Curd Nerd Boot Camp

I remember the first time I really started completely unsupervised home-cheesemaking. I'd been making cheese with real cheesemakers for several months, but doing it on my own without real equipment or trusted recipes was the darkest of comedies. I remember going through gallons of failed batches at a time, terrifying the little old ladies at the grocery store with my unreasonably sized milk purchases. Is she making poisonous milk meth or dairy drank to sell to school children?

Because of all those failures, experiments, and uncertainty as to whether I would have cheese or swill at the end of the day, I have had an irrational fear of teaching cheesemaking classes. I finally had to face that fear a couple of weeks ago at my first cheesemaking class at the Philip Mahl Memorial Kitchen in Del Rio.

The PMMK is housed in what's known as the Firehouse, an old, uh, firehouse, which has been converted into an art gallery with a demo kitchen in the back. It's like a piece of Brooklyn took a crap right in downtown Del Rio. In a good way. The Firehouse and PMMK offer amazing classes, including pottery, photography, ballet, sushi-making, and wine tastings. They'd never had a true home-cheesemaking class before, which is where I inserted myself in an effort to be a productive citizen. For the Spring and Summer classes I was scheduled to teach a cheesemaking series: three classes that I could structure however I wanted. My plan was to gradually increase in difficulty from class to class, while leaving myself some options to teach in a future series...if I was any good at this type of thing.

With only two weeks of limited advertising in a small town, I fully expected maybe two students at most to enroll. So, I was completely terrified when I found out that 9 people were taking the class. Would the cheese turn out in front of all those people. Of course it would. My first class was fresh acid-set cheeses (ricotta and paneer) and butter, which are the easiest dairy products to make at home and nearly impossible to screw up. But my mind wouldn't let me forget all that wasted milk from the days of yore.

If cooking is art and baking is science, then cheese is baking's fraternal twin. I learned early in my cheesemaking training that cheese is deeply rooted in science.

Well, my very initial cheese training would be best be classified as binge eating dairy. From there, I became more nuanced by actually reading the labels and names of what I was eating. Fast forward to formal vocational training, which I received in the cheesemaking room and behind the cheese counter. Somewhere in between gorging and working, I took classes to learn where cheese came from at the University of Vermont's cheese program (VIAC). That curriculum was created by a doctor of food and dairy science.  Everyone there knew oodles about making and eating cheese, but most of the instructors were first and foremost, scientists.

So, from the very beginning I knew the various components of a casein micelle and I knew the gospel of the pH reading. Some of it was completely lost on me until I faced an actual cheese vat, but I started off intrigued by the details of why milk does what it does on its journey to cheese.

Most home cheesemaking classes will give you the basic information: what is a culture, what is rennet, here is a basic recipe and here's how you stretch pre-made mozzarella curds. For the basic hobbyist cheesemaker who isn't geeked out on science that's probably just fine. But I'm of the opinion that on a bad cheesemaking day, even the hobbyist wants to (and needs to) know why their curd never formed and they just poured several gallons of failed batches down the drain. The only way to know that is the science behind why your milk is screwing with you.

I divided the science into three main categories, milk composition, basic cheesemaking steps, and basic
cheesemaking ingredients. While I was lecturing I had them pass around and shake a jar full of heavy cream that would eventually (after enough shaking) turn into butter. It offered a distraction from my voice and our first lesson for the day. Then we made butter the easy way (with a hand mixer), leading to our true cheesemaking.

Cutting paneer samples

I divided the class into two groups: one made ricotta with vinegar and the other made ricotta with lemon juice. While they were working over their pots, I talked about making ricotta with buttermilk and with the microwave shortcut, both of which I think are unreliable and open up a world of wasted milk. After we strained the two batches of ricotta and compared the differences, we made one more batch with vinegar to press into paneer.

I tried to keep all science information quarantined to nuggets specifically related to the category of fresh acid-coagulated cheeses we were making. For instance, after the broad overview, we skipped entirely over starter cultures and rennet in favor of more detail on proteins and fat, the main players in heat and acid-precipitated cheeses like whole milk ricotta.

The students were wonderful and very interested in the science, or at the very least indulged my belief that the science was important. All the cheeses turned out. Best of all, I had fun. I really enjoyed teaching the variations on each recipe and constantly reminding them that cheesemaking is a big science experiment that allows them to figure out for themselves which modifications and techniques will actually work for them.

As the series continues, we'll build on the science and I'll indoctrinate my students with all the necessary curd nerdiness, thereby totally validating my need to know exactly how everything works.