Have your cheese and eat it too

When Harshini Kiran and her family vacationed at Coonoor last summer, her two daughters spent their time feeding the animals, watering the vegetable garden and making friends with the cows at the Acres Wild home stay. Kiran, meanwhile, was busy learning the intricacies of making cheese from her host, Tina Khan.
When she returned to her Bangalore farm, Kiran started experimenting. Every week she tried a new cheese: gouda, her daughters' favourite, feta, everyone's favourite, and soft cheese, the easiest to make. And a happy outcome of all this is that she now uses freshly-made cheese in her exploration of French cuisine. "Acres Wild was the perfect holiday," says Kiran, contentedly.
Cheese tours are common in the cheese-making provinces of Florence and Tuscany, Italy; as well as Belgium, where they are paired with fruit or wine tastings. With Indians experimenting with global cuisines that need exotic varieties of cheese that are unavailable or too expensive, cheese tours are slowly gaining popularity in this country too.
It helps that cheese farms are situated in cold, mountainous regions (ideal to age the cheese), adding to the holiday experience.
K Balakrishnan's stone grey home stay in Kodaikanal also doubles up as a cheese learning academy. At Cinnabar, Balakrishnan and his wife conduct classes in cheese making, cooking with cheese, serving cheese and pairing wine and cheese. The duo have seen chefs come in to know more about the cheeses they use, women who come out on short but productive holidays and serious learners interested in making their own cheese. "You can be a casual or a daily cheese maker. Either way learning about cheese making comes as an eye opener," says Balakrishnan.
One of the 'serious' learners was Tina Khan, who along with her husband Mansoor started her own course at Acres Wild. Students at the two-day course are taught how to make one soft and one hard cheese, are given a course manual, a cylinder for pressing cheese and a kit that includes portions of culture and coagulant. "People are dining better, have disposable incomes, and are travelling more. Cheese tourism is a trickle down from this. It's a new kind of holiday," says Mansoor.
The need to procure fresh cheese and the steep cost of imported ones available prompted Vandana Naik to make a solo trip to Acres Wild. Five days later, Naik returned to Goa armed with information on how to make ricotta, cream cheese, mozzarella, feta and haloumi. "There is so much pleasure in make pizza with homemade mozzarella. Taste wise it is superior and the satisfaction you get is tremendous," she says.