Taken up any new hobbies recently?
Cheesemaking: earn your place on the board
Airfix, ballet, breadmaking... Tom Ough investigates the traditional pastimes suddenly absorbing the nation
Traditional hobbies are booming in lockdown, as Britons seek new pastimes in their droves. Tom Ough catches up with four people who have discovered fresh passions – and purpose
It is endemic. It passes from household to household, and wherever it is incubated it multiplies in scale. Such is our national obsession that you cannot open social media without seeing umpteen posts about it. By now it has infiltrated every part of our country and shows no sign of eradication.
I am talking, of course, about sourdough and the widely shared live cultures that start its development.
For every dry cough emitted in Coronavirus Britain, there are at least three beautiful sourdough loaves being lovingly ushered into being. They are gorgeous, they are delicious, and we are all sick of hearing about them, which is why this article on new lockdown hobbies will be sourdough-free from this point onwards.
For when historians look back at 2020, they might call this a golden age of hobbies. Those of us confined to our homes have more spare time than we’ve ever had, and there’s a surfeit of things to occupy our minds.
Many hobbies, while practised alone, are documented socially. Niche Facebook groups are swelling; our Instagram feeds are full of new creations. As Dr Jon Sutton, a chartered psychologist, explains: “Building and maintaining social identities is vital for our health and well-being. That’s a challenge in times of physical distancing, but people are getting creative around how they ‘stay together apart’. Building models and sharing photos of them on social media may be one way people are reaching out to others.”
This adds up to a situation where the public is clamouring for garden centres to open as soon as possible; where flour, for reasons I must not go into, has been stripped from supermarket shelves; where a man in Eastbourne, as per a BBC update in which his wife called him a “very sad husband”, has finally finished building a 30ft, regular-gauge railway in his back garden.
The man embodies Britain’s new hobbyists. The dedication. The enthusiasm. The sweet “hello, darling” he calls to his wife as she walks past his wagon, mockingly filming him.
Let us all be that earnest in our enjoyment of our new pastimes. Today, we present four hobbyists who, in their zealous and increasingly skilful adoption of unfamiliar pursuits, show the rest of us how we might use lockdown wisely.
Most Britons, we can safely assume, are chafing unhappily against the restrictions of lockdown, following the rules but eager to be let out. A fortunate minority, however, have no such desire to leave the house, for they already have everything they need. Scientists have finally identified the factor uniting that minority, and it is this: they can make their own cheese. Nikhil Subbiah, a 27-year-old lawyer who is spending lockdown with his family in north London, found himself running low on cheese at the beginning of self-isolation. “I researched how to make mozzarella,” he says, “and found it was surprisingly simple, at least in principle.” He explains how to do it, and it really does seem quite straightforward. You warm some milk with some lemon juice, taking care not to overheat it; you take the mixture off the heat and add rennet (a set of enzymes that coagulate the milk).
The rennet separates the mixture into curds and whey, and after a while you cut the curds into cubes and gently strain them over a sieve or cloth.
“Then you reheat the curds in the warm whey and try to shape them into balls,” says Subbiah. “I’ve found that the biggest challenges in the process are keeping the milk at an even 32C (90F) and not adding too much rennet, which is about the only way to make fresh cheese unpalatable. Shaping the curds by hand is also fiddly, but I’m getting better at it.”
Subbiah’s first mozzarella was a “crumbly monstrosity”, he says, “but it was still tasty in a salad with some tomatoes and olive oil”. Encouraged, he ordered a lot of milk, tried again, and has since produced other kinds of fresh cheese: ricotta, halloumi, paneer, cottage cheese and queso fresco.
The process doesn’t take long, which means that despite still working long hours, Subbiah is able to put food on his family’s table. “Unfortunately for them, yes, they have been subjected to all my experiments. My brother and I get quite competitive when it comes to cooking, so we definitely try to show each other up.”
In cheesemaking, Subbiah has found a project that suits a home working lockdown.
“Making cheese is just quick enough that it doesn’t take a full afternoon, but long enough that you can relax and forget about everything else, and there are enough simple cheese recipes for a complete beginner.”
A homemade cheese might not look as nice as a shop-bought cheese, but it will generally taste good, at least up until the more challenging aged cheeses.
“It’s nice to be able to make something that most people don’t think to make for themselves, and also to understand a little bit more about the process behind it – why some cheeses taste the way they do, how it developed, etc.
“If you’re making fresh cheese, it’s something you can do in a few hours at most and end up with a reliably delicious end product, and there’s less scope for it to go wrong compared with baking or other forms of food preparation.”