Cheesemaking
Milk is meant to be cheese.
Cheesemaking was my doorway into fermentation in the early 90s. I am awe struck every time I make cheese, all the shapes, textures, and flavors.
Along the way I embraced home cheesemaking that followed in the footsteps of commercial cheesemaking in the United States which relies on denaturing milk, commercial cultures, and ingredients—which while troublesome for many reasons, do make home cheesemaking accessible and successful.
Natural cheesemaking has since taken a hold of me—it just makes sense that we don’t need to grow things in laboratories to make cheese.
If you are new to cheesemaking and don’t have access to fresh, raw, never refrigerated milk, I recommend a solid foundation and successes with pasteurized milk, commercial cultures and molds, coagulants, and so forth. Then move onto cheeses that rely on wild cultures such as clabber, whey, ripe milk kefir and yogurt, homemade coagulants, and home harvested molds.
I’ve found it helpful to recognize the outcomes with some controls before heading down the road of raw milk cheeses, culturing with milk kefir (or raw milk’s endemic cultures and other natural cultures) months long aging with natural rinds, and so forth.
If I could only pick two books from this list for making cheese at a small scale at home, I would select Gianaclis Caldwell’s Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking and David Asher’s The Art of Natural Cheesemaking. This list doesn’t include my older and out-of-print favorites that are hard to find and/or expensive or books geared to small-scale artisan cheesemakers rather than home cheesemakers.
Asher, David. The Art of Natural Cheesemaking: Using Traditional, Non-Industrial Methods and Raw Ingredients to Make the World’s Best Cheeses. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015.
Tucked in the appendix of this book is David’s framework for natural cheesemaking. It spells out the practices that a natural cheesemaking world would work within. It important to remember that the framework is for use within a locality, a regional foodshed if you will, so there are concerns about that are addressed simply with limited scale at a regional level. This book will walk you through using milk kefir as a milk culture, natural rinds and cloth bandaging, and skirting around much of the use of plastics. No vacuum bag aging here.
All that said, the challenge with natural cheesemaking for most folks in the U.S. is access to fresh, raw, never refrigerated milk—so I recommend that short of moving to Tennessee and getting a herd of goats or a couple dairy cows, that we work mightily and closely with local farms that are producing milk and convert the seasonal bounty into cheese.
Caldwell, Gianaclis. Mastering Basic Cheesemaking: The Fun and Fundamentals of Making Cheese at Home. 2016.
I understand that not everyone is going to want to jump into Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking, although I highly recommend doing so as it is an incredible course you can work yourself through.
Caldwell, Gianaclis. Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking: The Ultimate Guide for Home-Scale and Market Producers. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013.
When this book was first published, I couldn’t add to cart fast enough. Gianaclis is an expert with decades of experiences and I’d followed her farm online for years. This book is my number one recommendation for folks who are ready to be self-directed learners and work through the book. It is a course on cheesemaking in book form. Rather than teaching you to mimic a cheese that you might grab at a store, she teaches the techniques that result in various types of cheeses. If you have attended one of my cheesemaking workshops and we made feta-esque together, check out Gianaclis’s recipe in this book which is the inspiration for my feta-esque. (Ingredients are milk, .2 gram Flora Danica, and 1 Walcoren tablet per gallon of milk)
Carroll, Ricki, and Ricki Carroll. Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses. North Adams, MA: Storey Books, 2002.
This book is popular and for good reason, it’s easy. I’m not knocking easy however if you want to head down the road of creating a cheese unique to your terroir, this book will have trouble leading you down that road. That said, if the goal is a glut of milk processed and put up to enjoy later, go for it.
Farnham, Jody. The Joy of Cheesemaking: The Ultimate Guide to Understanding, Making, and Eating Fine Cheese. 2015.
A nice tidy and graphic volume that is easy to digest. It covers all the basic FAQs in a straightforward fashion. It highlights a number of artisan cheesemakers too.
Karlin, Mary. Artisan Cheese Making at Home: Techniques and Recipes for Mastering World-Class Cheeses. 2011.
There are times when we want to make that cheese we enjoyed at the fancy cheese shop. There are a number of recipes in this book that will help with that. It’s not a cheesemaking course, it is cheesemaking recipes.