A video-driven online encyclopedia of cheese called “Joy of Cheese,” created by a Delmar man who quit his career as an engineer in the energy field to devote attention to developing the course, is an extraordinary overview of a staple of the human diet that dates back 7,000 years.
Divided into 20 main lessons totaling about five hours of video, with three more hours of video for another 20 try-this-at-home exercises, “Joy of Cheese” covers topics as broad as the history and chemistry of cheese and an outline of the 10 basic cheese families, and as specific as wrapping techniques for different cheese shapes and how to tell whether a cheese is still safe to eat. Nuggets of amusement appear throughout, like crystals in aged Parmigiano-Reggiano, such as “cheese mites are tiny, harmless arachnoids … found on most dry natural-rind cheeses” and an answer to the question “What the hell is Easy Cheese?”
“On the one hand, it’s meant to be comprehensive,” said creator Jeremy Snyder, who also stars in the videos, did all the research, created animations and illustrations like this cheese protein matrix, and built the website. He said, “On the other hand, I tried to devise a course that’s not too overwhelming. A student can choose how they want to experience it.” The amount of work the course took to develop in the five years since Snyder dumped his engineering career is boggling. He tells me the written script for the main lessons alone runs to 60,000 words — 20% longer than “Fahrenheit 451” and more than twice the length of “The Old Man and the Sea.”…