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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

Some years ago, I decided to make cheese as a hobby. Got a starter kit, bought an extra fridge and so on.

Turns out making cheese is -really- easy. Milk, rennet, culture, time.

Making -specific kind of cheese- though is hard. Recipes are very precise (so you need things like good pH measurers).

The biggest problem for me was the waiting time. I'm into software - fix, recompile, run, repeat. Whereas 'leave for 3 months, 6 months, a year, and see if you got it right' was too slow of a feedback loop.

These days I only make soft-cheeses, take a week or less, and only in tiny batches (and irregularly).

Overall learning the process was fun, and a cool thing to do, but if you want good cheese, well, find a good cheese store :)

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I think this advice is mostly correct based on my experience taking a cheesemaking class last year. They had all kinds of dedicated mini-fridges scattered around their house

Having said that, they introduced me to this handy site where they said folks can get any missing equipment and the calcium chloride additive for store milk: https://cheesemaking.com/collections/beginner

Then, speaking of the raw milk, because I know quite a few folks are in the Bay Area, they said - and I confirmed - they sell raw milk at the Oakland farmer's market on Saturday https://www.agriculturalinstitute.org/grand-lake Regrettably I don't recall the name of the vendor, and of course have no idea if they're present every Saturday

There is a vendor in Auburn CA, which is actually a thrift shop for Kids Stuff (its an upscale area - so hand-me-down stuff from higher income, single kids)....

However, in the back they have a little shop for Raw Milk Single Cow.

So you can subscribe and its super limited quantity, but they provide whole raw milk sourced from a single cow.

Super amazing - and the plug that forms on the top is amazing creme.

Another option is to make friends with whomever you can to learn where high-end products are sourced at MIchelin restaurants, I have someone very close to me who was at french laundry for years and their vendors (aside from certain veggies grown in the garden across the street) were from very particular vendors - such as their lamb which comes only from one specific farm.

The point being that you should find out who high-end restaurants source from and seek them out directly.

(most of the crab sold in San Francisco restaurants was sold by Royal Hawaiian Seafood, but the public could only purchase from them for one hour on a tuesday between 12pm and 1pm - but you get the same live crab that SF charges $65+ for, for $5...)

(Find out restaurants of ilk for things you like)

If latency is too high then use a pipeline to increase throughput.

Yeah, but that gets expensive real quick.

A rule of thumb is 10% cheese, 90% whey. So it takes a lot of milk to make say 1kg of cheese. And if you're waiting a year 1kg gets eaten pretty quickly.

The size of your fridge (and the cost of running it) dictates the size of your pipeline.

If an error is discovered, and that error was consistent through the pipeline, that's an expensive error. (Its all usually edible, but if you're trying to make say cheddar and it's not cheddar, then you have a lot of something else...)

At my local cheese shop there might be 10 varieties of cheddar. I can eat all of them but 1 or 2 are my personal favourites. Making something that matches one of those would take decades of experimenting.

Turns out, I like -eating- cheese, more than I like -making- it.

OTOH, whey can be turned into the delicious Norwegian "brunost" (literally "brown cheese") by just reducing it down until it caramellizes and then adding fresh cream in various amounts.

Especially if you have whey from goat milk, you get excellent brunost. Put it on waffles together with some strawberry jam, best thing in the world.

Traditional ricotta is also made from whey.

Brunost really is an acquired taste though. I don’t let that stuff near my food. :)

I think if one likes working in the kitchen they should try things like this. But, for me, certain things the trade-off of time/value isn't really worth it. For example, I can make croissants, but the time it takes to do them just isn't worth it to me when I can pick up some good ones when I am out. But, a French or Italian loaf, on the other hand, is really simple to do pretty good, so I just do those at home.

Homemade croissants are far superior to anything found at any store, due to having to sit out for some time. Same as sushi, I bought some otoro for fairly cheap, cooked some rice, and it was the best sushi I've had in my life.

>Making -specific kind of cheese- though is hard.

