Making Cheeses-

Anyone done this? Pointers? Sites to visit?

Id love to make a variaty of cheeses for pairing with beers!

MikeFlynn74 said:

Anyone done this? Pointers? Sites to visit?

Id love to make a variaty of cheeses for pairing with beers!

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There aren't too many good sites out there, but a good introductory book is Home Cheese Making. Probably the biggest hurdle to face with cheese making is setting up the humidity control in a spare fridge. It is not terribly expensive, but not cheap. Frankhauser (sp?) has an ok site, but he insists that using Junket rennet is ok. I have tried it that way with mediocre results personally, and the next time I delve into cheese making I am going to buy some good rennet, etc.

A good site for equipment/supplies is: Dairy Connection

SWMBO makes cheese, and it's damned good. She started off making simple soft cheeses like feta and ricotta but soon learned and progressed to harder, mord technically demanding cheeses. Yesterday we cut open a semi hard "Tome de Marc." It is a whole milk chees that she made back in September and after it sat for a few days on the counter to toughen thte rind she put it in a crock and covered it with the just pressed pommace of the Cab Savignon that I had pressed the day before. It was some kind of good. She had friends over for dinner yesterday and I had a few bites before I left for work and it was so good I filched a pound or so when she wasn't lookng and brought it out for my colleagues at about 3 am. Big hit! (Sure, anyone who breaks out food at 3 am gets rave reviews but this was great.) She says that the single biggest dfference in her cheese is when we foujnd a local farm a couple of towns over who will sell us unpasturezed whole milk. That made a world of difference.

Paul

Thanks paul- Thats what ive heard too- Use raw milk- Though it takes longer to cure its well worth it.

Ricki Carrol got me started making cheese and we have had a really good time doing it.

http://www.cheesemaking.com/
She has 2 kits one for soft and one for hard cheese and both are fun to do but the hard cheeses really need a press to do it right.

MikeFlynn74 said:

Thanks paul- Thats what ive heard too- Use raw milk- Though it takes longer to cure its well worth it.

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Yes, raw milk is far superior if you can get it. About the cure time though, I don't think there is any differece. There is, however, an FDA stipulation that cheese made from raw milk be aged over 60 (?) days before it is deemed 'safe' for sale and consumption (the theory here is that the infectious bacteria die off in this period of time, although to the best of my knowledge this is not necessarily as much proven fact as it is speculation on the part of the FDA).

A little note on Listeria, and such. In France, where cheese making has been from raw milk for ages, the process is what is predominantly different. Every day, from small scale farmers, who mainly milk by hand, the fresh (often still warm) milk is taken on a cart or wagon to the cheese maker. The big difference here is that there is a direct connection between the farmer and the milk vs. the large scale production here in the states where 1,000's of cows are connected to milk machines and every step is minimal in terms of human interaction.

Imho, there is much more room for infection in these cases and a bonefide need for pasteurization because a cow or goat is a number, not a well known animal of a small farmer's personal herd. He can tell when his flock is sick, etc. He alone bears the responsibility of wiping the teet, ensuring that contamination is minimized, etc. In the case of the latter, the tendency is to rely heavily on both Antibiotic treatment and post processing treatment rather than prevention.

Awesome! thanks for the info