck me as so strange, once I started writing about making my own food, that I had never made any.

I cure meat. I grind sausage. I boil sap down to syrup, I brew, I bake, I ferment, I can, I smoke. And somehow the food I probably love most, I had never once made myself. That didn’t get fixed until the early nineties.

The first one

Mozzarella. Milk, vinegar, and cheese salt — flake salt. That’s the whole ingredient list.

The milk was raw cow’s milk from the farm down the road, which mattered more than I understood at the time. No rennet, because I didn’t own any and wouldn’t have known where to get it.

It turned out amazing. It tasted so wonderful. I remember being faintly suspicious of how good it was for how little it had asked of me — I’d braced for a project and got a result in an afternoon.

It’s in the collection as Mozzarella Cheese (Traditional & Quick No-Rennet).

I want to flag something I only worked out while building this section, because it’s changed how I think about that first afternoon. I had always filed the vinegar version as the beginner’s shortcut — the thing you do before you get serious and order rennet. It isn’t. Acid coagulation and rennet coagulation are two different chemistries producing two different materials, and on the archaeological evidence the acid one is plausibly the older branch of the entire craft: the oldest cheesemaking artefact anyone has dated is a strainer, and a strainer is what you need for exactly the cheese I made. I wasn’t cutting a corner. I was doing the oldest version of it. See how cheese was invented.

Then it got easy, and then it got out of hand

Cottage cheese next. With vinegar first, then with lemon juice. Both amazing — and so easy. The taste was just so good. Those are both in the collection too: with vinegar and with lemon juice, because they genuinely are two different cheeses and worth keeping separate.

Then I went back to the mozzarella and swapped the plain flake salt for smoked flake salt.

Yum.

That’s a small change and it’s also, in hindsight, the exact moment the hobby got its hooks in me. Not because smoked salt is clever, but because it was the first time I changed one variable on purpose to see what would happen — and something good happened. Everything since has been a version of that.

Which is when I started reading. And buying. I’m now at thirty-odd books on cheese, nine of which I actually use; they disagree with each other in useful ways and I’ve written up the whole shelf and their arguments.

Where I’ve bought everything, and a thing I only just found out

All those great books had all those great recipes, and the recipes wanted rennet and equipment I didn’t have. So I went looking online and found what became my trusted source for years: New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. Their site has so much information and so many products it’s a reference in its own right.

I bought a couple of kits and their equipment bundle — a skimmer, a curd knife, a ladle, a temperature gauge, and some muslin. I ordered both vegetable and animal rennet, because the books disagreed about which and I wanted to find out for myself. Several moulds and baskets. A Dutch-style press. Then a “standard” cheese press, because obviously one press was not going to be enough. Wax, and a brush for it.

Well. Like everything else I do, I went crazy.

Here’s what I didn’t know until this week. New England Cheesemaking Supply Company is owned and run by Ricki Carroll — who wrote Home Cheese Making, the first cheese book I’d tell anybody to buy, the one with 400,000 copies in print. She’s been teaching this since 1980, the company has been shipping since 1978, and the American Cheese Society gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award. They call her the Cheese Queen.

I bought the book. Separately, and later, I found the company. I have spent the better part of thirty years ordering rennet from my own favourite author and never made the connection. That tells you something about how small and how personal this craft still is: the person who wrote the primer is the person who ships you the cultures.

And then I needed somewhere to put it all

Here’s the thing about buying the equipment to make every cheese in nine books: most of those cheeses need to be aged, and I had nowhere to age them. A refrigerator is too cold and far too dry. Cheese wants roughly cellar conditions — cool, and humid — and a modern fridge is engineered to be the opposite of humid.

So I bought a used refrigerator and rebuilt it.

First a controller, so it holds the temperature I want instead of the temperature a fridge wants. Then a humidifier, and humidity control wired in alongside the temperature control, because dry air is what cracks a rind and ruins a wheel.

Then the part I’m proudest of. Aging cheese has to be turned — regularly, for weeks or months, so moisture distributes evenly and the wheel doesn’t slump or grow unevenly. Which means opening the door constantly, and every time you open the door you dump your humidity and your temperature onto the basement floor.

So I put motors inside it and made the cheeses turn themselves. Slowly, on their own, without the door ever opening.

I’ve gone looking, and I can’t find anybody who’s published a home cheese cave that turns its own wheels. Plenty of converted fridges — the controller-and-humidifier build is well documented. Not the motors. That page is coming, and it’s the one thing in this whole section that might be genuinely new.

Why bother, when the shops are full of it

This is the honest question, and cheese gets a different answer from everything else I make.

With most things, part of why I make my own is that what you can buy is a shadow of the real thing. Supermarket bread, supermarket sausage, pancake syrup that has never been near a maple tree. Making it yourself isn’t just satisfying, it’s better.

That argument doesn’t work for cheese, and I’m not going to pretend it does. Cheese is readily available nearly everywhere and there are some very, very good ones. I am not going to out-Comté the Jura, or beat a proper Stilton, or improve on a two-year Parmigiano. People have been perfecting these for centuries in places with the right animals, the right grass and the right caves, and I have a rebuilt refrigerator in Michigan.

So it isn’t about beating them. It’s that cheese lets me experiment and tweak more than anything else in my kitchen. Four ingredients and a dial with a hundred positions: change the cut, the cook, the press, the salt, the humidity, the months, and the same gallon of milk becomes a different cheese. Smoked salt instead of plain. A wetter curd. Three more weeks. There’s no end to it.

And best of all, I get to say: hey, I made that.

I love it.

Start with what cheese actually is, get the shape of it from the family tree, or read the books.