More than meets the eye

“So what can I do?” I asked.
“Do you remember the curing room?” Christoph replied.
My heart leapt so joyfully that it must have been visible in my face.
“It’s like riding a bike, you can’t really forget it!” he added cheerfully
and then went on to explain what is now being done differently.

Seems that apart for the actual handling the cheese most of the equipment has been replaced since I last had the honour to do the wiping.

Curing room is not, as the name could perhaps suggest, one of these white windowless rooms with no doorhandle, whose walls are padded with soft cushions and which you enter in a straightjacket. Instead, it is a white and windowless room full of heavy and sharp-edged objects made of stainless steel, which you enter in white wellies, a thick white rubber apron, a thin white polyethylene apron, matching sleeves and medical examination gloves made of latex.
Funnily enough, the equipment on wheels is not there to be moved.
It is the wire racks, each with 4-5 cheeses of slightly under a kilo and a half per piece, that you are supposed to pick up from a stack of your own height (mine, not, let’s say Christoph’s – nor Ent's or Albert’s or Alan’s for that matter). You place it onto a trolley, carefully pick the cheeses, one after another, wipe them with a brush dipped in brine, turn them and place them, most carefully, back. When the rack is finished, you transfer it to another stack (or start a new one).
As the racks are stacked chronologically it does not matter where you start, because never mind if you finish with the oldest OR the youngest cheeses on top, you would have taken each and every one of the kind anyway.
In between the cheeses mature, and not unlike a human being, they go through phases of baby-like soft skin, when every harsher treatment will damage the surface irrevocably, periods of resistance, mouldy stages (just as when no matter what you do to your teenage skin it keeps on breaking out in rash), until it gains its unmistakable, distinctive smell (which would make even the nonexistent hair on Ála’s legs bristle). This would be, prototypically (interní ftip pro KAJL), about a month after the batch was produced.
The cheeses in question are then promptly sent off into the shop, wrapped, labelled and left to ripen for several more weeks in the cold store.

The nice thing about… no, hang on, the thing I love about the creamery is that within a week you are very probably given a go at all the stages of cheese production – from the very early milk-whey-transformation through the soft cheeses (which are made before the whey is let out of the vat) to the farmhouse cheese (because we are not allowed to call them Cheddar, though technically that’s what a farmhouse cheese is). With a bit of luck you are present when the weighty cylinders are being scalded (bacha, nikoli scolded) and wrapped into special cheese-cloth. But with the soft or semi-soft cheeses the process is much more visible – and for the insider, palpable.

Very much palpable, actually.
The skin on your palms parched by hours of soaking in whey.
Fingers burnt in the hot wax.
Disinfection in my eyes.
The realisation that your hands are full of wee cuts that you’re not aware of until salt gets rubbed into them.
Backache.
Stomach flattened by your constant leaning on the edge of the vat.
Slushy, muddy, yucky, reeking… surfaces, corners, buckets you have to cleanse.

There must be something more to it than I am able to grasp with my little brain.
How come it’s such hard, physical work, and I simply love it?
How come I have the courage to come back after several months away
and to ask all these silly questions,
to let myself in danger of making a nuisance of myself,
or even of being humiliated by Barry’s kind explanations and corrections?
(Just today I got shown how to chop chives. Twice. He’s just got this amazing, completely unaffected way of making you feel an absolute idiot.)
How come I am willing to go and wrestle with the huge and ghastly bulk tank of which I am scared stiff,
scared lest something stainless slips or I slip on the concrete floor and it goes off,
lest the great propeller inside starts rotating, suddenly, eerily…

There must be more to it than meets the eye.


Slovníček technických termínů:
wire rack – drátěný rošt
wellies – holinky
apron – zástěra
stack – štos
trolley – vozík
brine – slaný nálev
batch – dávka (vyrobená onoho dne)
whey – syrovátka
vat – nádrž
scald – spařit
chop – nasekat, nakrájet
chives – šnitlík (po česku pažitka)
bulk tank – velká nádrž
propeller - vrtule