Blessed are the Cheesemakers

Say cheese!



Mr littlechrissy and I went to my Dad's home on Saturday to do a cheesemaking course. I adore cheese. I love it in all its forms. Soft, hard, stinky, mild, cooked, raw, on biscuits, in lasagne, shredded... whatever.

Get in my mouth cheese, because I want to eat you.



The lovely Lyndall from The Cheesemaking Workshop travelled up from just outside of Coffs Harbour to Alstonville to host our little lactose-laden soiree.

The occasion? My little sister's 30th, and a desire to eat as much dairy goodness as humanly possible. Give a human a cheese and they'll eat for a day, teach them how to make cheese and they'll be fat and happy forever.

I love hands-on. I love cooking. I love understanding where food comes from at its most basic level. No, we may not have milked a cow, but we created cheese from raw ingredients, and learned a lot about the processes involved in its creations, and an appreciation for its form.

During the course we made several different products: camembert, fetta, quark (cream cheese), ricotta (ridiculously easy), marscapone and greek yoghurt.

Camembert in hoops - only 8 weeks away from optimum nomnomnomnoming time

The camembert and fetta are both rennet cultured cheeses, meaning there was a lot of curd-cutting, temperature-sensitive mixing, white mould spore sprinkling, and hooping... and now the most difficult part. Waiting for it to mature. The camembert takes 4 weeks to mature and 8 weeks to become beautifully ripe, sloppy and delicious.

My sister Bron hoops the fetta.

Thankfully the ricotta could be turned instantly into Cannelloni, which we ate for lunch. Lyndall also created rissoni with a camembert sauce, and little squashes from her garden stuffed with cheese and other delicious tid-bits. Of course we also had a divine salad with homemade fetta.



We arrived home this afternoon and tucked in to our handmade rum and raisin, almond-encrusted cream cheese, along with a store-bought blue brie, which would ordinarily fill me with glee, but which has now filled me with a longing for the freshness of cheese made in my own kitchen.



Thank god we bought the cheesemaker starter kit.

My sister loves the cheese.

Now I just need to buy a vineyard...