Cheesemaking is back!

Does anyone remember when I made cheese right out of college in the little house on I Street? 

Well, I've got a new office and studio space with way more room and I've rekindled my love of cheese and all things cheesemaking. 

I had forgotten exactly how time intensive cheesemaking was or all my failures in cheesemaking at the I Street house. But, in hindsight, I failed more than actually was successful. 

Cheesemaking requires its own cheese cave or cheese fridge. We have two at the studio just for cheese; one for blue cheese (since it contaminates everything it comes into contact with and the mold spores go airborne) and all the other cheeses. 

All the cheese require different kinds of molds and need between 1 and 3 days of draining/turning before they can either be put to rest and curing or, pressed for another day. 

The Bramble Berry team has been SO much loving all the cheese experiments since I certainly can't eat all this cheese on my own.

They especially enjoyed the soft cheese, Robbiola. It's an Italian style creamy cheese made out of cowmilk. 

It was paired with a spiced raspberry jelly and devoured almost instantly. 

The salted beer cheese curds went about the same way. They had both beer and salt as the flavoring. Fun fact: when you're dry salting cheese, you rub the salt all over the cheese, put it back in the fridge (covered) and by morning? All the salt is absorbed into the cheese. Salt is a key component for cheese. 

This is a big wheel of Brie cheese. It needs to age for a few more weeks before I can determine it's a success.

The mozzarella (one of the easiest of the cheese to make) was a success. 

The blue cheese tasted great on day 1 but then, I didn't baby the wheels for a couple days and by the time I got to them again, the mold had overtaken them ... and not the good kind of cheese mold. But, it was delicious on Day 1 and we all enjoyed it.