The Craft & Co: Cheese-making class

Need an idea for the ultimate date night? A clever birthday present? Milk Bar Mag presents the next The Craft & Co class for every foodie out there, and tonight’s adventure is a step-by-step process for making cheese. These classes are excellent for breaking the processes down, making them fun and easy to take home — if you can remember what to do through the haze of wine, beer and spirits that are on offer at C&C.

Now a regular, the space is filled with warmth and familiarity. I know my favourite wine, the whole lotta rosé, and my way to the loft space where this evening’s mozzarella making class will take place.

Carole Willman — professional cheesemaker and co-author of popular cookbook Home Cheese-Making: The Secrets of How to Make Your Own Cheese and Other Dairy Products — is on hand to guide us through how to produce our own butter, mascarpone and mozzarella. 

She’s the highlight of the evening, providing an energetic humour to the particulars of the craft. She educates us on the particulars of cheese: the how, the what, before coming to a fantastic conclusion of ‘so what is cheese? Milk merely seeking immortality’.

Large platters of a variety of house-made cheeses, meats, bread, biscuits, olives and pickled vegetables are propped to the side of the large room, so that we can nibble during the lesson — if sampling the product along the way wasn’t wonderful enough.

But you’re not to nibble with unclean hands; hygienic practice is hammered in, with sanitation vital to the success of the final product. Carole provides a fantastic commentary throughout the evening to keep us engaged, dropping gems such as ‘I don’t know what you have been doing outside, but your cheese will find out’ and ‘old cheesemakers don’t die, they just smell that way’.

Everything that’s covered off in these classes is documented in a take home booklet, so that you can (at least try) to remember how to replicate your crafts at home.

We leave, grinning wildly with brown paper bags in hand, filled with cured butter, our proud attempts at mascarpone and large tubs filled with clumps of salty mozzarella. 

It continues to be a truly unique experience at The Craft & Co, one I won’t be forgetting or straying from any time soon. Definitely worth a visit!

The Craft & Co 
390 Smith Street, Collingwood
thecraftandco.com.au