Cheese Making
fankhauserblog.wordpress.com
fankhauserblog.wordpress.com
(A lot of the talk in pizza making circles is about using very fresh mozzarella, based mainly on 'tradition'. Nathan Mhyrvold just published a book on pizza that seems to show a counter-argument. I'm not paying £300 for a cookbook without really knowing it's worth it though, so I'll wait for the British Library to get it.)
I think other fresh cheeses could be worthwhile. A similar process to mozzarella makes queso oaxahaca, which isn't easily found here. The big difference is oaxaca is stretched into an extremely long thread, then knotted, then dried.
I wouldn't want to make hard cheeses at home, the food poisoning risk is way too high for me.
Aged hard cheese, even raw milk cheese, is often exempted because the risk is much lower, and goes down with the age of the cheese.
Aged cheeses are too acidic and dry for most pathogens to grow.
Why do you say that? Hard cheese is much safer than soft cheese. Most instances of food poisoining are caused by fresh, soft cheese. Hard cheese is normally aged for a few months after which most pathogens (and most microbes in general) die off for lack of nutrients and moisture. Actually that's the mechanism by which cheese develops flavor as it ages: microorganisms in cheese die off and their ruptured cells release enzymes that interact with the proteins and fats in cheese to create new flavors.
In general, it's a very good idea to be careful when making cheese at home. Your first line of defense against food poisoning from homemade cheese is pasteurisation. Food poisoning risk from pasteurised milk products is going to be very low unless you're really careless.
Your other first line of defense is to have scrupulus sanitation practices. Sanitise every surface that will come into contact with cheese, or with anything that will come into contact with cheese. Boil all implements that can be boiled for at least 15' (that won't sterilise them quite, but it's close). Wash thoroughly everything you can't boil. Use separate utensils and receptacles for cheesemaking and separate ones for cooking to avoid cross-contamination. Use brushes rather than sponges for washing utensils and also keep them separate to avoid cross-contamination. Use clean paper towels, or sterilise your cloth towels before each cheesemaking session. Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water, duh, or use one-use gloves (preferrably sterilised) chaning them every time you handle cheese. That's my regime anyway!
I'm also curious about your comment that making mozzarella consumes too much milk. Normally you should get about 10-15% yield with cow's milk mozzarella, depending on how you make it. Are you making it by directly adding acid to milk (like citric acid or vinegar etc) or are you doing it traditional style? I think the direct-acid method can have lower yields.
I have become a vegetarian largely because of the climate impact of meat production. And though I have limited my dairy consumption, I still consume a fair bit of cheese and chocolate and coffee :(
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane
I'd agree that a $300 book sounds expensive. On the other side, I'm quite happy that someone as "crazy" as Nathan is willing to do this kind of work.
A lot of this "risk" people mention when it comes to traditional (ancient) food preservation techniques is a purely modern irrational-emotional perception, typically brought on by a once-in-a-while news report of some salmonella outbreak at an industrial-scale food manufacturer.
I see this irrational fear in circles related to homebrewing, charcuterie, pickles/sauerkraut, and more. It's unfortunate because this fear often drives people to deviate from traditional methods in ways that cause the final product to lack desirable properties like flavor, longevity, and nutrition, and can drive them to create something actually harmful to their health (like carcinogenic nitrates/nitrites in charcuterie).
I am Italian, I'm very proud of my country of origin, I defend regional diversity, but I'm also happy that they finally applied some common sense to this issue.
It feels like a great addition to a hobbyist cooks experience and in a similar space as fermentation (patience, temperature controls, accuracy where it counts)
Sounds Finnish.
Glad you asked! Juustolepia is a Finnish bread cheese that you can fry or bake. Unlike other cheese, it doesn't melt when you fry it: it just browns instead. Instead of using live cultures, Juustoleipa is curdled with a chemical culture (basically calcium chloride) that does not break down all the sugars in the cheese; the resulting a cheese also has a really low pH. The high natural sugar content means the cheese browns beautifully instead of melting when you fry it, which is pretty cool.
I think these will do for now :)
> Where was the creamery?
Heber Valley Artisan Cheese in Midway, Utah. (Wasatch Back)
> Where did your milk come from, did the creamery have its own animals or did it buy from an independent farmer?
We raise and milk our own cows :)
> What milk did you most often make cheese with?
We use cow's milk. Some of our cheeses are pasteurized, others are made with raw milk (it's is high enough quality to make into cheese w/out pasteurization, the resulting cheese is creamier, plus the low pH + heat kills off most bacteria).
> How much milk did you transform per day, on average?
