Advanced Cheesemaking Class - Milled Curd (Cheddar Style)

River Whey Creamery is offering an Advanced Cheesemaking Class with Owner and Founder, Susan Rigg. This class will be conducted in two sessions. The first session will be for five hours in the creamery as we make an 65 gallon batch of aged milled curd cheese. We will go through all of the steps from bringing the milk to the correct temperature for the cultures, adding cultures, renneting, fermentation and pH measurements, cutting curds, milling and salting the curds, and then hooping and pressing. While waiting between steps, we will taste a variety of milled and salted style cheeses, especially British regional cheeses where this method is prevalent. We will be discussing the history of these kinds of cheeses as well as methods for making other styles of hard and semi-hard cheeses.

Each participant will be allowed to pack their curds to form their own wheels which will be marked. River Whey will then age the cheeses in our temperature and humidity controlled state-of-the-art cheese caves for approximately three months. Our class-made batch of semi-hard cheese will yield eleven wheels of approximately seven pounds each (one for tasting on Harvest Day, and ten for the participants).

On the Friday evening of the Harvest Day all of the participants will be invited back to the creamery to hand harvest their own marked wheel, and clean them up for packaging. We will serve wine and accompaniments and taste our one wheel from the batch to see how our cheeses have matured. Each participant will then take home their own wheel of hand made aged cheese to share with their family and friends.

See drop down menu of dates available below. The first date with be the hands on class and the second date will be the harvest celebration! Class size is limited to ten participants.

Class times: Sunday Make Day - 10:30 am to 4 pm & Harvest Days are Friday from 6:30 pm to 9 pm