I woke up on Thursday morning to a phone call telling me I should probably bring two pairs of clean clothes with me for the first day. Thankfully, I can say there has been no other time in my adult life when I was warned to be well-prepared to soil myself. To be fair, it's not as bad as it sounds. Generally, before starting a day in the cheese room at Cato Corner, you have to bring and change into a clean set of clothes to ensure everything stays as sanitary as possible. So I had already prepared for one changing. But I needed two pairs because Thursdays are "double" days, when both clean-up and cheesemaking take place in one day. Meaning, it would be an intensely action-packed first day on the job.
There was very little delay in jumping in when I arrived. I showed up, met Mark, the cheesemaker extraordinaire and man behind the Cato Corner cheese, introduced myself to the Thursday cheesemakers, and within ten minutes I was helping carry last night's wheels down to the brine (salt) bath in the aging cellar. Then came a morning full of cleaning up from last night's batch. I was told cheesemaking is mostly cleaning and sanitizing. It's true, but I don't mind. Cleaning allows time to have interesting conversations and operate a high pressured water hose-gun-thing. What's not to like?
After lunch, I helped make that day's batch of cheese. I assisted as cultures and rennet were added. After some time, the milk coagulated into a giant curd gel mass from the activity of the rennet. Then, I sort of helped cut. The cutter is a metal square frame (maybe about two by two feet) with cutting wires strung through the frame. When you push it through the curd, it cuts like an egg slicer. The vat holds a lot of milk and looks like an oval, metal hot tub. So the pressure and weight of so much curd left me struggling to push the cutter through the vat. I've never felt so weak and daunted by a food.
Once the curd is cut, I continued to rake, stir and keep the curd from clumping up. (Yes, the rake is about the size of a garden rake, except it's fancier, thicker and all-metal). I was told that I'd be starting out making their most difficult cheese. I was regaled with stories of people passing out in the cheeseroom from the heat and intensity of making this particular cheese. It didn't seem so bad, until the temperature of the curd started to inch towards 110, and eventually 112. Meanwhile, I was leaning over the hot vat, continuously stirring and mixing for upwards of 30-45 minutes as the vat reached the appropriate temperature and the room kept getting obscenely hotter. I started to feel the beads of sweat collect under my hair net. Oh yes, I know how attractive that sounds.
I didn't pass out. But I did have to take several breaks to cool off and wipe the sweat from my brow, lest an errant drip completely contaminate the vat or force them by FDA regulations to add "eau de Samia" to the ingredients disclosure.
Then came hooping the curd, which is essentially draining the whey and scooping the curd into molds or forms that look like wheels. The molds were then placed in the press to remove excess whey. Oh and the room was still ungodly hot. By the time things were wrapping up, it was well after 7pm. Apparently this was the longest day they had had in a while. Admittedly, I was tired. But we had a bit of a chuckle when I noted how foreign it seemed to me to have an employer be apologetic about keeping me past a certain hour. I was exhausted and I looked like a hot mess when I stopped at the grocery store on the way home. But when I left, and when I was actually thanked for a days work, it felt.....good.
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