Cheeseworld.

Today Briony and I made the cheese. She was the cheese mistress and I was the dodgy assistant. It was amazing and funny and seriously time consuming. It took us pretty much all day but we raised a bumper crop of baby cheeses. Along the way I learned how incredibly easy it is to make ricotta and have sworn to never buy shop ricotta again. The process of turning the milk into cheese was fascinatingly alchemical and tactile and slightly stinky at times.

It started with 16 litres of milk.....

...which was kept at precisely the right temperature and fed some rennet....

...and mollycoddled and sung to and generally encouraged until it set and turned into curds and whey. This took a long time.

Then we had to stir it for a long time and do some tricks with it's temperature. After that, we got in it up to the elbows and used our hands to press all the curds into a silky substance which was piled into hoops (cheesemaker jargon for squishing containers).

Then it got boiled in the drained off whey (the stinky part) and when it came out it had magically taken on the recognisably rubbery texture of haloumi. We folded it over with a mint leaf inside and viola! Traditional home made haloumi cheese. We made kind of a lot; Briony took hers home in a tub.

Thanks Briony, you're the Cheese Queen.