(Sorry to jump in ahead of ye, Boofer)
My parents always told me "Ladies first..." and thank you, george, for stepping in.
When I found this site back in 2009 there wasn't quite the breadth of info as there is today, but there were still a lot of things to know. You can see evidence of my lack of knowledge and the resulting mistakes I made in some earlier threads. Don't misunderstand me, I'm still learning what I don't know.
I have bought different cheeses to try to understand what a particular cheese style is all about (taste, smell, texture, rind, etc.) both to broaden my limited cheese palate and to give me some idea of a target I'm trying to hit if I decide to mimic a cheese style. Some of my efforts have been very successful...others, not so much.
I am especially thrilled if something turns out well and makes me look forward to it the next time I think about my cheeses.
When I began this adventure I had a few specific cheese styles that I thought would be good to emulate. Others popped into my vision after reading about them in the forum. I now have a handful of styles that I try to focus on improving:
Esrom,
Tomme,
Fourme d'Ambert,
Leiden,
Beaufort,
Reblochon,
Tilsit,
Maasdam/Jarlsberg. You may wonder "But what about Cheddar?" That is an unanswered question at the moment. Ask me after my
one and
two have aged in another 6-9 months.
These are cheeses I (and sometimes my wife) like to eat and they offer a challenge to my kitchen skills. One of the trends you'll see here in the forum are the numbers that may follow a member's cheese style. I adopted that method for myself to keep track of how many iterations a cheese has gone through. Hopefully, as the number grows, so does my knowledge of how to make that particular cheese and also the quality of the final product. That does not reflect the total number of cheeses I may have made to date (58). The word to keep in mind is
repetition. Oh yeah, it helps to keep notes of what you've done so that you can do it again if it seems like
Cheese Hall of Fame worthy.
Tiarella, to answer that first wonder of yours...yes, I
did have a chemistry set and I almost blew up the house (sorry, folks!). I also had a microscope early on and liked to see pond critters swimming around.
Where I live now precludes me having a garden that grows all manner of delights, so my garden is confined to my caves. Wondrous things grow in there and the deer, rabbits, and birds don't eat everything in sight.
-Boofer-