Cheesemaking tips from the ancients
laphamsquarterly.org
laphamsquarterly.org
One of the details that sticked with me was that, in his village, there was a lady whose job was to pee on cheeses. She'll go from cheese maker to cheese maker, and do her thing on each piece.
Also a windmill gore accident, bestiality with a cow, rape by a grandma and mugging by the police.
But the cheese pee is still my favorite.
Dave at Dairy Connection is a wonderful guy and a great source for supplies and connections: http://www.dairyconnection.com
Also, see cheesemaking.com
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE31MqUy6nIMJ_f8y4R3_AA
But other than that, I think the best thing is just to make cheese. My wife is in charge of the credit card in our family and when I told her I wanted to make cheese, she wisely suggested that I see what I could do with things I could find at the grocery store -- just to see if I would still be interested after 3 days (she knows me well!)
I started with some fresh cheeses -- mostly ricotta. I learned why UHT milk can't be used for anything other than ricotta. I experimented trying to make cheese from yogurt and discovered why that doesn't work. I did many google searches about how rennet works and how acid curds are formed (I believe it is the University of Wisconsin that has a really good page somewhere about how casein micelles knit together in a variety of situations, but I can't seem to find the page right now).
In the end I discovered that you can make a hard cheese by inoculating milk with yogurt (thermophilic culture), bringing the temp to 42C, letting it ripen for 40 minutes, then slowly adding citric acid while stirring slowly with a whisk. The resulting curd will melt slightly (!) and you can ladle that into a camembert hoop (which I fashioned by cutting the ends off of a pet bottle and poking holes in the side with an awl). If you drain for 4 hours, flipping every hour, it will form a delicate cheese that you can brine. It's essentially a lactic cheese (even though the final curd is made with citric acid, not rennet). I let mine age in my regular refrigerator and it eventually formed a rind. I'm still waiting to taste it, but I've done a couple of cheeses that way and eaten them fresh and they were delicious (tart, crumbly, like a Caerphilly or Wendsleydale). I've also tried making a fresh cheese with a butter milk culture (mesophilic) with a washed curd. It was also delicious, but I'm not sure that washing the curd actually did anything -- it's already too acidic at that point.
Anyway, I feel like it's almost like playing a game without reading the spoilers :-) It's super fun just experimenting and by and large you can make a cheese of some description. I need to wait until winter to do some more "normal" cheeses, but my experiments have whetted my appetite (and I've unlocked the "you can use the credit card" achievement).
He visits a convent where the sisters are making raw milk cheese. It's fascinating.