Shepherds and sheepherders in my country make traditional kinds of cheese, which are very specific, with ease. They use their eyes and experience, they don't use lab glassware and they don't measure PH.

Sure, but that's one specific type of cheese that they can make whereas they would have extreme difficulty making any of the other hundreds(?) of types of cheeses. If you want a specific type you're still going to need a recipe and the tools to follow it.

Pretty much all of the cheeses were invented long before pH meters were. The pH scale itself was invented only in the early 1900’s.

Technology is great for making a large amount of cheese that’s very similar. You don’t need it to make any specific type of cheese that’s over 100 yrs old though, and that’s nearly all of them.

Sure, you don't need technology — as long as you have exactly the same climate and other conditions as where the original cheese was made.

Or Google them and have a refrigerator and humidity control.

You just mentioned three pieces of technology.

Oh I see, this was a standard “aaaaaaactually” comment. We were discussing labware and pH meters. Cheesemaking is itself technology.

And they are using very specific kinds of milk, and specific kinds of temperatures and specific environments and probably have specific kinds of bacterial and fungal cultures wafting on the breeze.

Yes, but they probably couldn't decide to swap and crack out a Parmesan or a Camembert next week instead.

making a specific kind of cheese is mostly about replicating the traditional procedures and ambient conditions of the place that cheese originated.

"go to this specific valley in switzerland and spend 20 years immersing yourself in their cheesemaking tradition" is arguably a lot more difficult than following some specific procedures and measuring carefully.

i have been looking into that too and faced the same problem.

where i live, cheese shops do not exist. european style cheese has to be imported and is way to expensive. local options are barely useful for pizza.

i learned how to make yoghurt (from my chinese wife, surprisingly) and a few times turned milk going bad into a cheese experiment that sometimes worked out.

now i am making kefir which turns out to be a lot easier than yoghurt because it works at room temperature, whereas yoghurt needs milk slightly heated.

> Overall learning the process was fun, and a cool thing to do, but if you want good cheese, well, find a good cheese store :)

Strongly seconded. Unless you have a full blown cheese cellar in which to store a hundred wheels and experiment over years, there's pretty much only one cheese that the average cook can make that would be cheaper and taste better than buying in a store (unless you're in Italy) and that would be burrata. Store bought burrata has a much bigger markup than other cheeses and the machine method they use to make it here in the US is inferior to the hand shredded version.

Never heard of burrito before, but mozzarella is quick so easy to make, so this looks like a fun one to do.

I expect, like most quick cheeses, it's all about the texture, not the flavour?

> Never heard of burrito before

I would start with the Americanized version at Chipotle and move up from there :)

On a serious note, I'm not sure if you can use the usual quick mozzarella recipe [1] for burrata because the mozzarella might not be stretchy enough to form the shell or the mixture might be too acidic - I forgot what the issue was. You'll have to use the proper recipe [2] which is quite a bit more involved (I also recommend looking up videos of Italian cheesemongers making burrata for the technique, there are tricks to it). A sous vide recirculator comes in real handy.

Burrata is more about the flavor of the cream which combines very nicely with the texture of the cheese. Definitely recommend getting the cream from a proper dairy even if you don't get raw milk for the cheese. The stracciatella absorbs the cream which creates a unique and very rich flavor.

[1] https://cheesemaking.com/products/30-minute-mozzarella-recip...

[2] https://cheesemaking.com/products/burrata-recipe

Don't forget the whey! If you're making burrata, you get ricotta for practically free. From there, if you're feeling fancy, you can make ricotta salata. Otherwise, put both into a divine lasagna.

Also, cheese curd is super easy. Ripening it into something fancy is a trick, but, poutine!

Also paneer! Paneer is so easy to make and you can go from milk to useable product in literally about 2.5 hours.

It’s honestly so much nicer also, I always find store bought paneer to be somewhat hard and lack the buttery taste of the fluffy homemade stuff

Try soaking store-bought paneer in warm water. I simmer it on low for 10 minutes while cooking the rest of the meal.

The paneer turns so soft and fluffy that it’s hard for me to distinguish from homemade.

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