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.

Everyone knows that yogurt is good for you. Like many foods that have been
around for hundreds of years, we don’t know how it was invented, but people say
that it’s one of those things that was probably invented accidentally when
someone left some milk sitting around for too long and was hungry enough to
try and eat it. Some people claim that it can help you lose weight, live longer,
avoid cancer and even have better breath. I don’t eat foods just because they’re
good for me, I try to eat a variety of foods that taste good and that are
processed as little as possible. Yogurt is one of them. I like to eat yogurt
for breakfast, I like to make things using yogurt. Sean Connery apparently
likes yogurt.
Some cats
even like yogurt (but some don’t).
If you don’t like yogurt, you might as well just stop reading this post right
now and go read about
no-knead bread
instead, because everyone needs to make some.

What I don’t like is how difficult it is to find plain non-fat or low-fat yogurt that doesn’t have preservatives or gelatin added to it. I also don’t like how expensive yogurt can be. The Greek-style thick yogurt that I love to cook with costs more than two dollars for seven ounces. For that price, you’d think they could at least give you a whole cup. I like the yogurt with the fruit on the bottom. My husband stirs it all up together, but I think he’s missing the point. The idea with fruit on the bottom is to stir only a little bit of the fruit goo in and to save some of it to eat by itself. Otherwise, you can just buy yogurt that already has all of the fruity stuff mixed in with it, right? What is that fruity goo stuff anyway? Most likely it’s fruit mixed with gelatin — I just checked, it does have gelatin and also high fructose corn syrup and some other things I don’t know if I want to be eating. Some fresh fruit or homemade jam, some honey and walnuts are much better, especially when (not all the way) mixed into some homemade yogurt.

The first time I ever made yogurt it was following the directions of my ex, who is from the Balkans. He told me to boil some milk, add in some yogurt, put the yogurt in jars, wrap them in a blanket and put the whole thing by the radiator overnight. This actually works, most of the time. The fact that sometimes the stuff didn’t turn into yogurt was fine with me (he would drink it, yuck), but I was always afraid it was going to make us sick. So one day, this person who told me how to make yogurt rather than make it himself ate the last one. The one I was saving to make the next batch with. I went on strike and stopped making yogurt for a long time.

Last year, I decided it was high time for the great yogurt making strike to be over. I was still afraid of making myself sick, so I started looking around for options. I do not like those yogurt making contraptions. I refuse to buy kitchen gadgets that can only be used for one thing (my ice cream maker also makes sorbet, does yours?). Besides, the yogurt makers on the market only produce six to eight little containers of yogurt. I’m sorry, if we want yogurt for breakfast for a whole week, I need at least 14 containers of yogurt, preferably more, because if there’s yogurt in the fridge, my husband will eat it and not just for breakfast. So, the decision not to buy one of those yogurt machines was an easy one, and I decided to poke around on the internet for information on homemade methods of yogurt making that do not involve buying any specialized equipment, that would produce reliable results and calm my fear of poisoning myself, my husband or my friends.

I found one website that explained it all, that gave me the science of yogurt that even Harold McGee doesn’t talk about (and that also inspired last year’s ricotta adventure). Professor David B. Fankhauser of Claremont College created Yogurt Making Illustrated using fresh goat’s milk, I am jealous. Erik is now planning to buy me a goat. My Aunt Millie once asked my Uncle Dick to buy her a garbage disposal. On Christmas morning, he told her to look under the sink and she was delighted to run into the kitchen and open the cupboard to find her shiny new…baby goat? That’s right, if Erik buys me a goat, it wouldn’t be the first time in my family that a husband shows his love for his wife by purchasing a cute little kid. The only thing is, we don’t have twenty acres like my aunt and uncle had. Maybe we could just find a source for fresh goat milk? In the meantime, cow’s milk works fine.

Ingredients for this should be fresh. I make yogurt with hormone-free milk from a local dairy that I use the same day I buy it. The website Where Can I Find Real Milk is a great place to look for a dairy near you. I use some yogurt from a leftover batch if I have some, or I use yogurt from the store, usually Dannon plain or Greek style yogurt. You can use any brand of plain yogurt that lists only milk with active yogurt cultures as its ingredient. For incubating the yogurt, I use a large cooler outfitted with a heating pad on the bottom (cord snaked out the side and plugged in), a trivet on top of the heating pad and a tray on top of the trivet. These last two items ensure that the yogurt is not sitting directly on the heat source. Finally, I use a probe thermometer to make sure that the temperature inside the cooler is above 98 degrees and below 130 degrees at all times. Using this method, the yogurt incubates in about 10 hours. If you don’t have this equipment, there are several other ways of incubating the yogurt. Some professors at the University of Missouri describe some of them here. Some yogurt recipes also include 1/3 or 1/2 cup dry milk powder as an ingredient to make the yogurt thicker. I have so far wanted to make yogurt using just milk and yogurt. If I want my yogurt thicker, I drain out some of the liquid.

