Seeing as it’s yet another day, it’s time to think about how awesome cheese is, and how utterly fantastic it would be to have someone pay you money to eat it. Enter a professional cheese grader, who likes to think of himself as a “cheese babysitter,” and who is now the subject of my undying jealousy.
WCAX.com checked in with the senior grader for Cabot Creamery in Vermont, the guy tasked with defining cheddar profiles and deciding what’s mild and what’s sharp. He gets to eat lots of cheese.
“Sometimes you do have stubborn cheeses. I usually refer to my job as babysitting cheese. I do really think of them as having their own personalities,” he explained, adding that with his degree in psychology, he’s also somewhere between a taster and cheese shrink.
He goes through the ins and outs of his job — from testing the resistance of the cheddar (more resistance = the sharper it gets), a sniff test to detect notes of fruitiness or yeast and then a visual inspection to seek out any slits or discoloration.
Then, the best part… eating the cheese.
[pause for contemplation of the wonderfulness of this sacred act]
Cabot’s graders look for what the company calls a “Northeast bite,” our hero explains.
“It’s like this really clean, acidic, sulfur bite,” he says.
So do you need any sort of fancy experience to become a cheese grader/babysitter? Not so much, he says, saying his palate isn’t particularly special.
“We’re kind of proud to be average because the idea here is hopefully I can pick out a product that the average person is looking for,” he said.
To have cheese on your resume? You’re basically living the dream, buddy. Living the ultimate, most delicious of dreams. I salute you.
Odd Jobs: Cabot cheese grader [WCAX.com]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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