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Food

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Cheese wiz!

Yummy science experiments make it OK to play with

your foodSTORY BY BAYLEE PULLIAM PHOTOS BY JOHN P. CLEARY

Four-year-old Maylon DeLury likes cooking. More than that, he likes eating: Yummy

sandwiches, crumbly cookies and just about anything else he makes with his mother, Melody, in their Anderson kitchen.

Today’s a pizza kind of day, chef Maylon’s decided. Mom obligingly plays sous chef, collect-ing all the supplies to make the gooey, fresh moz-zarella cheese that goes on top.

“You need to use all the ingredients,” says the pint-sized gourmet, retrieving a little shaker of salt from the other side of the counter, already full with glass beakers and bottles of whole goats’ milk, cool water, rennet, lipase powder and citric acid.

If that sounds more like a chemistry lab than the ingredients to make cheese, you’re wrong. And right. It’s kind of both, really.

“There’s a lot of science in cooking,” Melody said. And she hopes some of those little science lessons — ranging from chemical change to ther-

modynamics — stick with Maylon when he enters preschool this fall.

“It’s always kind of a toss-up of what sticks and what doesn’t when they’re this little,” she said. “He’s at least going to know what a thermometer is and the basics of measuring.”

For example, he’ll know that when the ingredi-ents are added together, they become an entirely new thing — a stretchy, ooey-gooey thing that tastes good with tomato sauce and bread.

He’ll also learn about ratios, physical proper-ties and about states of matter, when that bottled liquid milk magically transforms into solid cheese. And about heat transfer, when the same milk starts bubbling in its pan on the stove.

“Look at that!” he says excitedly. Then looking at the thermometer, he asks his mom why the lit-tle LCD numbers are ticking “up and up and up.”

“Because the milk is heating up,” she says, “We’ve got a fire under it, and that’s what fire does. But those aren’t all numbers — do you

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“I’d like to think if he sees it (science) can be applied to everyday life, that it’s

something he can use, he’ll see that maybe it’s not always numbers and all that — it can

be fun.” Melody DeLury

Melody DeLury makes cheese with her son.