Numbers may have changed since I left, but if memory serves: each day, we processed ~15,000 lbs (1,500 gallons) milk to produce ~1,200 lbs of cheese (50 standard 22-lbs wheels) and ~300 lbs curd. (We took out about 30% of each batch to sell as curd.)
> How many days a week did you spend on making cheese?
We'd usually make cheese in the mornings, clean the make room in the afternoon, then cut, package, and move around aging cheese in the evenings. 5 days a week, but sometimes Saturdays. We up our production in the summer, and decrease it in the winter.
> How did you process milk before making cheese?
Oh, I kinda already answered this! We make cheese with raw or pasteurized milk. We process the milk the day we make the cheese (which is usually the day after we milk the cows).
> What was your aging space like?
We aged in 'the cave' a basically a massive walk-in refrigerator room thing. We usually age cheese for a couple months to a few years, depending on the type of cheese it is, etc.
> And what were your customers like?
Very kind :)
We sell cheese, milk, ice cream, etc. through in store on the farm next to the cheese factory. We are also partnered with some grocery stores (Whole Foods, Harmons, Smiths) in the area, and some wholesale distributors.
Let me know if you have any more questions!
Do you still work there? Your answers kind of make it sound like you do, but don't work on the cheeses?
I worked there when I was younger (summer job as a teenager), but I don't work for them anymore (do SWE now).
I have tried this recipe with a wine cooler mini fridge, it took about a month and was very tasty https://fullofplants.com/vegan-blue-cheese/
The "solution" here is calcium chloride (CaCl₂) and the standard concentration is 30% by weight (the article says 0.02%).
CaCl₂ is needed to replenish the calcium lost during pasteurisation, and also during refrigeration. Basically any change to the temperature of milk will cause the calcium in the milk to precipitate which means it is less available to the rennet enzymes. I don't pretend to understand the chemistry any further than that, but that's why we add CaCl₂ to cheesemaking milk.
On the other hand, CaCl₂ doesn't do anything for homogenisation. Homogenisation basically pushes milk through a very small funnel with great force so that the fat globules in the milk cream burst and become more evenly distributed throughout the milk emulsion (milk is an emulsion!). This is done to consumer milk to avoid having the cream float to the top that, legend has it, consumers find icky. More honestly, the reason that milk is homogenised is to standardise its appearance so that its fat content is not immediately obvious, leaving the producer free to skim off any "excess" fat and standardise fat content to 3.5% on the dot, while the rest of the fat is sold as cream. Skimmed milk is the byproduct of the same marketing incentive.
In any case, pasteurised, homogenised and standardised milk can be used in cheesemaking just fine and indeed most commercially produced cheese sold today anywhere is made that way, both for public health reasons and for marketing and regulatory reasons (for example, regulations for PDO cheeses typically specify the minimum fat content of cheese, so cream must often be added or removed to meet them). On the other hand, setting a curd gets progressively more difficult the more such processing is applied to milk.
Pasteurisation is really the mildest treatment one can apply and it doesn't really hurt if the milk is fresh and good quality milk to begin with. Pasteurisation temperatures and durations are expressly tuned to avoid damaging the milk proteins (contrary to what the article says) while ensuring the total destruction of all vegetative forms of bacteria known to cause disease (the standard of 63°C for 30' is calculated to exterminate 100% of individuals of Coxiella burnetii with 97% accuracy, C. burnettii being the most heat-tolerant disease-causing bacterium we generally expect to find in raw milk). In my experience, home-pasteurised ewe's milk doesn't even need CaCl₂ to set the firmest of curds, rather the opposite, the problem is to keep the curd from coagulating too quickly (at least that is the case with sheep-derived rennet; bovine rennet tends to act less immediately on ewe's milk for some reason I don't understand. It's the same enzyme?). That's because of the highest amount of protein in ewe's milk that makes for a firmer curd and greater yields. Cow's and goat's milk are slightly thinner and they need more care to get all the variables right.
Homogenisation on the other hand, makes it much harder to set a firm curd. In my experience, making cheese at home with homogenised (cow's) milk from the supermarket, I always get a thinner curd and have a lower yield than normal, so I avoid it. There's nothing I know of that can be done to improve homogenised milk. How the large factories do it, I know not, but for anyone who doesn't have a factory the best is to stay away from homogenised milk if you're making your cheese at home.
Also: don't make cheese with raw milk. You'll regret it. Trust me.
Re: "don't make cheese with raw milk. You'll regret it." If the only non-homogenized milk I can find is raw, is it safe to home-pasteurize it (63C for 30 mins,) or am I better off using the homogenized stuff?
