A weekend making cheese

Every October, our school stops classes for a week. We devote the time to special projects–some students are organizing a march against human trafficking in our nearby city of Førde; some are helping out on a local farm; others are job-shadowing in Bergen; a few groups are on three-day hikes in the mountains. My husband and I, along with a group of eight students, are busy here on campus making cheese. Because of scheduling conflicts we started early–this weekend–and so in the time when I would normally have written this blog post, I was down in the student kitchen, coagulating great tubs of milk.

With the addition of a starter culture, the milk begins to acidify. That acid, plus heat and the coagulating enzyme rennet, causes the milk to separate. Fat and protein form curds; water and lactose are left in the greenish whey.

My sister got me into cheesemaking many years ago when, at Christmas, Ricki Carroll’s Home Cheese Making entered my life. I started with simpler, soft cheeses (lemon cheese, mascarpone, ricotta), then got ambitious, trying my hand at camembert, mozzarella, and an incredible hard Italian cheese called Montasio.

We drain the curds into a cloth–for a soft cheese, we hang the cloth to drip for a few hours; for a hard cheese, as shown here, we press it with 20-30 pounds of pressure to extract as much whey as possible.

There’s something incredible about seeing the solid curds emerge out of the milk. Although it’s common knowledge that cheese is made from milk, the two are so visibly different, and the separation of curds and whey so abrupt when you see it, that the process feels like alchemy. The students have been taking a lot of photographs of pots of milk.

This is halloumi. After pressing, the halloumi gets cooked in its own whey–this cooking, plus a subsequent brining process, is what gives halloumi its characteristic squeaky texture and its high melting point, which enables the cheese to be grilled or pan-fried. Yum.

We haven’t been doing as much cheesemaking during the last few years. Doing this project with students, though, is re-energizing us. I appreciate the slow, deliberate process. I appreciate knowing how food is made, because it makes me feel connected to the real world in a way that the commercial food ecosystem often obscures. I think doing slow food projects like this is one way to be more conscious of historical food traditions, and one way to be thankful to the planet.

Before this weekend’s launch into cheese, it was a heavy academic push to meet the deadline for October grades, which some students need for university applications. I’ve been sneaking in time outside when I can–sun or rain. We’re into the heart of fall now, and leaves are changing. The autumn colors are subtler here in Norway than my home in Minnesota. Here, the birches are a brilliant yellow, but the conifers stay green. The effect is that the mountainside seems to have become muted, a shift in color that itself is only fully visible in the places where the birches predominate (as in the photograph below). It is getting cooler, although we haven’t yet had frost.

I’ll leave you with a few photographs:

Looking across the fjord on Saturday morning–the mountain in the background, the Håheia, is one I’ve wanted to hike up for years because I look at it every day, but I’ve still never gotten to it.

*Rainy hike–the gray silhouette at the back is the Håheia again.*

*Saturday evening, out buying a few extra groceries for the cheesemaking workshop.*

*Where I was standing, it was sunny, but looking down the fjord, you can see the storms over the distant mountains, across the Dalsfjord off of which our smaller Flekkefjord branches.*

A blend of sun and cloud on an afternoon when I brought a coffee out to sit on the jetty next to the fjord during lunch. As I sat, a bit of rain began, which you can see speckling the water. It’s low tide too, and some of the algae is visible hovering at the surface. In the background at the left is one last shot of the Håheia.

When we’re finished with the cheesemaking work on Wednesday, I’ll have some down time. My husband will be traveling. I’ll do some writing. I’ll do schoolwork too. Hopefully we’ll get some sunny fall days and I’ll get outside. Hopefully I’ll get a lot of writing done.