Homemade Yogurt

• 1 gallon milk, you can use whole milk, 2%, 1% or skim
• 1/2 cup yogurt with live cultures and no additives
• Optional: sugar, jam or honey

Sterilize the jars and lids that you will use for the yogurt. I use 8 oz. jelly jars and fill them not quite full so we can put jam or honey on top. I generally use 16 jars and put the rest in a larger container to strain and thicken to use for tzatziki or lebneh. If you want to create your own fruit on the bottom style yogurt, put in a tablespoon or so of jam or honey in the jars now.

Place a heating pad in a large cooler and put a trivet or some empty cans on top of the heating pad and put a tray on top of that so that the jars of yogurt won’t sit directly on the heating pad (the bottom of the yogurt will be overcooked and not smooth otherwise). Put the probe of a cooking thermometer inside the cooler and put the rest of it on top of the cooler. Heat the inside of the cooler to at least 98 degrees and below 130 degrees. While making the yogurt, keep the inside of the cooler above 98 degrees and below 130 degrees. Under 98 degrees, the yogurt won’t thicken, above 130 degrees and you’ll kill the bacteria that cause the milk to turn into yogurt.

Fill your sink half full with cold water and a little ice. Pour the milk into a large pot with a thick bottom. If you want your yogurt sweet, add the sugar now. 1/4 cup is probably enough. Heat the milk to 190 degrees and hold it at about that temperature for ten minutes, but don’t let it boil. Place the pot of milk in the ice bath in the sink and cool it down to 125 degrees. This happens quite quickly; watch it to make sure it doesn’t get much colder than that. Mix one cup of the cooled milk with the yogurt in a small bowl and pour this mixture into the pot of cooled milk. Use a whisk to combine the yogurt mixture and the milk, making sure it is well blended. Ladle the inoculated milk into sterilized jars. Place the jars on the tray in the cooler and close the lid. After about 6 hours, check one of the jars to see if the yogurt has thickened, if not, check again every half hour until it is ready. Once the yogurt is thickened, put it right away into the refrigerator. Cooling it right away stops the yogurt from being too acidic.

I hate to waste food. I almost always finish everything on my plate (my brother, Paul, calls it plate-clearing syndrome) and I try to turn leftovers into things that we really want to eat. Last weekend, our friend and former colleague, Ames, and his partner, Yumiko, came up from the city to see us and brought along their two year-old son, Yugo. They also brought a half gallon of organic milk for Yugo’s bottle, but he didn’t drink much of it. He was mostly busy running around and going up and down the stairs and being adorable. Because we are a strictly skim milk family, I looked at the carton of milk on Sunday afternoon and wondered what I could cook to use it up. I’d been wanting to try making cheese, so I decided to find a recipe for ricotta. Normally ricotta is made from the whey that is leftover from making other kinds of cheese, like mozzarella, so it’s not technically a cheese, but a bi-product of cheese making, an idea that I love because it uses up something that would otherwise be wasted. You add an acidic liquid like lemon or vinegar and simmer it until the stuff starts to coagulate. This is the second time it’s been cooked, hence the name ricotta, which means ‘cooked again’ in Italian. You don’t need to have whey to make ricotta; you can just use milk, so that’s what I did. We’re going to eat some of it with honey and walnuts or maybe the strawberry jam we made this summer and the rest of it will go into stuffed shells with some parmesan and spinach and be topped with tomato sauce and mozzarella.

Ricotta

• 1/2 gallon milk
• 3 Tbs lemon juice
• 1 tsp salt

Put milk, lemon juice and salt in a pot, turn heat to medium and heat the mixture to 195 degrees. Put the lid on the pot and let it sit for about 20 minutes. Line a colander with several layers of cheese cloth and ladle in the curd. Let the mixture drain for about two hours and then gather up the ends of the cheese cloth and tie them around a wooden spoon or some other long straight utensil (I used a metal skewer). Hang the ricotta over a pot and place the pot in the refrigerator for one or two days. Empty the liquid from the bottom of the pot from time to time. Use the ricotta within a week or freeze it for up to six months.