8 ms·

Cheese Making

98 points by bsilvereagle 5y ago

teetertater 5y ago
I've tried cheese-making and can highly recommend! The easiest one to start with is ricotta, and then Mysost[1] with the leftover whey 1. https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipes/mysost-cheese/ https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipe...
- soperj 5y ago
  Did you have to get a whole new set of pots?
  - teetertater 5y ago
    Absolutely not! The only special things I bought were cheese cloth and a food thermometer But I wouldn't recommend making Mysost in a particularly nice pot, it's hard to clean the caramelized cheese off of it
- nereye 5y ago
  ‘Starting’ by making ricotta seems a bit odd in that ricotta (like Mysost, as per link above) is made starting from by-products of making other kinds of cheeses in the first place (fresh/sweet whey). 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.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Agree with the paneer suggestion - the only equipment needed is a pot & muslin; only ingredients are milk & acid (e.g. lemon juice); it's easy; it tastes better than what you can buy (here in the UK anyway); you can have it however soft or firm you like it. 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.
  - cheese_goddess 5y ago
    The ricotta meant by the OP is an acid-coagulated cheese, like paneer. If I understand correctly, that's how "ricotta" is made in the States. In Europe, particularly in Italy, "ricotta" is a whey cheese made with the whey left over from rennet-coagulated cheese. The same kind of cheese is called urda in Romania and myzithra/ anthotyro in Greece. 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.
    - teetertater 5y ago
      Thanks for backing me up on this cheese_goddess :) 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.
  - ddek 5y ago
    I mean, you can make ricotta and mozzarella at the same time. I also agree, paneer is a great start.
  - teetertater 5y ago
    Yep, normally this is true and this a good suggestion, but you don't have to if you just want to keep it simple! Starting with ricotta gives you a higher yield of ricotta :)
stephen_g 5y ago
Anybody wanting to get into this might be interested in Gavin Webber on YouTube [1]. Makes all sorts of cheeses, I find watching it interesting and I’ve never even made any and not particularly a cheese enthusiast! 1. https://m.youtube.com/c/GavinWebber https://m.youtube.com/c/GavinWebber
- PickledHotdog 5y ago
  That legal battle he got into over the Grana Padano was epic[1]. Also, the amount of rage he causes amongst Italian YouTube commenters for what he does with cheese. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_AzMLhPF1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_AzMLhPF1Q
  - mdek 5y ago
    There was a HN discussion[0] on this back in 2020. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226513
  - simonebrunozzi 5y ago
    At the end, the Cheese consortium sort of apologized to him [0]. 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. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xy_KkZDiTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xy_KkZDiTE
ryannevius 5y ago
Anybody have source recommendations for cheese cultures in Europe? I made cheese for years in North America, but have found it difficult to source ingredients in EU. Perhaps I'm not looking in the right places.
- Croftengea 5y ago
  I'd be interested too.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  Here's a few links that I've tried myself: https://cheesemaking.co.uk/ https://cheesemaking.co.uk/ (UK) https://cheesemakingshop.co.uk/ https://cheesemakingshop.co.uk/ (UK) https://www.ya-tout-fromage-maison.fr/ 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://serowar.eu/ https://serowar.eu/
- radarsat1 5y ago
  i've been doing it in the netherlands, i found that the online craft beer suppliers also often supply cheese making ingredients. eg brauwmarkt
- wortelefant 5y ago
  I order my vegan cheese cultures from https://www.kaese-selber.de/ https://www.kaese-selber.de/ in Germany, good results so far
felipellrocha 5y ago
I love cheese making (made a few goudas by now), and cannot recommend it enough. It’s basically edible chemistry. Fun, challenging, and delicious.
luxurytent 5y ago
Cheese making is a hobby I intend to get into in a few years, when I have more time in the evenings (read: kids get older). I've been subscribed to /r/cheesemaking (https://www.reddit.com/r/cheesemaking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cheesemaking/) for some time now, gathering inspiration, bad ideas, and good ideas! 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)
cheese_goddess 5y ago
> The one remaining problem relates to use of pasteurized, homogenized milk (as one would get from the store). I am less familiar with it than the fresh raw goat’s milk I use, but the processing alters the protein structure, and may cause problems establishing a firm curd. Some recipes call for purchasing a solution from a cheese making supply house, and adding “1/2 to 1 teaspoons” per gallon (5-10 mL). 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.
ddek 5y ago
Making mozzarella was a real 'been there, done that' kinda thing. It's satisfying work, but it consumes so much milk it's not really economically viable and the milk I'm using isn't as good for cheesemaking as the better producers. I'd do more of it, but my office in Liverpool Street (London) is right next to an Eataly that make fresh (made in front of you) buffalo mozzarella at a fair price. (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.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  Can you go into more detail on the food poisoning risk for hard cheeses? I'd quite like to make some hard cheese, but I'd rather not die.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    Maybe not what you were asking, but pregnant women are often recommended by public health systems to avoid raw milk and soft cheeses. 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. https://111.wales.nhs.uk/livewell/pregnancy/FoodstoAvoidHW/ https://111.wales.nhs.uk/livewell/pregnancy/FoodstoAvoidHW/
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  > I wouldn't want to make hard cheeses at home, the food poisoning risk is way too high for me. 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.
isaacimagine 5y ago
I worked as an apprentice cheesemaker, making mostly curds, cheddars, jacks. Ask me anything! ("What's Juustoleipa?" might be a fun place to start)
- soperj 5y ago
  What's Juustoleipa?? Sounds Finnish.
  - isaacimagine 5y ago
    > What's Juustoleipa 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.
    - soperj 5y ago
      Is that kind of like Halloumi cheese?
      - isaacimagine 5y ago
        Pretty similar, but Halloumi is traditionally made with goat/sheep milk, whereas Juustoleipa is Cow or Reindeer(!) milk.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  I know about bread cheese :) So I want to ask: where was the creamery? Where did your milk come from, did the creamery have its own animals or did it buy from an independent farmer? What milk did you most often make cheese with (I assume cow's milk?). How much milk did you transform per day, on average and how many days a week did you spend on making cheese, versus tending to cheese (like aging etc)? How did you process milk before making cheese (pasteurisation, homogenisation, etc)? What was your aging space like? And what were your customers like? I think these will do for now :)
brodouevencode 5y ago
Did I see this correctly? The author has posts that date back to 1978 - has he been keeping a log that long?
zucker42 5y ago
Blessed are the cheese makers
zucker42 5y ago
Blessed are the cheese makers.
- neverartful 5y ago
  and all makers of dairy products!
druadh 5y ago
Huge cheese lover, but I honestly didn't make it past that low res, unappetizing hero image - made me queasy. Might wanna replace that. Unsplash will prolly have a free cheese stock photo
wortelefant 5y ago
There is also an emerging community of vegan cheesemakers, I can recommend to at least trying to produce it that way. When producing vegan cheeaes, I learned that the flavor mostly comes from the cultures involved, and that good cheese does not need to involve animal suffering. I also enjoyed the 'food hacking' factor and inventiveness of recreating a cheese with different ingredients. 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/ https://fullofplants.com/vegan-blue-cheese/
derbOac 5y ago
I loved this book: https://www.hardiegrant.com/au/publishing/bookfinder/book/kitchen-creamery-by-louella-hill/9781452111629 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.

