> If you are a cheese connoisseur, knowing how to make your own at home can unlock a world of unpasteurized possibilities.
Gotta push back against that.
If you're a budding cheesemaker and you don't know what you're doing, don't start with unpasteurised (raw) milk. The professional cheesemakers who make cheese with raw milk know the microorganisms in their milk down to the species and they know it's safe to make cheese with that milk. Unless you have a biology lab next to your house who are willing to look at milk samples, then you simply don't have the same information and everytime you use raw milk you're playing the lottery, and a lottery that you win by losing. Heuristics like "but the animals look healthy" are meaningless, there are bacterial diseases that have very different effects on humans and animals, for example brucellosis (caused by the Brucella bacteria) causes recurring fevers to people but only causes miscarriage in animals. And how would you know that an animal is having a fever, or is not healthy, if you're not, yourself, a farmer?
Even if you don't get sick, raw milk cheese can go bad easily and I mean it can blow up and turn into a sponge-like structure in what is called "early blowing" caused by the gases released by bacteria and yeasts infecting unpasteurised milk. If you don't mind your cheddar turning into a cheesy rugby ball with the consistency of carrot cake, go right for it, but don't say nobody warned you.
Gotta push back gently against your push back. First you make a good point about raw milk - it is raw and hasn't been "pasteurized". The source of any raw milk needs to be checked carefully. And all milk needs to be handled properly.
However "raw milk can go bad easily and I mean it can blow up ... etc" is not helpful. Millions of people did and do drink raw milk. Cheese was invented by people because raw milk was so valuable as food that it was stored for long periods of time.
In the present day we are informed of risks in a sometimes random way. Automobiles are perhaps the most dangerous things in our lives. And they certainly do go bad and explode. Or crash into people. Yet we still drive and cross the street. We manage our risks.
Our food supply is now managed for us by giant corporations. They try very hard to make as much profit as possible - often by using materials and processes that are untested and may cause unexpected problems. BPA? Forever chemicals anyone? Thalidomide? Have you looked at what they have done to chicken? And perhaps most important is obesity. Sugar anyone? How many aisles in your grocery store are completely devoted to sugar? How many to salt? Did you know that purchasing these supposedly safe products may cause you to explode? :-)
So in your risk assessment you might consider your health risks from all sources. I am not arguing against being careful, just to intelligently whey your choices.
> In the present day we are informed of risks in a sometimes random way. Automobiles are perhaps the most dangerous things in our lives. And they certainly do go bad and explode. Or crash into people. Yet we still drive and cross the street. We manage our risks.
We manage that risk through rules and safety regulations, like ABS and airbags.
> Our food supply is now managed for us by giant corporations. They try very hard to make as much profit as possible - often by using materials and processes that are untested and may cause unexpected problems.
Pasteurization is just heating milk. It's one of the best tested processes in existence.
Rejecting safety measures is just rolling back centuries of progress. Those giant corporations would love it if they didn't have to take elaborate precautions to make food and cars safe, because those take effort and cost a lot of money to provide.
> Rejecting safety measures is just rolling back centuries of progress.
Of course we have to sometimes roll back safety measures as the world changes.
* Many places that used to chlorinate water no longer do, because the water has gotten cleaner. * The US chlorinate's chicken, and hopefully they'll stop at some point. * Many places no longer require you to heat eggs, because salmonella had been eradicated. * Nobody wears covid masks anymore because the risk of covid is so low.
Here's to hoping we'll be able to roll back many more safety regulations in the future.
I have a small amount of experience making cheese, and have only made it with pasteurized milk as it is not easy to find raw milk where I live. However, in the US at least, there is both pasteurized and ultra pasteurized milk. Pasteurized uses a lower temperature for a longer period than ultra pasteurized. The vast majority of milk in the US is ultra pasteurized. My understanding from reading articles on cheesemaking is you can't really use it to make cheese as the curd doesn't develop correctly. While I haven't made cheese with raw milk, there is no doubt it tastes better than processed milk. I know because I worked on a dairy farm when I was young, and used to drink it practically straight from the cow. I did get sick once though, so it's an actual risk.
In my experience - same Gouda recipe with good quality pasteurized milk and raw milk - the raw milk cheese is an order of magnitude better. I am not completely sure why, but the whey I understand it:
Milk proteins change with the pasteurization process. Pasteurization heats milks to between 149 - 161 (my best understanding). Using raw milk, the milk (usually) gets up to 100 F at most in the cheese making process. I believe that the effect of the heat accounts for the change in the flavor, but what do I know? In addition using pasteurized milk requires more rennet, more culture and the addition of calcium chloride. I'm not sure if this is a factor or not.
