LILI’s two day Cheese-making course

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 7 September 2010 in cooking | 6 comments

Last weekend, I went on a cheesemaking course run by the Low Impact Living Initiative. I think it’s the third LILI course I’ve been on and the others have been great introductions to the subject and excellent value for money – so I had high hopes for this one and thankfully, it didn’t disappoint.

When I signed up for the course a couple of months ago, it was listed as being taught by Kathy Biss – author of Practical Cheesemaking and a renowned cheesery teacher – but unfortunately she was ill so Mark Robertson from the Northumberland Cheese Company stepped in instead. Mark admitted at the very start that he’d never taught before and was clearly nervous about doing so – but while the course was presumably very different than it would have been with Kathy, it was possibly more interesting — we learnt less about some more advanced techniques, but more about setting up small scale commercial production (which I find fascinating). Like the keeping chickens LILI course I went on last year, I think knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject goes a long way on these type of intro courses – and Mark had those in spades.

I shalln’t go into any detail about the cheesemaking process that we learnt on the course as there are lots of great tutorials/books available, and I wouldn’t be able to do it justice – this is more a review of the course than a tutorial.