No more cheese. Please sweet Lord no more cheese! I’m seeing it everywhere and it is always accompanied by the music from “Psycho,” that jarring crescendo of violin strings. A billboard near the highway, a sign in a McDonald’s window, in my own home for goodness sake! Since class last night, I can’t seem to get away from cheese. I’ve only overdosed on a handful of things in my life (Oreos, “Sex and the City” reruns and IKEA) but last night was the first time I have ever OD’d on cheese. Too much of a good thing usually makes it a great thing, but too much cheese just leaves you feeling bloated, nauseous and smelling like farm. I was proud of myself, though - I usually cannot come within two feet of blue cheese for fear of the mold smell burning a hole through my nose, but last night I made the conscious decision to try many new things from many new animal teats, and it did not fail me. Someone made the inevitable, “I have nipples, can you milk me?” “Meet the Parents” reference, and that pretty much made my day.
Our tasting schedule was split into three categories: cow, goat and sheep; within each of the animals we tasted the full progression, from fresh milk to very aged cheeses. The one item that was missing was sheep’s milk, as it is apparently incredibly hard to find this time of year and was unavailable. It was interesting to me that although each of the products was different, each animal tasted the same. For example, when tasting the cow milk and cow yogurt, then the goat milk and goat yogurt, it is easy to pick out the taste that is cow and the taste that is goat. Same with the sheep, so by the time we got to the end of the tasting it was pretty obvious from which animal the cheese came, depending on its basic foundation taste.
We can all say with some certainty that we like milk, yogurt and cheddar, as those are the most common milk products in the U.S. Unaltered yogurt, however, is much different and is much, much more bitter and sour than Dannon or Yoplait. We also had something called a goat log, fromage blanc (cow) and feta (sheep) before moving onto the serious cheeses. The list sounds like role call at a meeting of the Forgotten European Villages meeting: Brillat-Savarin, Chabichou, Ossau Iraty, Monte Enebro, La Serena, Parmigiano Reggiano, Tomme du Berger and Roquefort. Of the 18 different milk derivatives, I truly enjoyed, and would probably purchase, about 6 of them. The others were, for lack of a better phrase, hard to swallow. I will never, ever be able to eat anything with mold on it, no matter how cultured or pasteurized or controlled it is, but I was very glad I ventured out of my comfort zone to try several new things.
We also made cheese! No, there were no goats or sheep brought in to produce fresh milk (that would be hilarious), and we did not stand for hours over a bucket churning the curds; it was a little more scientific than that. To make ricotta, we heated milk, citric acid and sea salt over very low heat until the curds separated from the whey. We then strained it into cheesecloth, wrapped it up and let it sit. We’ll use that ricotta for our ravioli on Friday (!!!). We also spun mozzarella curds with boiling water to form them into balls and shapes, which was very therapeutic. I brought home several balls of fresh mozzarella, which Steve combined with tomatoes, herbs and a vinaigrette to make a yummy caprese salad for dinner last night. Since my project at the bank ended on Wednesday, we were fortunate enough to eat two meals together yesterday, both outside! There’s nothing better than a picnic in the park with your sweetheart, times two!
Although the weather was amazing, I spent all day with a gurgling stomach, a lactose headache and the strange feeling that my intestines were solidifying. I think I even had a nightmare I was drowning in a field of sheep manure. My palate might not be sophisticated, but at least I got to spit out some incredibly expensive cheese.
Gotta love cheese, from cheeze whiz to mozzarella
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