Best analogy is white bread vs sourdough. The extra bacteria hanging around make for a more complex, but less consistent flavour. The flavour will vary by season, by year, and by maturing environment (for example the Stichelton that's around right now isn't nearly as good as what was available before Christmas, to the point where my local cheesemonger has retired it for a bit). Raw milk cheese has terroir by the bucketload.
Interestingly (to me, anyway) raw milk can be clabbered. This is the simplest way to get a sense of the complexity raw milk cheese has, by comparing clabbered milk with commercial sour cream or buttermilk (but don't try to clabber pasteurised milk, it's dangerous).
The first thing is to understand how different mass produced cheeses are from the "real" thing. If you like and expect the plastic wrapped cheddar from the grocery store then do not bother. Before starting I highly recommend visiting a very good cheese store and trying a bunch of cheeses, especially hard ones. The cheese you make at home is more akin to a fine wine. It will have character, subtlety and textures you may not have experienced.
I personally find the easy and soft cheeses - like mozarella - to be much less rewarding than a Gouda or Cheddar. Feta is the one exception to this, but this is only my opinion. One reason for this preference is that the amount of work-time required to make any type of cheese is pretty much a constant (not how long you age it). The same is true for the amount of cheese you make. It takes basically the same amount of time to convert one gallon of milk into one pound of cheese and six gallons.
If you want to make cheese you will need to consider where and how to age your cheese (aka a cheese cave), how to press your cheese (aka a cheese press) and a source of good quality milk.
I started by making some easy cheese's (Guido's Italian-like) and liking the result enough to get an apartment fridge with an adapter/thermostat as a cheese cave. I got a cheese press from cheesemaking.com and I found a source of raw milk.
I cannot recommend cheesemaking.com enough. They have good quality at very fair prices, have a long list of recipes and will answer email questions with kindness and knowledge.
Youtube has some outstanding video's to help you along. Someone mentioned Gavin, but if you search for "cheddar" you can find a large number of people who all use variations for making cheddar.
I can now make cheeses - even from pasteurized milk - that are every bit as good as very expensive gourmet cheeses. My only problem is that I tend to eat them instead of letting them age long enough. I guess that is a stretch goal.
Something that most "make your cheese" articles forgot to mention (and this is no exception) is that that large amount of leftover whey can - and should - be used to make ricotta.
Making ricotta from fresh milk is just not an accurate way to make ricotta. And, if done properly, is probably even more delicious than any cheese you have been making.
If you make it straight from milk it's (not yet pressed) paneer - it won't have the creaminess of ricotta. It is a decent way of quickly approximating khoya (milk solids by evaporation) though, I think.
I've occasionally seen suggestions to use whey from paneer to make ricotta, which is nonsense - it's already been acid-split to make the paneer, all you're really doing is taking some of your paneer curd and calling it ricotta.
Oh, khoya is a really decadent treat. I call it decadent because of the amount of sugar (they put) in it, at least the times I've had it as a kid. But some of that may the naturally occurring sugars in milk, such as lactose, when concentrated by removing the water in the milk. Or maybe they put no sugar in at all.
Anyway, it has a really rich taste and texture.
It is an even more concentrated milk product than paneer.
Not sure if I would compare paneer and Khoya (i don't think you could make Gulab Jamun out of paneer), but I agree on the rest of the line. My main point is that there's an abundance of how to articles that are ignoring ricotta entirely, and that's sad! :(
I probably paid $20 in organic whole milk retail and a few hours of time for a yield of about $7 worth of mozzarella. The economics likely make more sense for aged cheeses where you can have some value add in your process to make it more notably homemade. Everything about dairy in Canada is absurd anyway, so you may have better luck elsewhere. Something I can make in sufficient quantities to age and enjoy over a longer period would make the afternoon more worthwhile, imo.
It is also much harder to make a good aged cheese then a good fresh cheese. There's a lot more chance for bad bacteria to contribute a bad flavor or spoil the cheese if you give it more time.
Speaking as the son of a small commercial cheesemaker, who started out (~23 years ago) making cheddar that only stayed good for about a week in the fridge. Now we make aged cheddar.
Oh, trust me, the economics don't work out. And that's just for raw materials - if you factor your labor and energy (especially if you age it in a refrigerator) then it's even more bonkers.
But its a fun hobby - if you can stand the long feedback cycles.
Personally I'm pretty much only making a sort-of curd-cheese now [1] with left over (sour) milk. Its fast to make, only ages for a couple weeks, and then I use it in a quiche. Which works really well and us more of a way to use excess milk than actually "make cheese".
