When Justin and I arrived in Auckland, we had no plans and made zero research on what to do. We had the vague idea we wanted to see the scenery and the other vague idea of checking out the cheesemaking scene.

Arriving in the southern part of the North Island, we were headed to a “holiday park” (fancy campground) in Petone, a few minutes away from Wellington. Hmm, Petone… that name was familiar. I remembered that I was following the tweets of a cheese shop owner who also made some cheese herself and taught some classes locally… in Petone! We randomly turned down a street looking for the holiday park and I said to Justin: “I betcha that cheese shop is on this street”. A couple of blocks later, bam! We drove by it! Incredible. I immediately sent a message to Wendy telling her we would come by the shop to visit.

And so today, we went to meet Wendy in her lovely cheese shop named Cultured. We were welcomed with her smile and warm personality as well as with delicious coffee (uhhh was it a “flat white”? I still can’t remember) along with a taste of the Lyttelton Blue and Gaal Chèvre accompanied with some sumptuous dessert olives… what a treat! We chatted about cheese, traveling, the container ship ride and wwoofing.

Delicious and beautiful flat white coffee… I think.

An hour and a half later we were sent home with an Over The Moon washed rind Galactic Gold, an O.M.G. Triple Creme Brie and also got a piece of Kingsmead’s OpakiManchego and Wendy’s famous Tiramisu made with homemade Mascarpone. Guess what was for dinner tonight?

Wendy’s cheese case.

We had a wonderful time and left with the thought that this encounter would not have happened without the internet, reminding one not to underestimate the serendipitous value of social media.

Wendy and Stephanie… bringing the virtual ties to real life.

The piece of cheese with eyes is pretty much the universal symbol for representing the idea of cheese in general. If you were to play a game like Pictionary and draw up a piece of cheese, it’s likely you will end up with somewhat of a triangle wedge with holes. If no-one gets it, you’ll draw a mouse and point at the cheese. At least, that’s what I would do… maybe I watched too many cartoons as a *cough* child.

I knew that making a cheese with eyes required a culture called Propionic Shermanii. I went and got that here and flipped through my favorite cheese making recipe book to figure out which type I would make. I needed to start easy (with mild ripening necessities, aka no brushing the rind for months and months, for example). So I settled with Jarlsberg.

After a fairly easy washed curd cheese-making process and a couple of months to ripen, the result is pretty darn great. Starting with the way it looks:

I know Jarlsberg as being (quote from Wikipedia): “mild, buttery, nutty and slightly sweet. It is an all-purpose cheese, good both for cooking and for eating as a snack. It has a characteristic smooth, shiny-yellow body, and a creamy supple texture. ”

And my Soleil Jarlsberg ended being “mild, buttery, nutty and slightly sweet. [...] It has a [...] smooth, shiny-yellow body, and a creamy supple texture. ”
Incredible! Success! Hurrah!

I could just eat the whole wheel as is (ok… with other people too) or I could use it in things like quiche or potato gratin.

As a refresher, this is what I’m aiming for:

(photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

The width is supposed to be more or less the same as the height, the rind is bloomy but not thick, the paste is solid (but not hard) and it dries/hardens as it ages.

This time I achieved a much better shape. To get that, you just pack the molds with more curd. “Pack” is actually not the right word since you have to let the curds drain a bit before you add more curd. The draining happens solely thanks to holes in the molds and the natural weight of the curd.

You can tell that the bloom is fairly thick though. There’s lots of fuzz happening, which tends to get wrinkly after a while. That’s great in some cases, but it’s not what we’re going for here.

When you cut it, a nice fairly firm paste is discovered wrapped in a fairly thick rind, with.. with… with… ash! Yep, I played with ash. It’s that darker, grayer layer in between the paste and the white rind. It’s purely for aesthetic purposes and I have to say… I like it! I know, I know, I should only be tweaking one thing at a time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. But man, adding ash was fun!

Anyways, you can also notice that there’s a thin layer of cream forming right under the rind… quite nice, but again, not exactly it.

I criticize, I analyze, but to the taste, this cheese is de-li-cious. It’s light and slightly goaty, a little chalky to the texture (but good chalky) with a subtle sweet finish. No acidity, no bitterness.

So all in all, this second attempt is MUCH better than the first one. It still has some cosmetic tweaks to be made. I think I’m most guilty of inoculating the milk with way too much mold bacteria which makes the rind bloom too much and creates that cream layer… I think.

Guess what? I’ll try it again. I love this hobby!

So I brought 2 Camembert size Bries and 2 St Marcellin size ones. The first bigger one was munched on by her, Justin and I…. little wedge by little wedge and woosh it was gone. The second one, I wrapped it in a pre-made (didn’t have the patience to go for homemade) puff pastry. You know how many times you have to fold the dough to make puff pastry? Too many, that’s how many.

Anyways… puff pastry with some homemade jam (see, I make other srtuff than cheese) and some crushed almonds. I baked in the oven for a good 30-35 minutes and it turned out golden, melty, yummy. Maybe a little too doughy for me, but still really yummy. The Brie practically dissolved.

Next time, I might try Phyllo dough.

What could I do? Wear a cheese hat? Be a cow? Be milk? Sure all of those would have worked. But nope, I decided to be a cheese fairy. And what would a cheese fairy do? Bring cheese to people around her, which is exactly what I did. For the work festivities, I dressed up my little fresh chevres with a pumpkin gummy hat (and some spiders).

It made for a beautiful and colorful tray!

And for our friend’s party, well the fairy turned into an angel. That halo isn’t very fairly-like. A cheese angel, that works too, right?