98 points by bsilvereagle 5y ago

I've tried cheese-making and can highly recommend! The easiest one to start with is ricotta, and then Mysost[1] with the leftover whey 1. https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipes/mysost-cheese/ https://www.culturesforhealth.com/learn/recipe/cheese-recipe...

soperj 5y ago
Did you have to get a whole new set of pots?
- teetertater 5y ago
  Absolutely not! The only special things I bought were cheese cloth and a food thermometer But I wouldn't recommend making Mysost in a particularly nice pot, it's hard to clean the caramelized cheese off of it
nereye 5y ago
‘Starting’ by making ricotta seems a bit odd in that ricotta (like Mysost, as per link above) is made starting from by-products of making other kinds of cheeses in the first place (fresh/sweet whey). 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.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Agree with the paneer suggestion - the only equipment needed is a pot & muslin; only ingredients are milk & acid (e.g. lemon juice); it's easy; it tastes better than what you can buy (here in the UK anyway); you can have it however soft or firm you like it. 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.
- cheese_goddess 5y ago
  The ricotta meant by the OP is an acid-coagulated cheese, like paneer. If I understand correctly, that's how "ricotta" is made in the States. In Europe, particularly in Italy, "ricotta" is a whey cheese made with the whey left over from rennet-coagulated cheese. The same kind of cheese is called urda in Romania and myzithra/ anthotyro in Greece. 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.
  - teetertater 5y ago
    Thanks for backing me up on this cheese_goddess :) 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.
- ddek 5y ago
  I mean, you can make ricotta and mozzarella at the same time. I also agree, paneer is a great start.
- teetertater 5y ago
  Yep, normally this is true and this a good suggestion, but you don't have to if you just want to keep it simple! Starting with ricotta gives you a higher yield of ricotta :)

stephen_g 5y ago

Anybody wanting to get into this might be interested in Gavin Webber on YouTube [1]. Makes all sorts of cheeses, I find watching it interesting and I’ve never even made any and not particularly a cheese enthusiast! 1. https://m.youtube.com/c/GavinWebber https://m.youtube.com/c/GavinWebber

PickledHotdog 5y ago
That legal battle he got into over the Grana Padano was epic[1]. Also, the amount of rage he causes amongst Italian YouTube commenters for what he does with cheese. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_AzMLhPF1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_AzMLhPF1Q
- mdek 5y ago
  There was a HN discussion[0] on this back in 2020. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226513
- simonebrunozzi 5y ago
  At the end, the Cheese consortium sort of apologized to him [0]. 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. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xy_KkZDiTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xy_KkZDiTE

ryannevius 5y ago

Anybody have source recommendations for cheese cultures in Europe? I made cheese for years in North America, but have found it difficult to source ingredients in EU. Perhaps I'm not looking in the right places.

