So I really decided to ratchet up my dork factor to record levels today by taking on cheese making as a new hobby. (A farmhouse cheddar, to start.) It turns out that cheese making isn't as difficult as I had thought it would be, as long as you start with high-quality milk and stay pretty true to the directions. Of course, I haven't been able to actually taste my final product yet, as my tiny wheel needs to age for at least a month first, so who knows how successful I was. But at every step of the way what I was doing roughly matched what I saw happening in the one million YouTube videos I watched on cheese making, so I can't imagine I was too far off.

A few pictures, starting with the adorable glass-bottled milk that I picked up at our local farmers market. Cheese making requires milk that hasn't been ultra-pasteurized, which many store-bought milks are these days. And I had been hoping to avoid the vitamin D added to a lot of them. (Has to do with the somewhat-less-than-vegetarian sources of the additive.) But I picked up these beauties for a few bucks each. The milk inside is what's called creamline, meaning that you have to shake before drinking to mix the cream back in:

I was surprised to find that cheddar's made by heating the milk in a water bath; you never involve a stove in the process at all. Here's a shot I took while patiently waiting for the thermometer to hit 90 degrees:

The curding stage, produced by the interaction of the mesophilic starter, heat, and rennet. It really put a huge smile on my face to produce these beauties. Up to that point, I had kinda been thinking, "yeah, this milk is gonna suddenly up and congeal because of 'science' -- suuure...":

The curds, broken up and salted. I snuck a taste. They were pretty good, actually -- like tiny milk clouds:

From there I packed it into a mold, and that's resting under 20 pounds of pressure as I type. A day or so of pressing is followed by four days of air drying, and then I get to wax it. Then it gets stored away for as little as a month and for as long I can possibly stand it. It gets better with age, of course, but I suspect that every day over thirty that I wait is going to feel like torture. I do love me some cheese.