Guest Post: Fresh Meat in the Cheese Room

A week ago my boyfriend, Tad, came to hang out while I worked on a Saturday afternoon and he ended up checking out life in the cheese room. He even came back the next day to help me clean up! (Mostly because he wanted to ensure I finished early enough to watch the World Cup finals with him.) Having someone so close to me come do what I do on a daily basis not only helped me realize how far I've come, but also made what I'm doing feel real. As if now I have witness to say, no really this crazy idea totally doesn't suck! So check it out, cheese rules! 

I’ll start with the obvious: the good folks at Cato Corner make some shockingly good cheese.  No joke.  I already knew I liked the cheese, but I was having a fair amount of trouble conceptualizing just what the people down on the farm do to create such a wildly good product.  Last week, to assist in my edification, and because I think she was tired of having me lay around her house eating a significant dent into her ice cream stockpile while she was at work, Samia offered to let me assist with the cheesemaking for a day.

Before Samia began enlightening me about the process, I didn’t know what cheesemaking entailed at all.  I pictured it to be some sort of hazy amalgamation of various stereotypes I held about artisans.  In most of my inchoate cheese-centric daydreams, these guys worked in a dimly lit wooden room in a medieval workshop.  A guy playing a lute in period costume would sometimes creep into the scene.  And there was an old-school potter’s kick wheel involved in the process.  I think this was used to spin the cheese into wheels, but I’m not sure.  I just know it was somehow needed.

Turns out, that’s not exactly how it works.  The cheese room is just an exceptionally clean, undecorated room filled with big, uber-sterile cheesemaking equipment.  As I enter it to work, I immediately panic.  I’ve been in this room before, and Samia’s told me what all of this stuff does, but I’m nonetheless intimidated by it now.  I become deeply concerned that I’m somehow going to break something.  I decide to stand very, very still.  It works as hoped – I touch nothing, and nothing falls apart.  However, I look ridiculous.  Others are beginning their cheesemaking duties and I’m standing stock-still, arms frozen by my side, immobile.  I tell myself I probably appear impressive — a focused, unyielding sentry protecting the cheese room against bacterial interlopers.  Due to my awkward, uncertain glances around the room, I look more like a fidgety ten-year-old failing in his audition for a role as a Buckingham Palace guard in a school play.  I gather myself.  Luckily for me, this whole scene lasts about five seconds.  I don’t think anyone notices.  I get to work following orders.

My first big task is to help stir up milk in the milk vat to separate the curds from the whey.  As Samia’s explained before, the milk vat basically looks like a really big bathtub.  If they had cheese vats like this in President Taft’s time, I bet he’d have installed one in the White House, as no big-and-tall gentleman could possibly get stuck in this thing.  This vat’s filled with about two President Tafts worth of hot milk.  My job during this hour, along with the other folks in the cheese room, is to dunk my arms (thoroughly sterilized, of course) in up to my elbows and break the curd up so that we get nice, small, uniform chunks.  This I do with vigor and pleasure.  In all likelihood, I’ll never have the chance to go swimming in a pool of nacho cheese, and I’ll never get to lounge in a Jacuzzi full of milk shake.  I recognize that this stirring duty is as close as I’ll ever get, so I dig in.  The hour passes quickly, and even though I’m full-on sweaty by the end, I’m a bit sad when the task ends.  It’s good fun.

Next came the hooping, which involves dipping into the vat, in which the curd has been separated from the whey, and scooping out as much curd as you can.   Then you drop it into the circular metal molds that give the cheese wheel its shape.  Hooping’s great because it’s like really, really easy fishing.  When I fish, I usually catch nothing and just offend the lake and its inhabitants by upsetting their tranquility for the day.  But I like trying.  So you can imagine my pleasure at hooping.  It’s a fishing-type activity, and the beauty of it is that you can’t fail.  There’s a ton of curd in there, so with every scoop, you catch a lot.  I was pretty pleased.

During the remaining cheesemaking tasks, I mostly stood around basking in the hooping afterglow while the other folks did the work.  With the cheesemaking finished, we cleaned.  What we didn’t clean that day, we went back and cleaned the next.  We cleaned with a vigor that I’ve previously shown only when, flat broke and moving out of my apartment in college in the hopes that I might get my deposit back.  Those jerks just kept my money anyway.  But the folks at the farm were much nicer and seemed to appreciate my efforts to help, even if I was a bit inept in most of my chores.

I had a great time all day long.  I found out that cheesemaking isn’t for the languid.  It’s full-on, hard-ass work that requires precision and meticulousness and a willingness to put in more bona fide physical labor than has ever been required of me as a sapless lawyer.  Next time you see a gaggle of cheesemakers around town – as I’m sure you frequently do – be sure to thank them.  They’ve been toiling away to provide you with a product that will jazz up any day and will cause people to squeal with delight when shared at parties, dinners, beer pong tournaments, etc.  For this they should be celebrated.  Turns out it takes a lot of effort to make something so divine.

by Tad Duree