Last Sunday, I drove to the Berkshires in a horrible snow storm. I did it for cheese. Google told me that Ashfield, Massachusetts, where I needed to go, was a mere 117 miles from my house. Driving in what I hope was the last nasty weather of the season it took me more than 3 hours. There were a couple of times when the mix of rain and snow was turning to sleet and freezing on the road and I thought I wasn’t going to make it. I almost gave up and turned back, I didn’t think I could make it, but I kept going, creeping slowly along, tempted by the cheese. You see, I had signed myself up for Cheesemaking 101 at the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. There was no way I was going to miss it. As I climbed up the last of the very steep hills, I found myself repeating, I think I can I think I can I think I can…

When I arrived, I was about an hour late and it took me a few minutes to catch my breath and recover from the white knuckle car ride. More than 20 people were seated around three big tables in the kitchen area of a large and colorful Queen Anne house. Ricki Carrol, my cheese siren, was already finished showing the class how to make queso blanco and a whole milk ricotta. I was warmly welcomed and got straight to work with my classmates on the recipe for farmhouse cheddar that we would finish by day’s end. We also watched and helped out as Ricki demonstrated how to make mascarpone, fromage blanc, mozzarella and true ricotta using the whey from the cheddar. Ricki’s assistant Jamie was also there to help out and make sure we avoided disasters.

This Ricki has a mass of curly hair and a quick laugh. She started the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company in 1978 and has been converting people ever since. According to her website, she is also an artist, an activist, a mother, a teacher, a writer and party organizer. They call her the cheese queen. Her popular book, Cheese Making Made Easy has recently been updated, expanded and re-issued with the new title, Home Cheese Making, offers great instructions for 75 different kinds of cheese and 25 other dairy products. After seeing the book, I wanted to see her in action. That’s how I found myself on a snowy Sunday in Ricki’s kitchen as she talked about how you need to take time to smell the cheese, all the while measuring, stirring, explaining, showing, correcting, watching. Slow food is fast and fun at Ricki’s house.

Cheese is not as mysterious as it seems. You take milk and encourage good, tasty bacteria to grow in it while making sure that you don’t get too much bad bacteria in there to spoil the party. For many fresh cheeses, like ricotta, you just add citric acid or vinegar for coagulation, heat the milk until you have curds and whey, then drain it. Ricki let me know that my previous attempt at ricotta was actually paneer, because I made it with lemon juice, so now I’m thinking I need to correct that one. For other cheeses, you also add a starter culture, the good bacteria. Adding rennet causes coagulation, a necessary addition for more solid cheeses. This is something that people have been doing for thousands of years all over the world.

But if you can buy it in the store so easily, why would people want to make cheese at home? That’s a little like asking why make a cake when you can buy one already made. Sometimes you want a better tasting, homemade version without all the nasty chemicals and trans fats hidden in the grocery store versions. Maybe you just don’t want to eat a cake with bright blue frosting. Maybe you don’t want bright orange cheddar either. The people who signed up for the class all had very different reasons for being there. One guy told me that his wife was a chef and they have all these foodie friends. He didn’t know how to cook and was happy that his wife and their friends made delicious things to eat. But he didn’t want to feel left out, so he specialized in bread. This class was his attempt to branch out. A woman from an Italian American family told a story of a cookbook she wrote with her nana’s recipes, her recent quest to the old country to meet long lost family and her newfound desire to revive culinary traditions. Another woman, a pretty petite blond, was there because she has a farm in Connecticut where she’s been offering CSA subscriptions and bringing her produce to markets. She just acquired more land because the neighboring dairy farmers were retiring and she’s decided to continue running it as a dairy farm and wants to make cheese from the milk. Impressive. There were a lot of us talking about The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Ricki had this one figured out thirty years ago and seems amused that so many people are just getting it.

At around 2 p.m., we had a break for lunch, a feast of salads, roasted vegetables, a stir-fry made with the queso blanco, cubed and treated like tofu, and of course, dozens of different kinds of cheese. All delicious, all local. I slipped off to the bathroom and saw evidence of Ricki’s artistic soul. Playfully decorated in the style of a rococo boudoir, this ‘petit coin’ has a gold finished shell-shaped sink, clouds and cherubs fill the walls. Quotes from Alice in Wonderland in lacy gold letters popped out at me:

“There’s no use trying,” she said: “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

After lunch, we took the cheddar out of its press and flipped it over. The press removes the last of the whey and gives the cheese its shape. You have to turn it several times in the early stages so that the moisture level will be even throughout the cheese. At the end of the day, we took it out of the mold and marveled at this impossible thing. Three gallons of white liquid transformed into a solid pale yellow cylinder. After the first couple of days, the cheese will only need to be turned once a week. It will get more yellow as it ages. It’s ready to eat after five or six weeks, but would be really good after a longer aging. Have you seen cheddarvision? Check out the link to see cheddar maturing. You can also see a youtube time lapse version of the first three months. Will I ever be able to make a cheese on my own like that one? Seeing is believing.