As the movement toward artisan, traditionally-made, locally-produced foods continues to pick up momentum, more and more cheese-lovers have decided to try their own hand at the ancient trick of separating curds from whey. If you’ve been thinking about joining their joyous, dairy-drenched ranks but aren’t sure where to start, we’re here to help!
There is collectively quite a bit of cheese know-how in the heads of the cheesemakers and mongers here at the Creamery, always on hand to answer your questions and offer advice. And we love hearing about your own cheese triumphs and experiments (we recently had great fun helping one dedicated home-cheese-maker split open his first year-old, clothbound cheddar). But if you’re looking for a more formal, hands-on way to learn some cheese-making basics, I’d recommend our highly popular, highly delicious mozzarella classes. During a two-hour Saturday afternoon class, you get to make your own mozzarella from milk and from a premade, high-quality curd, then move on to making a baked mozzarella braid wrapped in myrtle (my very favorite), and the holy grail of mozz decadence: the burrata, a pouch of fresh mozzarella filled with shredded mozzarella and heavy cream. Ah, sweet cheese of indulgence! And in the moments between setting the milk and practicing your cheese-stretching technique, you’ll get a healthy dose of dairy science, too. We’ll send you home with recipes, a coupon for the curd we use at the Creamery to make our mozzarella, and all of the cheese you’ve made in the class (it’s a bunch).
We also have great mozzarella- and ricotta-making kits from the New England Cheese Company for sale in the shop, as well as goat-cheese and hard-cheese kits, complete with starter cultures and rennet. We’ve got the classic cheese-making books, detailing the history of cheese and including many recipes, for your cookbook shelf. And most important, we’ve got good milk. The old adage goes, You can make bad cheese with good milk, but you can’t make good cheese with bad milk. Keep this advice close to your cheese-loving heart! At the Creamery we sell the same Calder Dairy milk we use make our own cheeses. It is non-ultrapasturized (which means it’s been treated very gently to reduce the loss of flavor), and – not so easy to find these days – it’s unhomogenized. In the process of homogenization, milk is run through a series of screens to break up the fat molecules and allow them to mix evenly with the rest of the liquids and solids in the milk. This is just fine for drinking, but the whole idea of cheesemaking revolves around the fats and proteins coming together, not being broken apart. So by using Calder Natural Milk instead of the kinds most commonly found in grocery stores, you increase your chances of ending up with a successful cheese. (Or, just take home a half-gallon of this tasty, local milk for your cereal or your glass! Shake it up to manually homogenize, or leave it unhomogenized and skim a bit of the separated cream off the top for your morning coffee.)
The best advice I can think of, though, when it comes to cheesemaking, is not to get discouraged. There are a lot of factors that go in to successfully making cheese, including the temperature and atmosphere, the timing and performance of each of the steps in the recipe, and the type of milk and culture used. It sometimes takes beginning cheese-makers years to get their recipes to where they want them, and even master cheese-makers who have been working for decades make bad batches once in a while. It’s a tricky art as much as it is a science, and it takes a lot of patience and a lot of persistence. Don’t fear; come visit us and we’ll help you get started. Your cheese may one day be the envy of all you meet.
Our Mozzarella Classes will be running through April, held every Saturday from 12-2pm. Give us a call if you’d like to get signed up!
If you’ve been in to the Creamery this winter to taste our first ever hard cheese, the Great Lakes Cheshire, you know it looks a lot older from the outside than its milky, mild interior reveals. It’s actually only three months old, a relatively short amount of time for a hard aged cheese to reach its prime, but the rind is tough and mottled blue and green with bits of white and brown. We even wash it with olive oil to tamp down the extra puffiness of the various molds roosting there. It looks a bit like tundra.
The rind of many cheeses can be a little intimidating when first encountered, but they are essential to the flavor of the paste inside. Fresh cheeses, like our Sharon Hollows and City Goats, don’t grow rinds because they are meant to be eaten within a week or two, before they can dry out and before their flavor can be influenced by ambient molds in the air. Older cheeses depend on their rinds to protect them while their flavor develops, and to allow them to breathe without drying out. A rind can also ripen a cheese – as in the case of cheeses with soft white bloomy rinds like Brie and Camembert, which ripen from the outside in – or add flavor to a cheese, like washed rind cheeses rubbed with bacteria to create a glorious pungent stink. The rind is such an important part of a cheese that a bit of it is often intentionally left on small wedges on cheese plates and at tastings so that everyone is better able to appreciate the full quality and identity of each cheese.
