When I went to that guy’s house to make cheese, he introduced me to Belper Knolle.

This hard, dry, peppery cheese originated in Belp, Switzerland, and is actually a fairly new cheese (or so I’ve read). It’s similar to quark, but with fresh garlic and salt mixed in, and then shaped into balls, rolled in black pepper, and left to age at room temperature for a couple weeks prior to vacuum packing and refrigerating. 

after the curd’s hung for 24 hours, dump it in a bowl and add the fresh garlic and salt

knead in the salt and garlic

shape into balls

roll in pepper and airdry for 2-4 weeks

Since the process is low-tech— no cutting and stirring of curd, no cheese press, no saturated brine — this is a great cheese for beginning cheesemakers. Plus, it’s ready to eat relatively quickly (only a few weeks of wait time) which makes it a gratifying one to start with.

Regarding texture, I’ve had varying results. At the two-week mark, the cheese was firm yet sliceable, but at the four-week mark, it was so dry that it shattered under the knife. The cheese came from two different batches, which may explain the difference. Or maybe I air-dried the one batch too long? (But the cheese guy’s Belper Knolle was sliceable and his was six months old.) Or maybe Belper Knolle’s supposed to be dry and crumbly? Either way, it doesn’t really matter. The taste is incredible. Earlier cheeses are more pungent from the garlic and in older ones, the garlic is more mellow. In both, the pepper gives it a serious kick. Some bites are downright fiery.

I like to eat Belper Knolle shards with crackers, but it’s actually supposed to be a food condiment, like a truffle. (Not that I’ve ever cookes with truffles.) I’ve read that some people keep it on the counter and grate it into everything: scrambled eggs, pasta, roasted veggies, baked potatoes, soups. A couple weeks ago, I grated two little balls and added them to spaghetti carbonara in place of the Parmesan and black pepper — the reviews were off the charts.

Belper Knolle
Adapted from a variety of recipes and sources: Gavin Webber, New England Cheesemaking, and The Biegel Family.

Any kind of mesophilic culture will work, I think, but I like flora danica. Also, when scaling up to three gallons of milk, I don’t really increase the dry culture — maybe just a smidge more.

If mold grows on your Belper Knolle, don’t worry about it. Just scrape it off.

And finally, how to pronounce Belper Knolle.

2 gallons milk
½ cup whey leftover from making cheese with mesophilic culture
(OR ¼ teaspoon dry mesophilic culture)
4 drops rennet in ¼ cup cool, unchlorinated water
3-5 teaspoons salt
4-6 cloves fresh garlic, pressed
½ cup ground black pepper

Pour the milk into a stockpot and heat to 86 degrees. Stir in the mesophilic culture and then the rennet. Cover with a lid and let sit at room temperature, undisturbed, for 24 hours. After 12 hours, the milk should be solid, like jello; at 24 hours, the milk jello should have condensed and shrunk, and there should be a layer of whey on the top. 

Pour/ladle the curds into a cheesecloth and hang for 24 hours. Lots of whey will come out, so you may have to dump the whey-catching bowl a couple times — keep an eye on it. After 12 hours, open up the bag and stir in 2 teaspoons of salt (this will help express more whey); retie and rehang.

After it’s drained for 24 hours, dump the cheese into a bowl and add the crushed garlic and 3-5 more teaspoons of salt, depending on how salty you like your cheese. Form the cheese into balls — somewhere between a golf ball and a tennis ball. They will shrink as they dry. Roll each ball in the ground black pepper, until you no longer can see any white peeking through.

Place the balls on bamboo mats, or very clean wooden boards or cooling racks, and let air dry for 1-3 weeks (I usually aim for 2 weeks), turning the balls daily. If little bits of mold form, brush them off, pat on more pepper, and proceed.

After a couple weeks, the cheeses should feel firm when squeezed. Vacuum seal them and continue to age in a wine fridge (or regular refrigerator) for another 2-6 months. The flavor should improve with age — deeper, stronger, more mellow — but you can eat them at any time. 

This same time, years previous: fig walnut biscotti, pasta with chicken, broccoli, and oven-roasted tomatoes, o happy!, salted caramel ice cream, contradictions and cream, the quotidian (10.8.12), pear butterscotch pie.

While messaging with one of my friends, a critical care nurse, she mentioned that “…we should be doing virtual community tours so people know about unvaccinated hell,” and then she told me she’d written about her experiences. I’d love to read what you have, I said. 

I cried, reading about her experience, and then wrote back, “People need to hear this. May I share?” 

She said yes, and now, after a bit of back-and-forth collaboration, here we are.

***

A Nurse’s Lament

I write about each of the Covid patients I care for in the Intensive Care Unit — just a short blurb jotted down in my personal Covid journal reviewing the major events of their progression, things they shared with me before they could no longer talk, and things their family told me about them. Initially, I did this as a way to remember them, to capture their struggle in Covid isolation that only the medical staff was witness to, and so I wouldn’t forget their journey, but now, eighteen months later, I realize I also need to do it out of recognition of my own trauma. Work feels different this second wave of the pandemic — so needless, as our ICU patients have almost all been unvaccinated. 

Recently, when one of the families finally decided to stop the weeks of futile treatment on their middle-aged brother and son, they wept over our final video chat, asking me to please stay with him so he would not die alone. 

“Of course,” I said. “I will be with him the whole time. My patients never die alone.” 

