Comment by cheeze_whizz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheeze_whizz | Hacker News Reader

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> If you are a cheese connoisseur, knowing how to make your own at home can unlock a world of unpasteurized possibilities.

Gotta push back against that.

If you're a budding cheesemaker and you don't know what you're doing, don't start with unpasteurised (raw) milk. The professional cheesemakers who make cheese with raw milk know the microorganisms in their milk down to the species and they know it's safe to make cheese with that milk. Unless you have a biology lab next to your house who are willing to look at milk samples, then you simply don't have the same information and everytime you use raw milk you're playing the lottery, and a lottery that you win by losing. Heuristics like "but the animals look healthy" are meaningless, there are bacterial diseases that have very different effects on humans and animals, for example brucellosis (caused by the Brucella bacteria) causes recurring fevers to people but only causes miscarriage in animals. And how would you know that an animal is having a fever, or is not healthy, if you're not, yourself, a farmer?

Even if you don't get sick, raw milk cheese can go bad easily and I mean it can blow up and turn into a sponge-like structure in what is called "early blowing" caused by the gases released by bacteria and yeasts infecting unpasteurised milk. If you don't mind your cheddar turning into a cheesy rugby ball with the consistency of carrot cake, go right for it, but don't say nobody warned you.

Gotta push back gently against your push back. First you make a good point about raw milk - it is raw and hasn't been "pasteurized". The source of any raw milk needs to be checked carefully. And all milk needs to be handled properly.

However "raw milk can go bad easily and I mean it can blow up ... etc" is not helpful. Millions of people did and do drink raw milk. Cheese was invented by people because raw milk was so valuable as food that it was stored for long periods of time.

In the present day we are informed of risks in a sometimes random way. Automobiles are perhaps the most dangerous things in our lives. And they certainly do go bad and explode. Or crash into people. Yet we still drive and cross the street. We manage our risks.

Our food supply is now managed for us by giant corporations. They try very hard to make as much profit as possible - often by using materials and processes that are untested and may cause unexpected problems. BPA? Forever chemicals anyone? Thalidomide? Have you looked at what they have done to chicken? And perhaps most important is obesity. Sugar anyone? How many aisles in your grocery store are completely devoted to sugar? How many to salt? Did you know that purchasing these supposedly safe products may cause you to explode? :-)

So in your risk assessment you might consider your health risks from all sources. I am not arguing against being careful, just to intelligently whey your choices.

> In the present day we are informed of risks in a sometimes random way. Automobiles are perhaps the most dangerous things in our lives. And they certainly do go bad and explode. Or crash into people. Yet we still drive and cross the street. We manage our risks.

We manage that risk through rules and safety regulations, like ABS and airbags.

> Our food supply is now managed for us by giant corporations. They try very hard to make as much profit as possible - often by using materials and processes that are untested and may cause unexpected problems.

Pasteurization is just heating milk. It's one of the best tested processes in existence.

Rejecting safety measures is just rolling back centuries of progress. Those giant corporations would love it if they didn't have to take elaborate precautions to make food and cars safe, because those take effort and cost a lot of money to provide.

> Rejecting safety measures is just rolling back centuries of progress.

Of course we have to sometimes roll back safety measures as the world changes.

* Many places that used to chlorinate water no longer do, because the water has gotten cleaner. * The US chlorinate's chicken, and hopefully they'll stop at some point. * Many places no longer require you to heat eggs, because salmonella had been eradicated. * Nobody wears covid masks anymore because the risk of covid is so low.

Here's to hoping we'll be able to roll back many more safety regulations in the future.

> First you make a good point about raw milk - it is raw and hasn't been "pasteurized"

Why the scare quotes? Pasteurization is one of the most important contributions to public health in the last 500 years.

>Pasteurization is one of the most important contributions to public health in the last 500 years.

Right. And it was invented / discovered by Louis Pasteur, who also made some other important discoveries related to health and disease.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

We learned about him in high school.

Potential safety issues aside, what are the purported advantages of using unpasteurized milk? Do people feel like it tastes better?

I have a small amount of experience making cheese, and have only made it with pasteurized milk as it is not easy to find raw milk where I live. However, in the US at least, there is both pasteurized and ultra pasteurized milk. Pasteurized uses a lower temperature for a longer period than ultra pasteurized. The vast majority of milk in the US is ultra pasteurized. My understanding from reading articles on cheesemaking is you can't really use it to make cheese as the curd doesn't develop correctly. While I haven't made cheese with raw milk, there is no doubt it tastes better than processed milk. I know because I worked on a dairy farm when I was young, and used to drink it practically straight from the cow. I did get sick once though, so it's an actual risk.

In my experience - same Gouda recipe with good quality pasteurized milk and raw milk - the raw milk cheese is an order of magnitude better. I am not completely sure why, but the whey I understand it:

Milk proteins change with the pasteurization process. Pasteurization heats milks to between 149 - 161 (my best understanding). Using raw milk, the milk (usually) gets up to 100 F at most in the cheese making process. I believe that the effect of the heat accounts for the change in the flavor, but what do I know? In addition using pasteurized milk requires more rennet, more culture and the addition of calcium chloride. I'm not sure if this is a factor or not.

Best analogy is white bread vs sourdough. The extra bacteria hanging around make for a more complex, but less consistent flavour. The flavour will vary by season, by year, and by maturing environment (for example the Stichelton that's around right now isn't nearly as good as what was available before Christmas, to the point where my local cheesemonger has retired it for a bit). Raw milk cheese has terroir by the bucketload.

Interestingly (to me, anyway) raw milk can be clabbered. This is the simplest way to get a sense of the complexity raw milk cheese has, by comparing clabbered milk with commercial sour cream or buttermilk (but don't try to clabber pasteurised milk, it's dangerous).

As said before there is no compariso , both in milk and cheese form. I am surprised there are people who never drank raw milk.

There is no comparison.

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