Free The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti Page B

Molinos family could eat only a few slices at a time.
    Making it again soon became Ambrosio’s overriding obsession. He purchased a dozen or so Churra sheep, d a hardy Iberian breed whose grazing habits had, in part, laid the Meseta bare. Space was cleared in the
caseta
, pens were repaired, cobwebs swept away, windows washed, floors cleaned, feed bins built. Besides the dogs and cats, the mice and moles, it had been years since honest-to-goodness farm animals had abided here. In that shadowy, nearly forgotten place came new blades of light, freshly mown hay, the happy, daily whistling of Ambrosio. The sheep huddled there, bumping bodies, masticating in wonder, Jesus-faced and smelling of Rasta wool. The idea was to let the sheep graze freely by day over the expanse of the Meseta under the watchful eyes of some local shepherds, to gather and milk them by hand at the barn and then transport the milk in canisters a quarter mile up the rough, rocky road to a small building that had once been a horse stall across from Ambrosio’s childhood home. The stall soon looked like the lab of a mad scientist, strewn with ladles and measuring spoons, knives and triers, cheesecloth and wax, molds and presses, vats and thermometers.
    Ambrosio also implored their old family friend Tomás to share his wisdom, which he gladly did. First there was the matter of the milk, for all good cheese begins with good milk, not just fresh and full but carrying with it a resonance of the earth and air where it’s made. Ambrosio kept a detailed journal, marking the locations where the sheep grazed and what they ate. For instance, if the sheep munched on thyme and chamomile, common herbs found especially in the
barcos
below town, that taste came through in the milk—which then created pleasant hints in the cheese. Conversely, if the sheep grazed on weeds and dirty shoots, the cheese-milk might result in a bland or even sour product.
    Simultaneous with Ambrosio’s effort to control the quality of milk—to ensure that the sheep were expressing uniformly thick and creamy
leche
with a faint bloom of flowers and caramel—he focused his attention on the bigger experiment in the horse-stall lab. Behind the weathered door was a world of fire and boiling liquid. All cheeses, from blue to Gruyère, from those sporting pale, bloomy rinds to those with orange overcoats, are created equal, or at least adhere to the same three basic principles in their creation: the conversion of milk to curds by the introduction of rennet and the expulsion of water, or whey; the demineralization of what’s known as the “casein,” the predominant protein in milk; and the addition of salt to a nascent, ripening
queso
. And while all cheese is a solid born of liquid, e each also contains varying degrees of water, acid, and salt content, which affect the ripening process and determine in part the bouquet, texture, and flavor of each individual cheese. f
    In Ambrosio’s stall, the milk was poured from canister to vat, at which time he added the rennet, a natural coagulating agent of enzymes, g which had the effect of gathering casein molecules together just as planets formed from molecular clouds. Next, the thickening broth was cut into floating blocks with a cheese harp, then heated to temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and stirred, further dividing the fat from the liquid, the curds from the whey. These growing milk planets—known in Spanish as
la cuajada
and in English as“micelles”—clumped or, in cheesemaker jargon, “knitted” into blocks and glops of curd, and were separated out by draining the whey.
    For Ambrosio, cheesemaking was both beautiful and primal: the milking and hauling, the pouring and harping, the careful progression of heating that depended on the right flame, all of it down to the work of one’s callused hands, leading after a number of months to some unknown destination, some new birth, some revelation rising out of the physical. It was an act