Reclaiming the Kitchen
(Page 3 of 8)
June/July 2008
By Barbara Kingsolver
OK, I know. You were with me right up to that last one. I’m not sure why, since it takes less time to make a pound of mozzarella than to bake a cobbler, but most people find the idea of making cheese at home to be preposterous.
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What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It’s too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. What would it take to convince us that an hour spent rendering up cheese in our kitchens could be worth the trouble? A motivational speaker, a pal, an artisan — a Cheese Queen, maybe?
Yes, all of the above, and her name is Ricki Carroll. Since 1978, when she founded New England Cheesemaking Supply and began holding workshops in her kitchen, she has taught more than 7,000 people how to make cheese. That’s face to face, not counting those of us who worked our way through her first book, Cheesemaking Made Easy, which has sold over 100,000 copies.
When I went to see Ricki, it was equal parts admiration and curiosity. If my family is into reconnecting with the processes that bring us food, if we’ve taken it upon ourselves to be a bit evangelical about this, we have a lot to learn from Ricki Carroll.
Ricki invited our family to a workshop for beginning cheese makers after hearing of our interest in artisanal foods. When we introduced ourselves to the other workshoppers, I was already taking notes, not on cheese making, but on who in the heck comes here and does this?
Anybody. For several men it was an extremely original Father’s Day gift. A chef hoped to broaden her culinary range; mothers were after healthy, more local diets for their families. Martha, from Texas, owns water buffalo and dreams of a great mozzarella. (Their names are Betsy and Beau; she passed around photos.) Maybe we were all a little nuts, but being there made us feel like pilgrims of a secret order. We had turned our backs on our nation’s golden calf of cellophane-wrapped Cheese Product Singles. Our common wish was to understand a food we cared about, and take back one more measure of control over our own care and feeding.
We examined the stainless steel bowls, thermometers and culture packets assembled before us while Ricki began to talk us into her world. Cheese is a simple idea: a way to store milk, which goes bad quickly without refrigeration but keeps indefinitely — improves, even — in the form of cheese. From humble beginnings it has become a global fascination. “All over the world, without scientific instruments, people make cheeses the way their grandparents did.” In the Republic of Georgia, she told us, she watched cheese makers stir their curd with a twig and then swaddle the warm pot (in lieu of monitoring it with a thermometer) in a sweater, a baby blanket and a cape. Forging ahead, Ricki announced we were making queso blanco, ricotta, mascarpone, mozzarella and farmhouse cheddar. Yes, us, right here, today. We looked on in utter doubt as she led us into our first cheese, explaining that we’d make all this with ordinary milk from the grocery. Raw milk from a farm is wonderful to work with, unhomogenized is great, but any milk will do, so long as it’s not labeled “ultra-pasteurized.” Ultra-high-temperature pasteurization, Ricki explained, denatures proteins and destroys the curd.
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