Say “Cheese”!

I am so lucky to have a kid who will eat anything. She will try anything and always has been adventuresome in the food arena. But there is one thing she LOVES like most kids…cheese.

However, I’m not talking about slices of Kraft here, I never buy the stuff…I am talking real cheeses, crazy cheeses, the kind you have to slice yourself or peel the outside layer off , even stinky cheeses.

One of our favorite days in Tuscany was a lovely afternoon with my friend and tour guide Heather. She took us to (of course) a beautiful village atop another mountain called Vitiana. The views were just superb and it was a clear sunny day. We walked through the town until we reached a doorstep filled with milk cans. Heather knocked on the door and out pops the small, very quiet Marzia. She is a cheese maker and also tends to the cows, sheep and goats.

Her “kitchen” was a closet really with a fireplace. My chef husband would have been very impressed at the magic she creates just inside the small door. I was amazed at how perfect the entire process worked in her space. It included a counter with a sink, a fireplace with 2 swinging iron arms that held 2 huge pots. One pot would wait outside the fire pit, while the other was inside the fireplace heating the mild to make the cheese. She had place some milk and rennet into the pot about an hour before we arrived so we could watch her take it from milk to cheese.

Marzia used her soft hands to turn the milk over in the pot. No spoon or ladle-she knew exactly when it was ready to begin scooping into her round plastic molds. She would scoop the wet cheese into the molds of all sizes that were places on a small rolling cart in the center of her workspace. She would then squeeze out the extra (which is called whey). The whey would come out the tiny holes of the molds then drip down the bigger hole in the rolling cart into a bucket which hung underneath.

We would learn later that this “left over” whey is made into fresh ricotta! I learned that day that ricotta is not cheese at all…but leftovers. Very resourceful and hey, I never met a leftover I didn’t like.

After each mold was the way she liked it , she used old money called “lire” to mark the cheese. Certain coins represented goat cheese, sheep or cow cheese. She pressed the coin into the top of the cheese and then the molds went into her refrigerator to “set” or age. When she opened that walk-in fridge, I about died!!! How in the world did they get that thing up to this mountain town much less install it? My kid yelled out “Cheese” when she opened the door to reveal the lovely cheese….ready to be bought and eaten!

Marzia and her family also make sausage, salami, and other items which they sell in the town’s store. We made our purchases then hiked back to the car, stopping to pet the funny goats who gave the milk that morning that we would eat that night with our fresh salumi and bread.

Being so close to this process was such a wonderful learning experience for us both. The price was also amazing-8 euros for a HUGE round of cheese, it would have cost 40 bucks here in the States easy. But the rich flavor was priceless and the smile on my kid’s face even better….”Cheese”!