[1] I use citric acid and heat to separate the curd, then put that in moulds to drain for 2 weeks are do - minimal pressing. Forms a firm, crumbly curd with a mild sour flavor.
I made a large wheel once, and matured it for a year, and it was edible, but nothing special. That's too long for me to get the feedback I need to improve.
If you wanted a fermentation product that is doable in the home with quicker lead times and more variation, kimchi or other pickled veg is a pretty good candidate.
Lacto fermentation is fantastic. I do it with my 4yo son, he also comes up with new things to try. We regularly do kimchi or something similar, tomatoes, green beans, red sauerkraut. He suggested strawberries which was great.
Takes about a week, cheap and very easy. A decent kimchi here is £4.50 for a small pot, maybe 250-400g? I can make 2kg+ for less. Kimchi is the only one I've seen sold out of the list too. I highly recommend trying it, if you have a vac sealer it's even easier.
There are a ton of things you can play around with making at home and you by all means should if you enjoy it and want to learn more. Kombucha is another one I haven't seen mentioned here. I did a fair bit of beer brewing at one point--but mostly before there was such a great local supply of microbrews/craft brews. (You couldn't basically get IPAs, which is of course nothing like the case today.)
But, yeah, you don't really save money in general and decent commercial products you can easily get many places are as good or better.
There are exceptions. Some bread products (including biscuits etc.) are reasonable to make at home, especially if you don't have convenient access to a good baker. (There are a few in the city but not near me.)
I find cooking in general is rewarding and can save quite a bit of money.
>Kombucha is another one I haven't seen mentioned here...you don't really save money in general and decent commercial products you can easily get many places are as good or better.
Kombucha is the exception.
I make kombucha at home. The labor is extremely minimal (basically the same effort as making a gallon of sweet iced tea) and the economics absolutely make sense - the cost less than $1 a gallon for me to make it vs $3-5 for 16 oz at the grocery store. Plus I already have pounds of tea at home.
The other reasons I make it are to avoid having to haul heavy bottles into the house and because I prefer unflavored kombucha and only flavored ones are widely available commercially.
Fair. But, like a lot of these things, economic home production probably also requires a fair bit of production/use. My problem was that I just wasn't drinking enough and my scoby ended up contaminated.
Yeah, if you use a lot and are just producing unflavored, kombucha is pretty easy/cheap.
Even making your own yogurt is not cost efficient. It is literally cheaper to buy yogurt than the standard ordinary milk and sour it yourself. Cheese is even worse.
All the weird regulations, price control, quota, duties and import restrictions seem to ultimately benefit mostly the very large industrial transformers, leaving actual farmers with scraps and consumers with ballooning costs.
Were you trying to make yoghurt without starting with yoghurt? All you need is a little bit of yoghurt and the bacteria will multiply and sour the milk. Same thing for kefir, fil milk and plant based yoghurts.
Mozzarella is made with a sort of perpetual stew at the farm or milk factory, instead of adding a bacterial culture directly to milk like most cheeses.
In the Netherlands you can find dairy farms everywhere, and some of those have a shop with some range of milk or milk products, usually what they themselves prefer the most. They know how it works, so they can replicate it and it becomes no problem.
First there is a floor price on milk. Milk cannot legally be sold below that floor price to consumers.
Farmers are prohibited from selling fresh milk direct to consumers. It's illegal. Period. They can't gift it either. It has to go to a transformer to be mixed with, homogenized and pasteurized.
Dairies and cheese makers, with the proper license, buy fresh milk in bulk to be transformed.
Since yogurt, or cheese, is not milk, there is no floor price. Somehow this often cause the transformed product to cost less than the raw ingredients (milk) that goes into it if you were to purchase that milk as a consumer.
And of course, you can only buy pasteurized, homogenized milk, which is an entire other problems.
This is the case in Quebec, Canada. Other provinces have different but similar laws. The dairy industry is the only one that is protected in such a way, hence why OP commented how crazy the industry is here, as nothing else work that way.
Anecdotally, UK, the cheapest yoghurt (believe me, I have researched!) just dropped from £1.10/l to about £0.7/l - anomalous considering the rampant groceries inflation we have, but there it is.
Milk is about £0.64/l, so roughly equivalent if you add in the cost of heating it.
However, the price for live yoghurt is a different story - much more expensive, which is why I have recently started making my own.
I don't think these kinda of comparisons are valid.
The cheapest yoghurts have all a very bad taste and consistency in the mouth while those you will do at home taste on par with those you pay a premium for.
Ordinary, but skimmed milk - mumsnet says you need to boil it for ~10 mins and then let it cool to ~40C before adding the live yoghurt culture. Working well so far!
