![\"Graukase](\"\/assets\/Graukase-heese-making.jpg\")
<\/p>\nFat white globules tumble carelessly from her fingertips into the big blue bucket below as she\u00a0methodically shovels the rebellious cheese clumps into small plastic molds using her bare, weathered\u00a0hands. My eyes travel from cheese bucket to cheese mold and back again, dizzied by the rate at which she\u00a0can pack a mold. In the time it takes me to wonder how long she has been dealing with these rambunctious\u00a0curds (15 years is the answer), and when I will get to taste them (momentarily), she has loaded up five\u00a0molds and shows no signs of slowing. I make a mental note to get cracking on perfecting a skill-set of my\u00a0own as I come to the shocking realization that my main claim to fame, the ability to eat massive amounts of\u00a0chocolate, probably won\u2019t get me very far in life. As she tucks her rubbery baby curds into their new homes,\u00a0words flow out of her mouth and she gestures wildly with her cheese-speckled hands, tiny cheese nuggets\u00a0flying into the crowd of eager gastronomic students. If this cheese is the star of the show, she is the\u00a0celebrity agent, gently coaxing this little known, yet strikingly pungent, bundle of acidic curds into the\u00a0limelight. Her name is Agnes, her cheese is Grauk\u00e4se, and her number one fan is me.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I met my cheese idol on a foggy afternoon in July, high up in the mountains of South Tyrol. Arriving\u00a0at her farm straight from a 5 course cheese-filled lunch in the Aurina valley below, my fellow UNISG\u00a0classmates and I rolled listlessly out of the bus, struggling all the while to awake our useless bodies from\u00a0the food-induced coma that seems to accompany every school study trip. Stumbling into Mittermairhof dairy
\nfarm, already sweating over the thought of consuming more lactose, we were greeted by a bright-eyed\u00a0middle-aged woman in a sturdy white apron hovering over a large bucket of curds and whey: Agnes. Her\u00a0beaming face beckoned us closer and her energy bounced through the fog, pulling us out of our food\u00a0comas and into her wild world of cheese. Before our arrival, she had removed the cream from the milk for\u00a0use in butter, let it sit for two days to naturally coagulate, and then heated it to 48 C; a traditional method\u00a0from back in the day when this cheese was made solely as a by-product from butter, an essential part of\u00a0the peasant diet. As she strained the snowy white curds out of the steaming bucket of liquid whey, she\u00a0began her story. I huddled close to the whey, hoping it would share some of it\u2019s warmth with me, and\u00a0silently berated myself for never learning German. How was I supposed to become this cheese goddess\u2019s\u00a0new best friend and devoted assistant if all I could say to her was \u201c Eins, zwei, drei. Ja genau.\u201d or, in other\u00a0words \u201cOne, two, three. Ya, exactly.\u201d I was off the hook this time due to our trusty translator, but I secretly\u00a0yearned to hear her original words as I feared the deepest, darkest, cheesiest tidbits would be lost in
\ntranslation.<\/p>\n
![\"Agnes](\"\/assets\/Agnes-and-son-graukase-1024x682.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
As we moved from the curd straining station over to the packing station, the story of Agnes and her\u00a0Grauk\u00e4se, aka Grey Cheese (an ode to the grey mold that blooms on it\u2019s rind), unfolded, with all the\u00a0elements of a classic love story: passion, frustration, and devotion. Agnes never planned to make cheese,\u00a0but when she married her husband and suddenly found herself on his family farm high up in the South\u00a0Tyrollean mountains, it seemed like the right move (Note to self: marry man with farm). In 2000 they built\u00a0themselves a new barn, and with their precious three cows began to make cheese. It all sounded pretty\u00a0idyllic, until she delved into the nitty gritty details. Waving a chunk of frozen cheese in the air for all her\u00a0adoring fans to view, she swiftly grated a small piece of old cheese into the mountain of cheese curds,\u00a0along with a slight dusting of salt and pepper, explaining her special technique of using the old culture to\u00a0guide the new culture, like a little cheesy buddha. But this is not a foolproof technique, she warned,\u00a0because Grauk\u00e4se suffers from multiple personality disorder, due to natural acidification without use of\u00a0rennet, resulting in a completely different cheese from one batch to the next. As a practiced cheese\u00a0whisperer, Agnes has learned over time to channel her cheese in the direction she wants, but in the\u00a0beginning she confessed to the sin of heartbreakingly throwing several batches away (gasp!). Now the\u00a0routine is familiar, but still no walk in the park. With only three cows, and a completely machine free
\noperation, Agnes elicits the help of her equally energetic eight year old son and jolly husband to carry out\u00a0the milking and cheese making to keep the operation running smoothly from June to September. As the\u00a0only current Grauk\u00e4se producer, Agnes feels it\u2019s their family duty to uphold the tradition of this peasant\u00a0cheese, which serves as a reminder of leaner times. When prompted as to what motivates her to continue\u00a0this labor intensive process, she scrunched up her shoulders as the corners of her mouth shot upward into\u00a0a big smile ,and exclaimed \u201cI just love it\u201d, releasing a contagious little laugh that rippled through the group.<\/p>\n
![\"making](\"\/assets\/making-graukase.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n