adventures in cheesemaking

I made cheese tonight.

(And no, that's not a euphemism for some bodily function.)

A few weeks ago, I read a book that extolled the virtues of eating locally (Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) and one of the things the author talks about is making her own cheese with her daughters. It sounded like fun, so I ordered a cheesemaking kit, bought myself some milk and made some cheese.

Sort of.

First things first, the instructions said I should use a pot that wasn't aluminum or cast iron. I don't exactly have one of those. So I did the best I could, and the curds and whey (they really are called curds and whey) separated apart the way they were supposed to. That was promising, so I moved on to the step where you're supposed to put the curds in the microwave, drain off more whey, work it into a ball with your hands and then keep microwaving, draining, kneading and repeating until the cheese reaches 135 degrees.

That was my second mistake.

The directions suggest that when the cheese gets too hot to handle, you use rubber gloves. Well, I don't own rubber gloves. So when the cheese got too hot to handle, I got super-classy on its ass. I put on a winter glove and stuck it into a plastic bag and used that.

I worked the one big curd (and by "big" I mean "not much more than a fistful") until it was just sticking like glue to the plastic bag. I thought perhaps it was just too hot, and if I just let it cool off a little bit, it would be fine.

That was my third mistake.

By the end, my mistakes combined to make a really tasty ricotta-rella that wasn't exactly ricotta, but wasn't quite mozzarella either. But boy will it be tasty on toast!