I bought a book called "Make the Bread, Buy the Butter," by Jennifer Reese few weeks ago after hearing about it from my sister-in-law. This crazy lady (read: kindred spirit) decided to try making a bunch of different things from scratch to see if the hassle outweighed the benefit (she also compared cost, but often this was secondary to the other benefits/detriments of her projects.) Hotdog buns, home-cured prosciutto, granola, vinegar, yogurt, and camembert cheese. She recommends making your own cheese. I have made my own ketchup, brewed my own liqueurs, nurtured a natural yeast starter for a dozen years, built my own outdoor pizza oven, raised laying hens in my urban backyard. Why have I never tried to make cheese? That sounded right up my alley.
To make Camembert cheese, you take two gallons of milk and barely heat it (85 degrees), then add four things that you need to buy on a cheese making website: sodium chloride, mesophilic culture, penicillin candidum, and rennet. Stir gently and leave for an hour and a half. Come back and ladle the resulting curd into cheese molds (or, in my case, quart-sized deli cups with the bottoms cut off and holes poked in the sides), then let the cheese make itself, aided by the occasional flipping of the molds to aid in the oozing out of the whey.
I have Thursdays off. I usually spend some significant part of it with my dad, who suffers from Parkinson's disease and recently had brain surgery for it. We run his errands and chat. This particular Thursday we went to his barber and a few other places. Then I went to Trader Joe's to buy the milk for the cheese. You see, the cheese making ingredients had arrived on my doorstep as I was walking out of the house in the morning, and I couldn't wait to start turning milk into curds and whey.
At Trader Joe's I bought their Cream Top milk. I know that Camembert is supposed to be a raw-milk cheese, but c'mon. It's my first time making cheese. I don't know how to safely deal with raw milk. The recipe in my lovely book calls for "milk," and I decided to not bankrupt myself and potentially poison my family buying farmers' market raw milk. My first time, I'd buy pasteurized. But for a dollar more per gallon, I could get that cool un-homogenized milk with the cream floating on top. That had to be better, right? One step closer to its natural state?
I brought it home and opened it up, gazing at the thick cream plug that stoppered each half-gallon. I squeezed the container and the cream plug popped up over the top a little, then retreated back into the carton when I let go. I got a little engrossed in this and squeezed a little too enthusiastically, popping a sploosh of underlying milk out from under the cream, all over my brand new iPhone 4S, handily tucked into my brassiere. Un-homogenized milk dribbling down my legs, I rushed to dry off my phone. It seemed OK. I commenced cheese making. Using my big canning pot, I heated the milk and added the tiny pinches of those various stuffs called for in Jennifer's recipe.
My husband called. The phone rang, but I couldn't hear him speaking. I dismissed this as a bad connection. He called back. I still couldn't hear him and became rather concerned. I texted him. I noticed that the phone wasn't making any clicking sounds when I texted, either.
Me: "My phone isn't making sounds! I had a minor milk splashing incident. Help."
Harman: "I could hear you. Be home shortly."
I began to fear that this might turn out to be very, very expensive cheese.
When Harman got home, he set up an elaborate dishtowel sling for the iPhone, suspended it in front of a space heater, and attempted to dry it out. He was feeling particularly fraught over the incident, because, the week before, when I had been standing in the Apple store trying to decide whether to buy the breathtakingly expensive Apple Care package they were pushing on me, I had called Harman for his input. I have always bought the warranty packages in the past, but this one was half the price of the phone. I've never broken my previous phones, nor immersed them in water, so after a hurried conversation, he had convinced me that I should forego the warranty--the first one they have ever offered that covered such iPhone-detrimental incidents as smashing its glass face, dropping it in the toilet, or, presumably, liberally spraying it with dairy.
Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, the milk had coagulated into what looked like yogurt. I cut it into rough cubes and filled the makeshift molds with the soft curd. I was almost finished when I accidentally knocked over one of the molds. I called out for help, since for a moment it looked like all the curds were going to tumble slowly to the floor. Harman rushed in and found me splayed on the floor next to a puddle of curds. His only comment was, "You have to take responsibility for your own projects." My response, "Go away, please." It wasn't too bad. They had all kind of fallen over in tandem, some of the curds falling on my kitchen floor, but most of them saved by the clean, rimmed sheet pan I had wisely assembled them on. I saved what didn't hit the floor, packing it back into the molds, skidding on the slick floor the whole while. (I salvaged the floor curds in a little container to be given to the chickens the next day, which they loved.)
I got all the cheese curds tucked away into the molds, which were full to the top. The molds were tall, maybe seven or eight inches high, far too high for a camembert, but the cheese shrinks down dramatically as it ages.
Finally sitting down in front of the TV, where Harman had been this whole time like a regular person, I tested my phone. It seems to have suffered no lasting damage, though I have no idea what will happen if the particles of milk inside its speakers coagulate into their own form of deviant camembert.
So now all three cheeses are sitting in a dutch oven waiting to age. One of the four esoteric ingredients I added to the milk was that penicillin mold, meant to form the soft white rind that bries and camemberts have. You can spray it on the outside of the cheeses or add it to the milk to express itself on the outside later. I added it in. I'm looking forward to it appearing.
One question is where to store the aging cheeses. They are supposed to stay at about 50 degrees fahrenheit, which strikes me as a particularly tricky temperature. It's way cooler than any spot in my basement-less house, and significantly warmer than my fridge. Hmm. For now, I'm transferring it in and out of the fridge--during the day, it's in, during the night, it's out, which may or may not approximate the correct temperature.
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