But the big question is: can I eat it! Usually, you can. A general rule is that the younger a cheese is, the softer and tastier its rind will be. The mold-ripened cheeses we make at the Creamery, like the Bridgewater, Manchester, Lincoln Log, and others, are wholly edible. In fact, many people think the rind is the best-tasting part of these cheeses (it is where some of the most intense microscopic activity goes on, food science-wise). Older cheeses, as long as they have natural rinds, are generally edible as well, though they are usually pretty hard and don’t have as pleasing of flavors (the delicious nutty rind of Comte, a French Gruyere, is one exception). Non-natural rinds, which are found on cloth-bound and waxed cheeses or those wrapped in foil, are not meant to be eaten, though they still work to create and maintain a tasty paste inside.
Ultimately, the choice to eat or not to eat is yours. The rind of our Cheshire – the one with the pale blues and greens – is rather hard and has a distinctive musty flavor which some of the cheesemakers here at the Creamery greatly covet and others avoid. So come on in and try it! If you don’t like it, don’t feel guilty skipping straight to the paste – the rind has been working hard to make and keep it so dang good.
If you have always wanted to taste our cheeses but don’t live in Ann Arbor, fear not! There just might be a restaurant or cheese shop near you that carries it. Check out our Places To Buy page. And, no matter where you live, you can get a box full of Zingerman’s Creamery cheeses sent right to your front door through Zingerman’s Mail Order. Enjoy.
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When we think of Cheshire we think of the crumbly, light peach colored cheese of Shropshire, England. All right, most everyone else thinks of a grinning cat, but in the cheese world, Cheshire is exemplified by the Appleby’s of Shropshire. Many more years ago than I care to admit, I was able to spend time making a cheese near Fishgard, Wales with a great cheese maker who, having tired of his role in the symphony in Manchester, purchased a farm and set out to make cheese in the remote, rain drenched Welsh coastline. Leon Downey resurrected and refined an old Cheshire recipe, which yielded slightly different results than the usual Cheshire. The recipe had disappeared during World War II due to its fast ripening nature and the government’s inability to rapidly distribute the cheese during those food-rationing years. Our first batches of this raw milk, aged cheese is now ready for eating. The cheese has a slight tartness that goes very well with chutney or preserves on Zingerman’s Bakehouse Farm bread.
Finally-we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. For most people in the Midwest that means the end of winter and spring is in sight. In the myopic world of cheesemaking, it means that our long drought of goat milk is nearing its end. Todd and Howard McDonald’s goats have begun to kid which means that the milk will soon be flowing. This means that we’ll soon be able to make enough of our award winning Detroit St. Bricks and Lincoln Logs to meet the requests.
One of the most jubilant parts of every morning here at the cheese shop is the moment the fresh mozzarella balls come out of the brine and we get to cut into one – still warm! – and taste it. When it’s this gleaming new, you can still taste the grain of the crystals of salt, part dissolved, and the cream spilling out of the cheese as you bite into it.
As most of you mozz-ball fans who frequent the Creamery or our farmer’s market booth know, we always strongly recommend eating our mozzarella the day it’s made. Refrigeration greatly lessens its sinuous texture and decadent creaminess, qualities which have been known to cause even the most refined foodies to chomp their mozzarella ball like an apple. The mozzarella that is stored in brine in high-end supermarket coolers for days at a time, for example, spends its lonely hours leaching all of its delicious butterfat into the brine, which can leave the cheese sour and rubbery. If you plan to use the mozzarella to bake with, like in a pizza or lasagna, your mozz will still be A-OK up to a week after it’s made. But if you’re making yourself a summer caprese salad with tomatoes and basil, or putting your mozzarella on a roast beef sandwich, you’ll definitely want it the day it was made.
The good news is, at the Creamery we make our mozzarella fresh every single day, so you never have to worry about buying stuff that’s been sitting around. And if you want the super special treat of mozzarella just out of the brine, freshest of fresh, just pop into the Creamery in the morning around ten, and you’ll be the first to get a taste. (Give us a call ahead of time so we can better sync our mozz-making to your arrival time.) Or, even better, sign up for one of our mozzarella-making classes – every Saturday until the end of April – for two hours of hands-on mozz-making bliss and all you need to know for a lifetime of making your own at home. Holding that glossy ball of cheese aloft, knowing you’ve made it yourself, is a small miracle to behold! Tasting it is a large one.
To help celebrate the joy that is Fresh Mozzarella, we have made every Monday, Mozzarella Monday at The Creamery. You can treat yourself to the freshest mozzarella in town for $2 off of the per-pound price!
Finally-we’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. For most people in the Midwest that means the end of winter and spring is in sight. In the myopic world of cheesemaking, it means that our long drought of goat milk is nearing its end. Todd and Howard McDonald’s goats have begun to kid which means that the milk will soon be flowing. This means that we’ll soon be able to make enough of our award winning Detroit St. Bricks and Lincoln Logs to meet the requests.