"CHEESE - MILK'S LEAP TOWARDS IMMORTALITY"

Our Cheesepedition guidebook draws our attention to this quote by some author editor nobody. Cheeses can take years to mature, far longer than milk can ever be stored for, so it has been viewed by some as milk's attempt at eternal life.
I suppose then that long-life milk could be considered another leap by milk, but it really is all just a whole lot of leaping, as cheese and long-life milk both go off eventually.

The only food that appears to have landed in the immortality basket is honey, which evidently never goes off. They've found honey in Egyptian tombs that's still edible. Genius bees.
What about when it crystallizes, you cry? You've just got to heat it and give it a stir and it's fine.
But what about the best-before date on my Capliano easy-squeeze pack, you cry more feverishly? It should just be a packing date. The one on mine is. And if I'm wrong and yours says best before, ring them and ask. If they put a customer hotline on the pack they should expect customers to ring up with hot topics. Or hot tempers.

So, we have established that cheese is made from milk, which, for the purposes of human consumption, may mean milk from a:

• cow
  
• sheep
  
• camel
  
• yak
  
• donkey
  
• horse
  
• moose
  
• reindeer
  
• water buffalo
• goat
  

I must say, goat's cheese tastes like a goat. I cannot explain this further. It just tastes like a goat. A delicious goat!

To begin the cheese-making process, follow this simple recipe:

Cheese

1. Milk your cow, goat, moose, etc.
2. Add a bacterial starter culture to ferment the milk sugars and produce lactic acid.
3. Humanely remove the stomach from your cow, goat, moose etc. and extract from it the enzyme rennet. Alternatively, obtain a substitute for rennet such as vinegar or acetic acid.
4. Add rennet to milk. Milk will separate into curds (solids) and whey (liquid).
5. Sit on a tuffet and consume.


Here is a picture of curds and whey:


The curds or the whey are then processed in different ways to make different types of cheeses.


Whey cheeses:

• ricotta (Italian)
  
• a bunch of cheeses no-one's ever heard of except know-it-alls and cheese connoisseurs, including brunost (Norwegian), xynomizithra (Greek), Urda (Romanian), and Anari (Cyprian).
  

Curd cheeses:

• All other cheeses you can think of.
  

I suddenly have a recollection of bunsen burners, Mr. T and curds and whey, so I've obviously learned about this before in Year 10 Science. Can't remember anything about cheese though. Was probably too busy milking rubber gloves.