Hacker News Reader

Comment by comrade1234 | Hacker News Reader

I make cheese (ricotta and paneer) from raw milk all of the time at home. Raw milk is easy to buy here in Switzerland.

I get a noticeably better result with raw milk than pasteurized, and terrible terrible results from ultra-pasteurized milk. By 'better' I mean quantity per liter but also the size of the curds.

The thing that I find amusing is that I think people in the USA actually just chug raw milk like it's regular milk. Don't do that! You're supposed to heat to 60C minimum. When you make cheese you heat to higher - around 85C, when the milk surface turns foamy.

A lot of cheese here is from raw milk. I'd even say most but I don't know that for sure. But even though you aren't pasteurizing the milk (high temp under pressure for short time) you are killing the bacteria on the first step.

View on HN

You're just pasteurizing the raw milk at home by heating it. But it's interesting that pasteurizing at home right before use still makes better cheese than store bought pasteurized milk. Wonder why. Perhaps raw milk is just superior for reasons besides its lack of pasteurization? In the US at least it's only the very premium milk that can be bought raw.

Ricotta and paneer appear to be high-heat cheeses, where pasteurization is implicit in the first step even if the milk wasn't pasteurized to begin with.

Cheddar, the kind of cheese allegedly at issue in this outbreak, appears to be a low-heat cheese, so you wouldn't start by heating the milk to pasteurization temps. If the milk isn't already pasteurized, the resulting cheese might be contaminated.

European soft cheese makers allegedly follow protocols to ensure that there's not substantial bacterial contamination in the beginning; they carefully handle the milk through the beginning of the cheesemaking process, after which the culture and salt and acidification stall any further bacterial growth; then aging cuts down any bacterial population to safe levels, and it's never reached a level where it could produce dangerous levels of toxins.

Competent American raw-cheese makers would do the same thing, but in the interest of supplying "raw milk product" fanatics, unscrupulous businesses will cut corners for profit. High contamination levels of the initial raw milk, or substantial cross-contamination after aging, is probably what led to this and the company's previous cheese contamination problems.

> in the interest of supplying "raw milk product" fanatics

You might be on to something. In the US, raw milk cheeses are not at all unusual. It's not even especially hard to buy raw milk, although (at least where I am) you generally need to go to a fancier grocery store or a farmer's market to find it.

But what is weird is that the farm in question literally calls itself "Raw Farm". There are many cheesemakers, both mass-market and high-end, that make both raw-milk and pasteurized-milk cheeses, but they don't generally go out of their way to brand their cheese as one or the other -- if you care, you can read the ingredient list. These companies' product is the cheese, not the rawness of the cheese -- if it tastes good, customers will buy more!

But Raw Farm seems to be a farm that makes a specific point of being, well, raw, and that's strange. Maybe it's a better idea to buy one's raw milk cheeses from an ordinary dairy :)

In the US, if you're actually seeking out raw milk cheese, watch out. If the milk is pasteurized but not legally pasteurized (inspected, licensed, documented) it must be sold as raw milk cheese. Even if you boiled it for an hour first.

Then there's also some raw milk cheese that is heat treated for less than the requirement for pasteurization, but still much hotter than required for the cheese process.

Depends entirely on the state. In Wisconsin, the "dairy capital of the world", its illegal except for incidental sales directly from the dairy farm.

Reason being they don't want outbreaks to be linked to Wisconsin's dairy industry.

Heating milk to destroy pathogens has a name. It was named after the guy who originally discovered the process, Louis Pasteur.

The well known process of Louisurising milk.

When I make raw milk cheese (small commercial, USA) the milk gets only about 1-3 degrees (Fahrenheit!) above the cows body temperature.

Also our family has been drinking raw milk all our lives, and there are a lot of people who come to our farm and get raw milk to drink.

I'm not aware of anyone ever getting sick from our milk (unless lactose intolerant/allergic of course).

If you are heating your milk to 85C, I'm sorry, but that's not really raw milk cheese anymore. When I make pasteurized cheese the milk is heated to only 63C (albeit for 30 minutes).

Isn't the amount of cheese determined by amount of fat/protein in the milk itself and pasteurized is sometimes skimmed?

The yield is determined by the components (fat, protein, and other solids) in addition to the process the milk has underwent, and the cheese recipe. In our cheese making there's not a noticeable reduction in yield on pasteurized cheese, but we do a lower/slower pasteurization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com