More Cheese Please!

This week we have a guest blog post from the wonderful Beth!

Would you like to hear a cheese joke? I’ll keep it BRIEf.

This and many, many more fromage related puns were the order of the day last Saturday when The Big Cheese Making Kit made an appearance from our cupboard along with a fairly sizeable four pints of milk.

Most of the foody Christmas presents I’ve bought for my long-suffering dad have remained in the darkness of that lonely Christmas cupboard; a mandolin for dauphinoise potatoes and a pasta machine are two such contraptions that I’m convinced will never see the light of day.

The Big Cheese Making Kit is different though; the lure of cheese in under an hour was too much to resist and suddenly the kitchen was full of bodies that wanted to stare at citric acid and have a go at cutting curd.

There’s something a little bit Heston Blumenthal about thermometers, powders and finally getting to use those little plastic measuring spoons I won in a cracker about four Christmasses ago.

After much simmering, a little microwaving and surprisingly little swearing or arguing we were left with mozzarella the like of which we’d never tasted.

Now I’m not saying I make the best cheese in the world, but I made it myself (we even added chilli flakes all by ourselves) which means it tasted better than any queso I’ve ever bought from the super market and we even stuffed a chicken breast with it for dinner that night.

Since Saturday we’ve had mozzarella on pizza, mozzarella and tomato salad, mozzarella on toast, mozzarella sticks and mozzarella from the fridge at 1am and I’m not even ashamed about it!

I was just starting to think I’d scaled all the dizzying heights there were to scale in cheese making and then I realised I could try making ricotta, cheddar, Scottish crowdie and maybe even halloumi.

If I’m honest I’m becoming slightly concerned that this is just the beginning of a strange new obsession.

Cheese making kits, come at me!