I've only made ricotta and mozzarella so far, but I've been thinking about diving into hard cheeses soon. I was just talking to my partner about cheesemaking over the weekend, so a random cheesemaking article on Hacker News is rather serendipitous...
That's something you need to decide for yourself, depending on your risk tolerance and considering who you'll share your cheese with. Me, I make all my cheese with home-pasteurised milk. I buy it raw and I pasteurise it in my cheese vat. I think that this makes it much safer than raw milk, although probably not as safe as milk pasteurised in a dairy plant. The combination of heat and time in home pasteurisation is just as effective as the process most commonly used in dairy plants (72°C for 15 seconds) but there are more opportunities for post-pasteurisation contamination in a home kitchen and anyway I'm an amateur so I can always bungle something without even knowing until it's too late.
Btw, the reason we do it this way at home (63°C for 30') is because for pasteurisation to be done right every milk particle must be heated to the target temperature for the indicated time, which is much harder to do when the duration is short. For the same reason I stir gently but constantly while the milk is on the stove and also make sure that the needle of my milk thermometer is one or two degrees above the target temperature, because thermometers always have some error and it's best to err on the side of overheating than not-pasteurising. Also, pasteurisation temperatures are standardised for cow's milk with 3.5% fat so if you have fatter milk, say from Jersey cows or from ewes (as I do) you need to increase the temperature (so I pasteurise ewe's milk at 65°C for 30').
You can find more information about this kind of pasteurisation if you search online for "Long Time Low Temperature pasteurisation" (or "LTLT pasteurisation") or "vat-pasteurisation". Here's a very comprehensive report on pasteurisation in general:
https://www.foodstandards.govt.nz/code/proposals/documents/S...
To be honest I used to think that home-pasteurisation is just as safe as industrial pasteurisation but I had a conversation with a professional cheesemaker who told me it basically isn't and recommended that I age my cheeses for two or three months to be sure (as a general rule, the longer cheese has aged for, the safer it is to eat). To be more honest, I mostly do, but I also make some fresh cheeses that I eat within a couple of weeks. I expect though that if I was really messing it up with sanitation, I'd be seeing some signs like early blowing more often (currently I'm at 0 times, that is). So I think I'm doing it right. Anyway for me home pasteurisation is well below my risk threshold so I'm fine with it.
On the other hand, the big problem with microbes is that you can't see them, so unless you have access to a bio lab everything you do to get rid of them is basically ritual and your faith in your procedures is er, well, it's just that, faith. So it's up to you to decide what you think is safe. In fact I know plenty of folks who swear by raw milk and have been making cheese with it for many years. But I also know of professional cheesemakers who have killed off a few of their clients with their raw milk cheeses, so I feel my responsibility is to warn people against it.
I have friends who raise goats, and it sounds like it's time to give them a call. I'll err on the side of safety and read more on home pasteurization. Thanks for the info!
https://cheesemaking.co.uk/ (UK)
https://cheesemakingshop.co.uk/ (UK)
https://www.ya-tout-fromage-maison.fr/ (French)
Also, these guys in Poland have been recommended to me by someone whose cheesemaking skills I trust, but I haven't tried them myself:
https://www.hardiegrant.com/au/publishing/bookfinder/book/ki...
I've only made a couple recipes from it, but it really helped me understand cheese and fermented dairy in general.
The easiest one to start with is ricotta, and then Mysost[1] with the leftover whey
1. https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipe...
But I wouldn't recommend making Mysost in a particularly nice pot, it's hard to clean the caramelized cheese off of it
One would imagine starting from something like paneer would be more practical, no rennet needed etc.
Anyway, second the recommendation on trying cheese-making, if anybody is looking for book recommendations, ‘The art of natural cheesemaking’ (David Asher) seems like a good starting point.
Worth noting though that (afaiu anyway) you can't make ricotta with whey from paneer - since you've already introduced acid to coagulate, there's too little if any protein left. Use it instead in bread, or in place of water in anything that you might also add yoghurt or cream to. e.g. if you make palak paneer or mattar paneer with your paneer, use the whey instead of water to reach the desired consistency.
I'm not sure you can really make mysost from the whey left over from acid-coagulated cheese. I used to make cheese by straining milk kefir. I made mysost/ brunost from the leftover whey a couple of times and it was intensely acidic. So much so that I used it as a thickener in soups, rather than eat it on my toast. If you want the silken, slightly tangy tofu butter style of mysost, then I don't think you can get it without whey from rennet cheese.
I wasn't aware there is non-rennet and rennet ricotta. I was using the whey method for Mysost, and even that is pretty inedible without adding a bit of cream, so I linked that recipe.
I also agree, paneer is a great start.
Starting with ricotta gives you a higher yield of ricotta :)