Croftengea 5y ago
I'd be interested too.
cheese_goddess 5y ago
Here's a few links that I've tried myself: https://cheesemaking.co.uk/ https://cheesemaking.co.uk/ (UK) https://cheesemakingshop.co.uk/ https://cheesemakingshop.co.uk/ (UK) https://www.ya-tout-fromage-maison.fr/ 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://serowar.eu/ https://serowar.eu/
radarsat1 5y ago
i've been doing it in the netherlands, i found that the online craft beer suppliers also often supply cheese making ingredients. eg brauwmarkt
wortelefant 5y ago
I order my vegan cheese cultures from https://www.kaese-selber.de/ https://www.kaese-selber.de/ in Germany, good results so far

felipellrocha 5y ago

I love cheese making (made a few goudas by now), and cannot recommend it enough. It’s basically edible chemistry. Fun, challenging, and delicious.

luxurytent 5y ago

Cheese making is a hobby I intend to get into in a few years, when I have more time in the evenings (read: kids get older). I've been subscribed to /r/cheesemaking (https://www.reddit.com/r/cheesemaking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cheesemaking/) for some time now, gathering inspiration, bad ideas, and good ideas! 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)

cheese_goddess 5y ago

> The one remaining problem relates to use of pasteurized, homogenized milk (as one would get from the store). I am less familiar with it than the fresh raw goat’s milk I use, but the processing alters the protein structure, and may cause problems establishing a firm curd. Some recipes call for purchasing a solution from a cheese making supply house, and adding “1/2 to 1 teaspoons” per gallon (5-10 mL). 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.

ddek 5y ago

Making mozzarella was a real 'been there, done that' kinda thing. It's satisfying work, but it consumes so much milk it's not really economically viable and the milk I'm using isn't as good for cheesemaking as the better producers. I'd do more of it, but my office in Liverpool Street (London) is right next to an Eataly that make fresh (made in front of you) buffalo mozzarella at a fair price. (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.

zarzavat 5y ago
Can you go into more detail on the food poisoning risk for hard cheeses? I'd quite like to make some hard cheese, but I'd rather not die.
- derbOac 5y ago
  Maybe not what you were asking, but pregnant women are often recommended by public health systems to avoid raw milk and soft cheeses. 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. https://111.wales.nhs.uk/livewell/pregnancy/FoodstoAvoidHW/ https://111.wales.nhs.uk/livewell/pregnancy/FoodstoAvoidHW/
cheese_goddess 5y ago
> I wouldn't want to make hard cheeses at home, the food poisoning risk is way too high for me. 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.

isaacimagine 5y ago

I worked as an apprentice cheesemaker, making mostly curds, cheddars, jacks. Ask me anything! ("What's Juustoleipa?" might be a fun place to start)

soperj 5y ago
What's Juustoleipa?? Sounds Finnish.
- isaacimagine 5y ago
  > What's Juustoleipa 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.
  - soperj 5y ago
    Is that kind of like Halloumi cheese?
    - isaacimagine 5y ago
      Pretty similar, but Halloumi is traditionally made with goat/sheep milk, whereas Juustoleipa is Cow or Reindeer(!) milk.
cheese_goddess 5y ago
I know about bread cheese :) So I want to ask: where was the creamery? Where did your milk come from, did the creamery have its own animals or did it buy from an independent farmer? What milk did you most often make cheese with (I assume cow's milk?). How much milk did you transform per day, on average and how many days a week did you spend on making cheese, versus tending to cheese (like aging etc)? How did you process milk before making cheese (pasteurisation, homogenisation, etc)? What was your aging space like? And what were your customers like? I think these will do for now :)

brodouevencode 5y ago

Did I see this correctly? The author has posts that date back to 1978 - has he been keeping a log that long?

zucker42 5y ago

Blessed are the cheese makers

zucker42 5y ago

Blessed are the cheese makers.

neverartful 5y ago
and all makers of dairy products!

druadh 5y ago

Huge cheese lover, but I honestly didn't make it past that low res, unappetizing hero image - made me queasy. Might wanna replace that. Unsplash will prolly have a free cheese stock photo

wortelefant 5y ago

There is also an emerging community of vegan cheesemakers, I can recommend to at least trying to produce it that way. When producing vegan cheeaes, I learned that the flavor mostly comes from the cultures involved, and that good cheese does not need to involve animal suffering. I also enjoyed the 'food hacking' factor and inventiveness of recreating a cheese with different ingredients. 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/ https://fullofplants.com/vegan-blue-cheese/

derbOac 5y ago

I loved this book: https://www.hardiegrant.com/au/publishing/bookfinder/book/kitchen-creamery-by-louella-hill/9781452111629 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.