Meet Lorine Bourland from Old Hickory, Tenessee just east of Nashville. Lorine is an avid cook and teaches cooking classes with a team at her church. She also makes jewelry which she sells at her church’s Art Fair and she loves to travel, too, having gone to the Holy Land and Italy many, many times.
In early 2020, Lorine started her cheesemaking quest while trying to find a caraway cheese that her Czech mother and grandmother made. As she recalls, it was made from dry cottage cheese and was called Tyaroh. As she was looking for recipes, she came across The Art of Cheese’s website and saw that we had taught a class called the 3 Day Aged Farmer’s cheese that piqued her curiosity. Of course, we had taught that one back when we were still doing in-person classes but because of the Pandemic we were only doing virtual classes at this point. So, Lorine decided to take our virtual 7 Day Cheese Challenge, along with her daughter Jacque who lives just a few miles away from her. Once they started learning to make cheese, they were hooked! And eventually, when we added that 3 Day Aged Farmer’s cheese to our virtual course offerings, she was delighted to take that one, too.
Since then, Lorine has taken many virtual classes with us and has made 20 different types of cheese so far. That has qualified her for the Gold Level Artisan Cheesemaker Certification and she is well on her way to getting her Platinum certificate. Her husband, Fred, whom she’s been married to for almost 62 years, says they’ve bought more milk in the last 14 months that they have in their whole married life! In addition to making cheese at least once a week, she also makes yogurt and labneh, a type of cheese made from strained yogurt.
Lorine’s favorite kind of cheese is made out of sheep’s milk but she’s had no luck finding sheep milk in the Nashville area. So, she got creative and bought some lamb paste rennet and an extra strong lipase (a lamb enzyme that gives a piquant flavor to cheeses) and added these to cow’s milk to get something more similar in flavor to the sheep’s milk cheeses she loves.
Like most home cheesemakers, Lorine has had her share of both successes and failures as she’s been learning the craft. According to her, she had one colossal failure when following someone else’s online recipe for Drunken Cow cheese. Lorine says, “the recipe was weird and ended up, after soaking it in wine, looking like a flat round cork. In fact, I used it as a conversation piece on a cheese board and then it went in the trash!” Another less successful make was the time she made a paneer cheese with cumin and her husband said it tasted like dirt!
But she’s had many successes, too, and her favorite cheese to make is Guido’s Italian Hard Cheese. She says it’s easy to make and quick to age and can be flavored with different herbs, nuts and dried fruit easily. Lorine has started making sourdough bread as well, and her husband makes homemade wine, so they are all set – “a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and a hunk of cheese!”
submitted by Kate Johnson, July 2021
