Cheeeeese

Today was the highly anticipated cheese day. I feel like I've been groomed to love cheese by my cheese-loving mother, who always puts together the most beautiful cheese platters in the spur of the moment for any guest who happens to stop by. I mean, who doesn't love cheese? So I was very excited to learn more about cheese and to compare the different tastes in a cheese tasting. But first we had to make a few recipes: a meat sauce that we will use tomorrow in our pasta-making lesson, mushroom risotto and handmade ricotta cheese. First we put our meat sauce on the stove...a pretty simple recipe with ground meat, ground pork, pancetta, prosciutto and onion, carrot and celery. Then we made a mushroom risotto, carefully adding the chicken stock to cook out to a creamy consistency. And lastly, we made our own ricotta cheese, which was much simpler than I thought it would be. All you need is about 4 cups of whole milk and some acid...you can use vinegar, lemon juice or citric acid. You just bring the milk up to a boil very carefully, then add the acid, stir until curds form and then let it rest on a warm surface for about an hour. Then you carefully scoop the formed curds into a lined strainer with cheesecloth and hang it to release the moisture. It was pretty hilarious to see the balls of ricotta cheese hanging from everyone's station. Here's a picture of mine:



Tomorrow we'll use the ricotta to make cheese ravioli with tomato sauce. Yum :) After lunch, where we all tried to eat as little as possible to save room for the cheese we watched Chef Rogers carefully cut into pieces all morning, we began our cheese tasting. Chef Rogers and Chef Jeff sat at the front of the room, while we all sat at our stations with our trays of cheese carefully laid out. Here is a picture:



The tasting went from left to right, with the cheeses on the left from a cow, then a goat, then a sheep. On the top is cow's milk, goat's milk and was supposed to be sheep's milk, but unfortunately it's out of season right now. Below the milk is cow's yogurt, goat's milk yogurt and sheep's milk yogurt. And then below those are very soft cheeses, quesa fresca, goat cheese log and feta cheese. Below that are the hard, aged cheeses, from each separate animal. We went through each of the rows horizontally, tasting the differences between each of the cheese, milks and yogurt and going back so we could taste the similarities between the hard cheese and the milk. It was actually really interesting to taste that progression from milk to cheese. Before we tasted our strongest-tasting cheese, the Roquefort on the bottom right, Chef Rogers announced, "If you don't like this, then you don't like cheese." It's definitely an acquired taste. Much more strong than the goat cheese that we tasted earlier, which Chef Jeff deemed, "the gateway cheese," similar to marajuana being the "gateway drug", because like marajuana makes you want to try more drugs, goat cheese gets so many people hooked on cheese. A reasonable comparison. We are talking about cheese after all. And what can be more addictive than a good hunk of Brie?

After our cheese tasting, we watched two riveting DVDs on cheese. And when I say riveting I mean it was a DVD of happy looking cows licking the camera and a woman who was so obsessed with her goats and homemade goat cheese that she actually resembled one of them. The second DVD went into great depth about the history of Camembert cheese. Very exciting stuff.

Tomorrow we're making pasta...and lots of it! Ravioli, Lasagna and Egg noodles, all from scratch.