How could something so rotten be so good? Smells like ass but tastes like butter.

Well, needless to say, I am a cheese monster. I have written it here and have said it aloud a million times. I love cheese.

But good cheese is expensive. Unbelievably good cheese is unreachable. This realization led me to tap on my desire to once again take matters into my own hands: I will make cheese.

As you already know, I make my own bread now. So armed with this new activity in my life, I am inclined to make my own cheese. I couldn’t be that hard, I suppose. There should be some online guide or how-to-rot-milk-and-come-up-with-cheese instructions that I could follow.

And there it is, The Cheese Queen herself, Ricki Carrol!

She is selling kits complete with the cool bacteria and other tools needed to make my very own cheese right from my kitchen. Isn’t that amazing? Homemade mozzarella, ricotta, cheddar, and Parmesan–all the great tasting dairy stink bombs can be done at last.

I am interested in trying the mozzarella kit and the basic hard cheese kit first. If I produce edible cheese from these, then I won’t look back. Call me the bread man or the cheesy guy I don’t care. Even if I show up at work smelling like sautéed underwear, I won’t mind as long as I can make cheese.

Now, from what appears, cheese is more of a science project. The use of thermometers, living microbes, stainless steel cauldrons, and ancient looking presses seem more like a lab project than a kitchen chore. But it surely looks exciting.

I think if I can successfully pull off this cheese project, I will start to affect my speech with some accents: French on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, when I make brie and gruyere. Italian on Tuesday and Thursday, when I make mozzarella, ricotta, Parmesan, and pecorino. And perhaps, English on the weekend when I make cheddar. Sounds cool but stupid all together.

Like the bread-making and French cooking projects, I will also post my cheese making progress here.

I wonder if McDonalds misses me.

So yesterday I shared my garden salad lunch to three of my co-workers to test if they would be able to tell the difference between smelly-high-priced cheese and industrial-heavily processed cheese food.

Here are the results:

My co-worker, Larry (not his real name, though he wishes it is because of his idol Larry Bird), was too depressed to judge cheese quality. Apparently early in the morning, a friend emailed him a link to this Youtube music video and practically ruined his mood. “I was on my way for an early morning jog, when I decided to check my email,” Larry said. “When I saw the video, it was so sad, I was injured deep.”

Anyhow, Larry tried the salads with the two different dairy sprinkles but couldn’t come to a conclusion. His disposition was so out of shape, he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference if I topped the salads with pounded Cheetos. However, he did say he liked the texture of the smelly cheese.

One point: Gruyere

Deborah (not her real name as well), on the other hand, cursed me out from bringing stinky cheese. But she did try both and came to a conclusion that she liked the not-so-foul smelling cheese. She tried to defend her position by saying she does eat stuff with unpleasant odors, but I did not inquire any further.

One point: Processed cheese food

Kutis (her real name), however, could not tell the difference. She couldn’t even smell the difference. Perhaps she had been exposed to so much foul odor in the morning that her nose simply refused to partake in yet another smell fest. She did, however, rejected the cheese food’s texture, saying it was rubbery and even expounded with an analogy that it felt like eating shredded condoms.

One point: Gruyere

As for me, I liked the flavor of the Gruyere–it has a nice bite. The cheese food was so neutral tasting. It tasted like a cloud. More so, it doesn’t have the real cheese flavor of the Gruyere.

But for $6.89 a slice? It is indeed pricey compared to the $4.00 price of cheese food, which is a whole bag.

But I guess, this blog is about finding real food and, yes, real food is expensive.

Perhaps I can manage to put good quality cheese in my budget by cutting down on other expenses. Expenses like my monthly subscription to Grow a Moustache Magazine.

What do you want to eat, something clean or something delicious?

I have been asked this question many times and very often my answers were non-committal shrugs. It is a trick question–and a discriminating one too.

If I opt for the clean option, then I am pretty sure that the questioner would, in no time, reduce me to a breathing stereotype like clockwork: A well-groomed guy with Republican leanings, who proposes love on first dates hoping to quickly level up from the realm of virgins to the plateau of sex studs; listens to John Denver and thinks that General Tso’s chicken is an actual recipe concocted by Chairman Mao himself that’s why it sucks; eats wonder bread, finds joy in acid wash comfort fit jeans, and sports a bouncy flaming mullet.

On the other hand, if I go for the delicious option, I might turn up more exciting: A rebel who eats risk for lunch and fancies himself as a sex machine who has the gift of contorting the human body to angles even a protractor would find difficulty to measure; a foodie who appreciates world cultures, eats anything in sight regardless of dirt or odor, dabbles in painting and poetry, finds revelation in the lyrics of a 14^th street subway folk singer, and bald as Telly Savalas.

This is why I shrug. I am neither of those types. I am just a caveman who wants a real meal.

So when I am presented with something believed to be delicious but obviously unclean and foul smelling, I think. Hard.

Enter, cheese.

There are two kinds of cheese in this world: The smelly and the clean.

The clean cheeses are packaged in nice yellow boxes with nutritional claims adorning the labels. Other clean cheeses are in re-sealable plastic containers of different forms and sizes: long sticks, big balls, flat squares, and shredded. These dairy products are industry clean and have passed all the required food safety tests with high marks. Most of these cheeses are soft and wholesome smelling. They go by monikers such as cheese sticks, cheez wiz, cheese food, processed cheese etc.

The other kind of cheese is from a different universe: The smelly ones. These seem like coming straight from the damp socks of the cheese makers. Putrid, hard, crumbly, and teeming with bacteria, these dairy products can scare off even malnourished rats.

Plus, the thoughtless thin cellophane packaging of these goodies doesn’t make it more appealing. The marketing doesn’t pull you in and the smell pushes you out.

The odd thing, though, is that these olfactory dilemmas are thrice more expensive than their clean cheese food cousins.

As I am writing this blog, I am actually confronted by this.

I am packing lunch and I have a bag of salad greens, some oil and vinegar, and a choice of these two kinds of cheese for toppings. On one side I have a grated cheese product that came straight from the refrigerated isle of my local Shoprite. On the other is a Gruyere from a nearby Whole Foods Market.

Under careful scrutiny, the cheaper grated cheese food has more ingredients than the Gruyere. It has milk, enzymes, cultures, color, dry milk, whey solids, anhydrous milkfat, polysaccharide, xanthan gum, carrageenan, potato starch, powdered cellulose, and natamycin.

The stinky cheese has four ingredients: raw cow’s milk, milk cultures, enzymes, and salt.

So, what I’m going to do is make two sets so I would know which one of the two dairy products is tastier in a salad. Of course, at the back my mind, I am thinking, well, aren’t they just the same with the other one being a signature version of the other? Well, I would know later. Also, I will share my lunch to my co-workers and ask for their opinion. I will blog the results later. Certainly I won’t tell them which salad has the more expensive cheese.

Would they be able to tell by how my food smells? Or would they look at my feet instead?