A few months ago, a fellow cheese maker from Manitoba, Canada named David, contacted me about one of the cheese recipes that I posted and asked a few questions. We became cheese making pen pals so to speak, and the other week, he told me about a curd cutter that he made from stainless steel. Here is a picture of it.
It looks great, and I have always envied those commercial cheese makers that use this type of tool for making the horizontal cut in their curds. Anyway David describes how to use it as such;
"Cutting the curds diagonally from the top always resulted in lots of big pieces, certainly much bigger than the 1 cm that was stipulated. Mine is tapered because my pot slopes in from top to bottom and the width is the same as the radius of the pot. So I just push it down and rotate the pot 180 degrees, then do the vertical cuts. The whole thing is stainless steel with nylon fishing line as the cutting 'wires'. It works very well for me anyway."I was so impress, that I asked him how to make one, with which he offered to make one for me out of wood and send it over to me here in Australia for free, as a thank you gift for all of my cheese tutorial videos. So on my doorstep yesterday, this arrived. Click on the photo to enlarge.
This curd cutter is a work of art! The attention to detail is second to none. The wood is very stiff, and I think it may be maple as David mentioned that this was probably a perfect wood for the task. The cross bars are dowel, and it is screwed and glued together. The cutting wires are nylon fishing wire and the entire tool is lacquered and solid as a rock.
Thank you so much David, I shall use it during my next cheese making session on Friday and let you know how it goes. I am over the moon!