UHT is usable, and doesn't need to be boiled, but for that added convenience it costs nearly twice as much.
Fresh milk is currently £1.45 for 2.27 litres, down from £1.65 at peak.
Tip for UK readers: You can put an unopened 4pt plastic milk bottle in the freezer and it will keep as long as UHT. Defrosts in a few days in a fridge. (Was handy during COVID lockdowns)
Not Canadian here, but isn't it expected that a large scale bulk operation would inevitably be more efficient than a small scale manual one, regardless of any regulatory factors? At the end of the day the goal should not be for an amateur to beat a cutting edge agro corp on price. There are tons of other metrics that big co. can't compete on, such as learning, unique flavor, enjoyment of a hobby, etc.
Something I've noticed about Yogurt specifically - yogurt is very expensive at the grocery store (almost $5 for the 32 oz tub of plain store brand) but much cheaper at Walmart ($2.36 for a 32 oz tub of plain store brand).
This is the speech of a scaremonger: You might not be trying to scare folks, but you've certainly bought into it. Preservatives cut down on food waste and are an overall good for society. More folks would starve without these and more folks would wind up with foodborne illnesses.
I'll mention that salt and sugar are preservatives, we've just found better methods now. Are all of them good? Nope, but food preservation was never perfect. That doesn't make it worse now.
They may be a necessary evil for large production of the industry but you can make do without them when you make your owns that you will eat in the following 3 days. It is still a bonus in that case.
I think the key here is that you can make a “mozzarella” pretty easily, but an actual mozzarella is a more difficult cheese. Still I’d rank it easier for the home cheesemaker than many hard cheeses that require months of aging at specific humidity and temperature.
No, it's just hard to make traditional mozzarella, it takes more than a day and careful control of acidity. The "30 minute" recipes are faster and easier because they substitute the long acidification of the traditional recipes with instant acidification (with citric acid, vinegar etc) but they have a very high failure rate. If you search for "mozzarella" on r/cheesemaking you can see that maybe one out of three are from people who couldn't make it work:
That must be an underestimate too, because the people most likely to post on reddit to tell everyone about their mozzarella are the ones who had a "success!!!" with it.
Off topic, but wikiHow is such an interesting project.
At first I thought it's a comedy site as it had all these viral guides like "How To Eat Food" or "How To Accept That Your Computer Is Slow". Then it slowly started to appear more and more in search results with actual useful advice.
It's unusual that they have so much content while the content is also high effort considering the illustrations. And they have stood the test of time, they must be on it for 15+ years.
I wonder if there is a business model or a plan to have one or if they run on donations / VC funding / ???.
feta and goats cheese are good starting points, easy, tasty, quite different. I would recommend getting a pH meter as it makes the process more observable.
He got me started down the rabbit hole. Now I have a cheese cave, homemade cheese press and a fridge full of cultures. Still haven’t mastered mozarella though…
Let throw out there that if you are into cheese making, Dave Potter of https://www.getculture.com / Dairy Connection is an all around great guy, educator, and absolutely knows everything about cheese making. Their sites are a great place to order your cheese making supplies and reach out with questions. The kind of place you get a handwritten note in your order because they remembered you had asked them a question.
I was a bit surprised when I learned that cheese
is not Hallal. (automatically)
Rennet can also be sourced from pigs.
This was often the case in Norway at some point.
I am not sure when it started.
I believe few places use it now, some smaller
cheese makers might.
And not kosher for the same reason. But even today with 100% artificial rennet there is still a rabinical decret instituting that all cheese are forbidden without supervision.
what is with the extremely detailed photo captions -- are they stable diffusion prompts? if so it would be nice if that were disclosed. how skeptical should we be of the entire article? ex:
"Goat cheese with slice on round wooden cutting board shot on dark bluish tint kitchen table. The composition is at the right of an horizontal frame leaving useful copy space for text and/or logo. Low key DSRL studio photo taken with Canon EOS 5D Mk II and Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM"
I made bagels a few weeks ago and for the first time tried to make cream cheese to go with it. The product was definitely a cheese, but had a much sourer taste than what I prefer, and a much thicker consistency.
I used lemon juice as an acid because I had it on hand rather than vinegar which I think is the preferred acid agent. Anyone done this successfully before?
if you put milk in a pot, heated and added lemon until it separated sounds like you made ricotta, not cream cheese.
Cream cheese is more like yogurt actually (I'm sure I've had some brands that where really just yoghurt with very low water percentage). Maybe the culture they use is different, but I've left homemade greek yogurt straining in the fridge and forgot about it for an extra day and it came out exactly like cream cheese.