(See those circles on my shirt? Yeah that’s my attempt to illustrate swiss cheese holes… not sure that worked out, but anyways, you get the point.)

I brought some more cheese for the fine palates I knew would be there. In my right hand is a goat brie and in my left, a Chaource, my two latest experiments.

What can I say, bringing creamy yumminess to people makes me really happy!

It normally looks like this: (photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

The rind is slightly moldy, the shape is fairly even and the center is fairly solid and smooth. It actually can get quite chalky and crumbly as it ages. A beauty.

I found a recipe in my favorite cheese recipe book right now, “200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes” by Debra Amrein-Boyes. I also got 4 crottin molds from The Beverage People a couple of weeks ago when we visited our friends up in Santa Rosa.

Yesterday, the crottins reached their 10th day of maturity, which is technically when you can start eating them. The result looked pretty good!

Except, it looks not as high as the one above and a little softer/wrinklier than intended.

Uhhh maybe a lot softer?

I mean look at this gooeyness!

This looks way more like a mini goat camembert than a crottin.

It also tasted like a mini goat camembert! Super creamy, with a strong tasting rind and deliciously balanced with a glass of Côtes du Rhône.

I’m not sure what I did wrong in the process, but I am embracing the mistake.

I packed two of them tight is a double zip-lock bag for both exposure to air and to prevent the smell to leak! Uh yes, it was smelly. I didn’t want any airport dogs detecting it and wanting to eat it, so I sealed it really well and put it in one of those thermal lunch bags. Turns out it came out pretty soft and stinky, but apparently, so my family says, pretty good!

I loved writing on that label, origin: USA, producer: Stephanie, and crossing out “purchased” for “made”. Ha! So funny… to me.

The first glimpse of the small wheel was promising.

A nice white and yellow, wrinkly crust, wrapped a soft body when pressed down gently.

Indeed pretty soft when the knife went through.

Ta-da! A really creamy, gooey thick edge with a slightly firmer center.

By now Justin was in another room pinching his nose. Just kidding, he had a piece. I think. Hmm I’ll have to ask him. Maybe he’s traumatized forever with my stinky, but – so my Mom, Dad, Sister, aunt and grand-ma say – accurate cheese.

I can’t believe it! I made Camembert! In my kitchen! In San Francisco! I put it on a plane for 14 hours and it made it onto plates in France! And people liked it! Or everyone was very polite with me. Hmm…

Don’t get me wrong, there are some excellent fresh cheeses and complex hard cheeses out there. Some of which I probably will never be able to reproduce. But this time, I was feeling mold.

My first shot to a moldy rind was a bastardized St Maure style cheese, which is a mold ripened goat cheese. The first batch had to go to the trash. The mold didn’t grow everywhere, the cheese hardened and smelled like mushrooms. Yuk.

For the second batch, I used a different recipe, which made more sense to me and had more mold added to the milk. Sure enough, it worked. The mold grew homogeneously, the cheese softened a bit and adopted a nice, rich scent. It did not resemble any cheese I know, but it was definitely decent.

I thought to myself, if I can get mold to grow now, I can go the next level. I took a deep breath. I attempted St Marcellin.

The process was familiar to me, with some extra steps in the middle. Roughly, you have to heat up milk, add cultures and rennet and let sit overnight. In the morning you ladle the curds into the mold and start the draining process… let drain, flip the cheese, let drain, flip the cheese… about 3 or 4 times. Once you’re done draining, you let it sit at room temperature for a couple of days flipping it regularly and a nice coat of mold starts to form. Then you put it in a container with a lid and stick it in the cheese fridge at 56F for 2 weeks, flipping it every day. The cheese gets softer, moldier, smellier and wrinklier by the day.

Here’s what it looked like one week before it was ready to eat.

Traditionally, a St Marcellin is served in a little clay dish adopting the exact shape of the cheese. It helps finish the ripening process by keeping its shape (which is important, because the older it gets, the softer it gets) and retain the appropriate moisture.

Of course, I had to have that clay dish. Solution? We got a store bought St Marcellin, just to get the clay dish so I can pretend I’m all professional… haha!

My little cheese turned out looking like this:

With a moldy, wrinkly and quite pleasantly fragrant rind.

Pretty good, huh?

It was ready to get waxed. We melted just under 5 pounds of wax in a purchased-for-this-particular-purpose pot and dipped the cheese in the red liquid. It surprisingly cooled really fast which made the process of turning and dipping the cheese in the wax multiple times reasonably quick.

Here’s a shot right after the first dip. Justin posted some other really cool photos!

Since then, we made Cheddar #2 and Gouda #1 is air drying right now. Man, we’re going to have a lot of cheese in a few months!

1 – Heat up two gallons of whole milk to 90°F

2 – Add cultures and wait 45 minutes. Add Rennet and wait 45 minutes.

3 – The milk turns into something that looks very much like yogurt. It’s time to cut the curds!

4 – Cook the curds again in a bath of water (in the sink) and bring the temperature up to 100°F… no more than 2 degrees every 5 minutes, which is supposed to take about 30 minutes but really took us 45. We’re learning.

5 – Hang the curds.

6 – Line the mold with the cheese cloth and press it increasing the weight and turning the cheese periodically.
This process led us to put together a kick ass cheese press engineered and built by Justin. Tah-dah!!

7 – Take the cheese out of the mold and let it air dry for several days, turning it multiple times a day so moisture doesn’t collect at the bottom for too long.

8 – Wax the cheese and age it for at least 1 month. Ideally you want to wait for more than 6 months. Patience!