I stopped his dialysis, unhooked the IV meds that were keeping his heart going, and disconnected the ventilator. His body hung on longer than I anticipated. I stood by his bedside, stroking his hair, holding his hand, periodically repeating the 23rd Psalm, and singing the hymns and lullabies that I sang to my children at bedtime. He never woke up, but if he had any awareness at all, he was never alone. 

Later, I felt angry that I’d been put in that position, yet again: I bore the burden of his decision to refuse a life-saving, preventative measure at the cost of my own mental trauma. My own community has decided not to trust us — the healthcare providers who are also their neighbors, friends, and family, and who have their best interests in mind — and instead follow the inflammatory advice of radio and YouTube personalities, performers who are far more dynamic and entertaining than I am but who are woefully uninformed regarding medical treatments and evidence-based practices. And we — me and my fellow medical workers — must bear the brunt of the fallout. 

Three days later I was once again in the same room, this time doing CPR on a previously healthy man in his 40s who’d been admitted the same day as my last patient, the one who had just died. Once other medical staff arrived to help, I got the patient’s wife on a video call and sat the iPad in the corner of the room to watch so she could make informed decisions about his care. “We didn’t believe in Covid,” she’d wept into the phone each time I talked with her in the days prior. By now, her husband’s organs had been ravaged by the clotting malfunctions of Covid and, after forty-five minutes of watching us attempt to save him, she requested an end. My heart went out to her, but my head just couldn’t comprehend — how is it we’ve been living in such different realities? 

In Covid ICUs across the country, these scenarios are commonplace. The suffering is staggering. Covid patients are subjected to many hours of laying on their bellies to maximize viable lung tissue. Their faces and eyes swell due to the pressure from the face-down position, the excess fluid, and their stressed circulation. Because of the high-pressure ventilation required to recruit and maintain oxygen levels, their chest, neck, and arms fill with air directly beneath the skin, causing it to pop and crackle with every touch. They no longer look like the people their families once knew. 

My coworkers and I watch as patients who are not yet at the point of needing a ventilator slowly wear out and give up. They cannot remove their oxygen devices long enough to eat, and their mouths are parched from the constant high-pressure airflow from the face mask. They struggle for each breath, and even though they hold as still as possible to reduce all demands on their bodies, they’re practically panting, breathing 30 or 40 times a minute. To help their families understand the dire situation, we try to carve out time for the family to video in — this is yet another distressing interaction that we must bear witness to. 

Our ICU is on divert, almost continuously. We have some empty rooms, but there is not enough staff with proper training to care for the Covid patients, so sometimes patients are shipped several hours away in search of an available ICU bed. Beds open up when patients die. Does our community know this? Would knowing this help change people’s minds in favor of getting the vaccine? Would it make the unvaxxed a little more cautious? A little less invincible?

We have lost so many of our ICU staff, and I, too, have considered walking away in favor of lucrative travel nursing position, other less-intense hospital departments, maybe another career entirely. I understand why medical staff leave — this job is hard. But when I get the desperate texts from work for help and see the holes in our staffing matrix, I often say yes, mostly because I know how overwhelming it is to work with inadequate staffing. I don’t want to put my coworkers in that position. And yet I am so tired of sacrificing my own physical and mental health, and my time with my own family, for people who have declined, discredited, and denied our medical advice. 

I have been working in these conditions for the last eighteen months. I am numb, angry, and heartbroken, sometimes all at the same time, and I am exhausted. I often go hours without a break to eat or drink. I have learned to make a quick run to the restroom before gearing up because it may be hours before I can go to the bathroom again. The bruise across the bridge of my nose and cheeks is painfully tender from relentless hours in my N95. 

I see photos on social media and TV of people eating in restaurants, of packed college football stadiums, of full grandstands at county fairs, and I feel betrayed by my community where the vaccination rate hovers around fifty percent. Seeing these large gatherings, I feel both angry and teary, overwhelmed by the virus’s continued, unchecked transmission and hopeless that this will ever end. 

I understand the deep desire for normalcy, but at what cost? Mine? 

I want normal, too.

***

Thank you for sharing, friend. I am so grateful for the work you do.

This same time, years previous: it’s for real, one foggy morning, maple sugar and cinnamon popcorn, rustic cornmeal soup with beet greens, serious parenting, sweet rolls.

Quotidian: daily, usual or customary;
everyday; ordinary; commonplace

In process, a grape juice reduction (that just so happens to make a fabulous addition to milkshakes).

My son’s fiancé made her family’s beloved celebration cake for my birthday.

Curd brains.

Quail pearls: fried, they make cute one-bite appetizers.

The comparison.

I can not get enough of this cobbler.

Stripes on stripes.

Every time I see her (or so it seems), my mom, the Thrift Store Queen, is wearing a new pair.

Faucet fixer.

Girlfriend’s got some whack eyeball-wiggling skills.

Top dog.

A peanut butter spoonsicle for quick, Ultimate energy.

Another step in the bedroom makeover.

Birthday hike.

Birthday supper at my parents’: excellent company, toasty toes, and the perfect after-dinner cup of coffee.

This same time, years previous: sunflowers, the quotidian (10.2.18), twelve thousand doughnuts, a different angle, the soiree of 2014, a lesson I’d rather skip, catching our breath, the quotidian (10.1.12), Sunday cozy, pulled braised beef.