My very first braided mozzarella knot! Not bad for a novice, eh?

Oh, Groupon—how did we ever find cheap and marginally educational weekend recreation without you? The ubiquitous discount site was where I happened upon the mozzarella cheese-making class at BrickNYC, a brick oven pizza joint in downtown Manhattan. And since I have long harbored a secret fantasy in which I own a nanny goat named Moo Goo Gai Pan and make my own fresh chevre, I decided that it was worth a try. Here are my key takeaways:

Cheese details are not for the faint of heart.
People really do not like talking about food and poop in the same sentence, especially if the connection goes beyond the most basic one. My classmates looked a little dismal at the revelation that cheese is basically bacteria poo, except for two lively young women who clearly had had the good sense to pre-party before the class began. When the question of the holes in Swiss cheese was posed to one of them, she gasped and exclaimed, “Oh! Like little farts!”

Pity the piglet.
Apparently, you can make cheese from the milk of any mammal (yes, including humans), but the only one that tastes really vile is pig cheese. I was really curious about this fact, and asked our instructor Patrick to elaborate, but he said I was just supposed to trust him. Boo. Sounds like a cop out to me. Doing a little internet research today, the most prevalent theory is that pig cheese tastes bad because they are omnivores rather than ruminants like cows and sheep. Continue reading →