Pizza Talk Season Two, Episode 7: Meet Mark Todd, the Cheese Dude

Welcome back to Pizza Talk!

Some background: Over 35 years ago, before I was a bread baker, I entertained the notion of becoming an artisan cheese maker — that is before I lost control of a batch of about 20 wheels of home made cheddar cheese and was greeted by a walk-in covered in blue mold, including all the produce my wife was counting on in her job as head cook at a retreat center with about thirty residents. I spent most of that day scrubbing out the walk-in and trying to figure out how to save my cheeses (“Maybe I can just call them blue cheese instead of cheddar,” I thought).  Anyway, despite this near disaster (yes, I washed the mold off of every wheel and saved the cheese which, after some additional aging, turned out amazing and probably non-replicable), I love cheese — all cheese — which helps to explain why I also love pizza.

Recently, I heard about this guy, Mark Todd, who lives only 10 miles from where I lived during my cheese making days, in western Sonoma County, who is known as the “Cheese Dude.” That’s all you need to know at this point, as the rest of the story is all told here, in this conversation with Mark the Cheese Dude, as he takes us on his journey of fermentation passion, and also gives a master class in understand the category of cheese known as pasta filata, of which mozzarella is the most familiar example.  In future episodes Mark has promised to take us through all the categories of cheese, so enjoy this session and I’ll keep you posted, as we continue to explore the whole gamut of cheeses, category by category.