Say Cheese

I've been planning for awhile to turn my experimentation to cheese. After months of procrastination and reading a lot of recipes and websites I finally ordered some cultures and molds a couple of weeks ago.

The thing about cheese, for the good ones we're most familiar with, i.e. Brie, Parmesan, Blue, English Cheddar, etc., it takes from 2-14 months for the cheese to age and ripen. Being relatively impatient to get this going, I decided to try a couple of soft cheeses first since they don't require a cheese press and the aging time is lot less. The first one I made is robiola from raw cow's milk (pictured above). We ate one wheel last Friday and three wheels are still aging in the "cheese cave", aka a mini fridge given to me by a good friend (thx AG!). For lack of a better description it's quite cheesy (clearly my cheese vocabulary needs some work) but with a good tangy flavor that I think will age well over the next month or so.

Next up was chèvre made with raw goat milk from our CSA. This one was easy. It didn't need to age so we ate a good portion of it the next day. If speed of consumption is an indication of it's taste, it went fast.

The recipes for both the robiola and the chèvre can be found here at the appropriately named cheesemaking.com.

Coming up…homemade Mozzarella this Friday for pizza.

Update: Although the fresh robiola was good, I had to toss the 30-day old aged robiola. It was too salty and although I removed all of the mold it still had a moldy flavor to it. C'est la vie.