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Hard Labor

Posted by Jamie Forrest, September 4, 2007 at 2:15 PM

Labor Day has just passed, of course, but we should bear in mind the difficult, ceaseless work that goes into making cheese. It requires intense amounts of backbreaking, sometimes tedious effort, from herding the animals to milking them twice a day, from cutting and stirring the curd to flipping the wheels during aging. Cheesemaking also represents an ongoing sanitation challenge; since milk is a veritable feast for bacteria of all kinds, every piece of cheesemaking equipment that comes into contact with it must be diligently washed. Mateo Kehler of Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont has even gone so far as to call cheesemaking "glorified dishwashing."

While most cheeses are made with the same eight basic steps, challenging enough on their own, there are a couple of cheeses that should be singled out for requiring even more labor to make. Cheddar cheese gets its name from the village in England that was its birthplace, but it also refers to a step in the making of the cheese that is responsible for its distinctive crumbly texture and tart flavor. In this step, large blocks of freshly cut curds are stacked, turned and rotated every ten minutes for up to two hours. In industrial cheddar this step is almost always accomplished by machines, but in the traditional farmstead Cheddars of Somerset, England, it is always done by hand.

Fresh Mozzarella belongs to a family of cheeses known by the Italian phrase pasta filata, which literally means "spun paste". This refers to the process of pulling and stretching the curd, a process that gives Mozzarella its beautifully elastic and stringy texture. But it's the environment in which this pulling takes place that makes this work truly grueling: in order for the curd to become pliable enough, it must be immersed in a bath of either water or whey heated to between 160°F and 200°F. The insane mozzarella makers then stick their bare hands directly into this water to fetch the melting ball of curd before they start to pull it. How hot is this water? Remember that water boils at 212°F.

So let's think about all the work that goes into making cheese, and how this work is indeed what makes it such a special food. As anyone who's ever tried to make cheese at home knows, it is not an easy task by any stretch. Does anyone out there have greuling home-cheesemaking stories to share? Maybe one day down the road I'll write about the day I spent ten hours making Camembert at home.

Photo credit: The Cheddaring process, from the Creamery at Washington State University.

2 Comments | Tags: cheese, cheesemaking