I am the Cheeseman!

That title may be a little premature.  But I hope to be the cheeseman soon.  Last year my wife got me a cheese making kit.  I made a couple batches of mozzarella that did not turn out as expected.

Oh sure, it tasted like tasted like fresh mozzarella and it melted on pizza pretty similar to mozzarella, but it sure didn't look or have the consistency of mozzarella.  It was more like feta in those regards.

Well, after a couple tries with the same result, I decided to contact Leeners (cheese kit makers) to see what they can recommend.  Their recommendations were better straining of the whey and using non-homogenized milk.

That's all fine and dandy, but I hadn't found non-homogenized milk and I'd gotten busy, so I had not yet gone back to trying to make cheese.

That's when my lovely and fun-filled wife found that a local restaurant, The Traffic Jam and Snug, was doing a cheese making workshop and she signed us up! 
Traffic Jam is one of our favorites.  They brew their own beer, have their own bakery, and make their own ice cream in addition to cheese.  If you go, I highly recommend their meatloaf.  But they usually have terrific specials as well.  Oh! They also just brewed a terrific wheat beer made with wheat from a farm in Owosso, MI (they call it, conveniently enough, Owosso Wheat).  But I digress...

The cheesemaking workshop was basically watching and helping their cheesemaster/brewmaster make a batch of Asiago cheese (and yes, I do want his job).  They brought in milk that had been milked from cows in Ortonville that morning and started the process of heating the milk to expand the milk fat.

While that was going on, they gave us a quick run-down on the process and what our day was going to look like.  They fed us a very nice continental breakfast, and we got suited up (apron and hairnets) and headed into the dairy/brewery.  They use the same facility for brewing beer because much of the equipment is the same.  300 gallons of milk were being stirred in a giant double boiler (roughly figure that you'll get 10% cheese from milk - so aiming for 30lbs of cheese).  When it reached 88 degrees, they turned off the stirrers and the heat and let the milk fat solidify.

Interesting side note about the heat used for the double boiler - it's city steam heat [pdf].  Detroit has steam heat piped around the city from three different steam plants for buildings to use as heat (seem like they could have run these under sidewalks to melt snow as well, but I digress...again).  So, the Traffic Jam just has to attach their double boiler to the steam pipe coming into the building and doesn't have to spend the money on additional equipment to generate the steam.

Once the milk fat has knit together (which my mozzarella never did) you then cut it with big screens and then slowly reheat it and stir it again to separate the whey from the curds.  The whey is removed and the curds are set into forms.  After sitting over night they are rubbed with salt and then they age for at least 60 days.

Because this milk is unpasteurized, it has to sit at least 60 days to make sure that all the bad microbes are good and dead.

We followed it up with cheese tasting (lots and lots of cheese tasting) and beer tasting (not quite as much beer tasting, but still plenty).  We met new friends and had a great time.

Also, for my own cheese making endeavors, it  was great to be able the process as a whole.  I have a much better understanding of what I need to do, why, and hopefully as a result my next batch of cheese will be much, much better (though, I have to admit, I ate a LOT of cheese yesterday.  I am not feeling the urgent need for cheese right now).