I did warn you. I can get a little carried away. Where was I....um, right, the cheese. The cheese is supposed to be a brie style cheese or a camembert style cheese. They are pretty much the same cheese it's just that one is bigger and the other is supposed to be smaller in order to keep their respective names. As well, those cheese are place names in France so I guess the test batch of cheese I made was crafted here in Pennsylvania and since my cheese making skills are rudimentary at the moment I can't really call the cheese camembert or brie. I pretty much followed the recipe to make a brie and camembert. I used the appropriate cheese cultures and followed the appropriate temperature requirements for the inoculation and coagulation phases. Still, as I said, my skills are in their baby phases so the finished cheese might not become what is in my mind, or yours, when we think of brie or camembert cheeses. No matter, I understand there is a learning curve involved with any new (about a year of off and on cheese making now) field of study.
As long as I hold in my imagination the end result and all its nuances, I will succeed. I recently had a conversation with a gifted photographer and he gave away one of his secrets. His secret was that when approaching a scene to be photographed he paused for a few minutes and imagined what he wanted to reveal with the soon to be taken photo. He thought to himself, how might I see this future event (the un-taken photo). Of course being just a little obsessive I began to think about how this relates to my cheese making studies. Ah! I thought, I have to 'see' the end result before I begin! Just like with all my other passions (hobbies) I have to imagine the end result at the beginning or it just won't succeed.