Ricotta is properly made from the whey which is a by-product of making another cheese. Additionally, the souring comes not from lemon, but from fermentation of the whey itself. However, it's true that the term is commonly used in home cooking for plain fresh cheeses made from whole milk.
Your strained Greek yogurt sounds similar to labneh, which is delicious!
>if you put milk in a pot, heated and added lemon until it separated sounds like you made ricotta, not cream cheese.
Interesting. That is basically how paneer is made. Then you strain off the whey after the milk "splits", and hang the paneer up to drain, wrapped in a porous cloth, for a few hours.
Then you can eat it straight away, either raw (delicious that way too), or deep-fried alone, or in some recipe for a dish having paneer as an ingredient. The raw paneer lasts for a few days in the fridge.
The whey can be drunk as is, or used instead of or in addition to water for cooking.
Correct that is (unpressed) paneer, not ricotta - the latter should be the acid-split curds from the whey left from a rennet-set cheese; the result is much creamier (and of course much much lower yield).
Oh I wasn't meaning to correct you - you mentioned draining, and I know some people don't press it any more than under its own weight like that. (I do prefer it a bit firmer personally though - just not as far as the stuff we get in shops in the UK, which is like rubber.)
I just meant that up-thread cheese sounds like paneer because it is (on its way to being), ricotta is/should be slightly different.
Yes, it is the same paneer (a kind of Indian soft unaged cheese) that is used in palak paneer (a spinach + paneer dish with spices and masalas), which I agree is delicious when made well.
It's like a comfort food because you feel good after eating it, for some reason, not sure why.
But it is a main dish, not a desert :) It is eaten with either chapatis or rotis or naans or rice, mostly.
Not sure how you thought it was that, since it is not sweet, rather it is savory.
It is a dish from Punjabi or North Indian cuisine, whic is one of my favorite cuisines. I like many other regional Indian cuisines too, as well as some from other countries. Unfortunately in Indian restaurants, you don't get many options of ethnic, regional Indian foods, although that is slowly changing, but then again, some of it is the chi-chi and overpriced kind.
I understand that cottage cheese, cream cheese, and ricotta are all quite similar, and much of it has to do with how you handle removing the whey, or what you do with the curds afterwards.
cottage cheese and ricotta, yes, note the clumpy texture. That's what you get when you heat enough and cook the milk with an acid, it clumps into that typical texture.
But cream cheese is more like yogurt. You put the culture in the milk, add some sugar to feed it, heat it until barely warm and store until it thickens and can be separated from the whey by straining. The process is similar for both, just not sure if they use different cultures.
Thanks for mentioning this - the instructions that I'd found for making cream cheese had suggested essentially making ricotta, and running it through a food processor until creamy. While this did produce some sort of cheese, it wasn't what I was looking for. I did more research and just as you said, Cream cheese starts with a yogurt, drains the whey off and then is pressed. Some approaches combine yogurt (made with Milk) and sour cream. Anyway, it's obviously a complex and broad topic. You've gotten me pointed in the right(er) direction.
I've always used vinegar when making yogurt and cream cheese (it's also a lot cheaper than lemon juice) as I don't want to impact flavour at that stage.
I agree, we have been making our own kefir at home for a few years now and its got far more character than what can be found at the supermarket. This year my wife started separating out the whey more often. We drink this as is, and put it in smoothies and other recipes. The thicker kefir is also great with cereal or in place of sour cream. That's pretty much what it is, just on a different part of the spectrum.
Gotta push back against that.
If you're a budding cheesemaker and you don't know what you're doing, don't start with unpasteurised (raw) milk. The professional cheesemakers who make cheese with raw milk know the microorganisms in their milk down to the species and they know it's safe to make cheese with that milk. Unless you have a biology lab next to your house who are willing to look at milk samples, then you simply don't have the same information and everytime you use raw milk you're playing the lottery, and a lottery that you win by losing. Heuristics like "but the animals look healthy" are meaningless, there are bacterial diseases that have very different effects on humans and animals, for example brucellosis (caused by the Brucella bacteria) causes recurring fevers to people but only causes miscarriage in animals. And how would you know that an animal is having a fever, or is not healthy, if you're not, yourself, a farmer?
Even if you don't get sick, raw milk cheese can go bad easily and I mean it can blow up and turn into a sponge-like structure in what is called "early blowing" caused by the gases released by bacteria and yeasts infecting unpasteurised milk. If you don't mind your cheddar turning into a cheesy rugby ball with the consistency of carrot cake, go right for it, but don't say nobody warned you.