Cheese Curds

           I fucking love cheese curds. 

 Some of you are genuinely confused. I know I was when I first moved here and heard about them for the first time.  They are not, in fact, sopping bags of cottage cheese. This was my first thought when I first heard the term because the only cheese where I come from is kraft and velveeta. Not saying these don't have their applications but that's not cheese. When I first moved here, I actually went into overload because I had never seen so much cheese everywhere before. You can't go anywhere in Wisconsin without bumping into some kind of cheese. 

Everything you need to survive is on this shelf in a gas station: curds, cheese sticks and sausage. This same shelf is in EVERY gas station. Even the applesauce but I love it and cheese is awesome.

  Cheese curds are actually brand new cheddar cheese. Cheddar cheese doesn't form in a block or wheel, there's a whole process and it's much shorter and less climactic than you'd think.

  They take the raw milk and pasteurize it then boil it and add some enzymes to separate the curd, which will become the cheese, from the whey, which will become nutrition shakes and ricotta cheese. That's where you get "whey protein", it's the dried, leftover liquid from cheese making. I mix this into my milk and cereal in the morning to help me maintain weight. If you were to cook this liquid whey, you'd get ricotta cheese which actually means "twice cooked". 

Here, the separation has already happened and this worker is cutting up the curd while stirring it. This makes that shit easier to drain and once you separate the curd, it's edible from this moment on. See that pitchfork stick the worker has? The size of the partitions determines the size of the curd. They might even get down to using tiny squares if the curd is simply going to make block cheese.

          Hehehe, cheese packer...

 This is how you get blocked or wheeled cheddar. They put all of the drained loose curd into a mold and then stack big ass weights on top to get it to stick together. That's why, when you break a block of cheddar, it crumbles and doesn't break cleanly and you're left with an uneven block of fucking cheese that won't fit on the sandwich so you just decide to eat it like a caveman with your hands. 

 

                This shit right here

 These are bigger curds that will be sold as snack food. They're all dry and wiggly like a thousand peices of jello!! Seeing a big barrel of curds never fails to make me giggle because they're so jiggly and dumb, they need googly-eyes. These curds get bagged up as soon as they're done draining, a fresh curd is a happy curd! 

 Remember how I said they were jiggly? That's because they're kinda rubbery and when you bite into a really fresh one, they squeak! They're little teeny squeaks like tiny shoes playing a basketball game on a floor that's just been waxed in your mouth. That makes me happy. It's happy food.  

  They come in a variety of flavors, colors

 and you can eat them refrigerated or warm, depending on the age. It IS just cheese, which in theory would just age and the flavor would deepen but curds in bags like the one above are moist and are exposed to air, unlike the curds that are stored to make formed cheese and those conditions make mold. Moldy cheese is bleu cheese and not yummy curds so just refrigerate them after you buy them.

    If you touch my curds, I will bite you.

If you want to ramp it up into heart attack proportions, look no further than fried curds. These delicious nuggets have been rolled in a wet batter and briefly dipped in hot oil long enough to brown the outside. You know how there's stuffed-crust pizza and when you got it you just ate the crust? That was just me? Oh, okay. Well, that's what fried curds are like, all gooey, stringy, melty cheese on the inside.

  I had trouble imagining this when I moved here and kept getting grossed out by visions of trying to fry a spoonful of the same cottage cheese (which are curds just even earlier than the solid curds) my grandma ate peaches with. I never really liked cottage cheese before but when you have some that's made by a bunch of different tiny independent farms, you can at least respect all the different nuances. 

 I love having access to really good cheese like Muenster and Havarti as well as mild Cheddars and Gruyere. I find myself wishing it were cheaper to mail the shit across the country or a lot of people from home wouldn't have trouble finding good cheese either. I participated in an international snack food-themed anonymous gift exchange and sent cheese. The cheese curds themselves weren't expensive, even a specialty store will sell them for 5-7 dollars a bag and they usually come in pound and half pound divisions. Try eating a pound of cheese. It's great for snacking but you'll hurt your poor toilet. Please, think of your toilet when bingeing on cheese curds. Anyway, cheese is fat and fat is heavy so that crap cost me $14 to mail cross country and I didn't even get a bag of Doritos in return. Talk about disappointment. At that moment I would have been happy to even have gotten tamarind candy, which if you haven't grown up on curry powder, is NOT CANDY. That's how sad I was because it was a huge deal for me, as a lazy procrastinator, for me to take the extra 5 minutes out of my day and click to www.simonscheese.com and order the curds and select to have them shipped to my receiver's address. I even had to bend over to grab my purse and get my debit card! Tsk, some people just don't appreciate hard work, I tell ya.