Reddit reviews Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses

I never get tired of explaining dairy products. :)

Let's start with what milk is: a mixture of water, sugars (lactose), fats (milkfat), and proteins. It's baby food for cows.

As it comes out of the teat, this stuff is all mixed up together. This is great if you just want to drink it right away, or that same day. However, this is not so great if you happen to be a pre-industrial agrarian type person with no access to refrigeration, and would like to keep all that good milk around for longer.

The problem is the water. It takes up lots of space, it's heavy, it leaks through clay pots, et cetera. If only there were some way to get rid of the water, while keeping the good parts!

As it turns out, it's the proteins in the milk that are the key. Proteins are big, complex molecules whose biological function is often related to their shape. And the shape a protein takes turns out to be dependent on what acidity level is around it.

The proteins found in milk have this property that if the acidity level rises, the proteins "denature" (chemist-talk for "lose their normal shape") in such a way that they get all tangled up with one another. In doing so, they turn the liquid milk into a gel. Milk jello, basically. Well, tangy milk jello, because of the acidity necessary to make this happen.

This is great, because in cross-linking into a huge matrix, the proteins also trap those nice, yummy, calorie-rich fats.

The question then becomes "how do we get the acidity level of the milk to rise just enough to denature the proteins, but not so much as to make it all unpalatable?"

The answer: friendly bacteria.

Inoculate the milk with pretty much any bacteria, and those little bugs will reproduce like mad, consuming the sugars (lactose) in the milk and excreting acids as a waste product. It's a tradeoff: you're sacrificing the natural sugars in the milk, in exchange for getting the proteins to coagulate in a helpful way (see below).

The right bugs will do this while also being harmless to humans. That is, they're bugs that won't also make you sick if you eat them, and don't happen to also produce any other toxic byproducts as they go about their business. The wrong bacteria may do either or both of those things.

So anyway, dose the milk with the right bugs (after bringing it to a high temperature first to kill any bad bugs that might have gotten in there), then sit back to wait for them to work their magic.

How long this takes depends on the bacteria, the ambient temperature, et cetera. Usually it's just a few hours, though.

When they're done, you have your milk jello. Which still, unfortunately, has all that water in it. But now, because the proteins are all cross-linked together, it's possible to separate the watery stuff (which is called "whey") from the protein matrix (curds).

And in fact, this begins to happen naturally all on its own. If you just let it sit all on its own for a while, you'll see a layer of yellowish, clear liquid, the whey, building up on top of the container as the curds begin to settle under their own weight.

If you're making ordinary yogurt, and you cultured the milk with a yogurt bacteria, you're done. You can eat it as is. Or add sugar, fruit, et cetera to make the yogurt more palatable.

If you're making Greek-style yogurt or cheese, you gotta get as much whey out of there as possible.

Usually, you do this by breaking up the mass of curd into smaller bits, and transferring it to some kind of container where it can drain. Such as a colander lined with fine cloth.

Now let it sit some more. The whey pretty much falls right out, and after not very long you're left with a much denser curd. You can play with the amount of time you drain it to control the firmness of the resulting product. Either way, what you have now is a fresh (a.k.a. "green", as in un-ripened) cheese.

Typically, this is when you'd add salt and any other flavorings (spices, usually) that you're interested in.

Most regular cheeses--cheddar, et cetera--still want to be drier. Water, at this point, is the enemy. Water allows for bacterial growth. The name of the game at this stage is to transform what is essentially high-grade bacteria food into something bacteria can't live in. The easiest way to do that (again, especially if you're a pre-industrial type person) is to make it salty and dry.

So after adding salt and stuff, the curds are usually packed into round forms and pressed into wheels. Could be any shape, really, but historically cheese forms were usually round. A cylindrical basket, say, that you could line with cloth. Dump in the curds, cap it with a wooden board, and pile heavy rocks on it or whatever. Squeeze all the whey out you possibly can.

Once this is done, you have a more or less shelf-stable food product that can last a long time even unrefrigerated. You've thrown away the water, kept the calorie-rich and nutritious proteins and fats, and packed them into a nice dense and delicious brick.

Congratulations! You have made cheese!

From there, the possibilities are pretty endless. The cheese will age and develop richer flavors the longer you leave it sitting around. You might protect it from mold by coating it in wax until you're ready to get into it. You might specifically inoculate it with mold (again, only the right kinds!) to produce strong-flavored blue cheeses.

The whole infinite variety of cheeses across the world come from differences along this whole process: what kind of milk? What kind of bacterial culture? To what degree was the whey expressed? How much salt and/or spices were added to the curds? How were the curds further pressed and shaped? Under what conditions, and for how long, was the cheese aged afterwards?

So that's cheese (and yogurt, too, pretty much). And it's kind of mind-blowing to me that all of this stuff was pretty much determined by trial and error over history.

Edits: Thanks for the gold, somebody! If y'all are into this kind of thing, there's some pretty good cheese love on YouTube: Channel Cheese TV

Also: holy cow, I totally forgot to even mention rennet! Rennet, whether traditionally produced or modern, is an alternative to acid-based curdling. It uses an enzyme to fiddle with the protein structures, but to basically the same ultimate purpose. I've never used rennet myself, so I can't really say much more about it than that.

And finally: anybody interested in trying their own hand at cheese making, I would recommend you to this book, which is a very approachable and practical guide for the home cheese-making newbie.

Mozzarella is actually a great one to first attempt. If you mess up, you likely end up with ricotta.

This is a pretty good book:
http://www.amazon.com/Home-Cheese-Making-Recipes-Delicious/dp/1580174647

http://www.amazon.com/Home-Cheese-Making-Recipes-Homemade/dp/1580174647/ref=la_B001K8KW40_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405347971&sr=1-1

You need to read a real book about cheesemaking before you go any further. A lot of people consider Rikki Carroll's "Home Cheese Making" to be a bible for starting out in the process, and it's pretty simple to understand.

Here is the reality: incompetent cheesemaking can make you very, very sick. It requires holding milk at temperatures where pathogenic bacteria thrive and they can cause serious foodborne illness or, in certain circumstances, death. Especially since you are interested in aged cheeses, it is very important that you gain a basic understanding of how the process works chemically so that you can monitor your critical control points to prevent yourself getting sick. (You absolutely don't have to be a scientist or understand everything down on the molecular level, but you do need some basics.)

It is exciting to start out, but as a matter of safety and as a matter of you being able to make successful cheese, you should not be considering making any kind of ripened cheese yet if you don't even understand what the differences between rennet and culture are. You also want to get at least a minimal understanding of how you control specific bacteria, yeast and mold to influence your aging process, and what to look for when things go wrong. Dairy aging is not to be fucked with if you like your gastrointestinal system exactly the way it currently functions.

Grab a book and learn about how all the factors work together, and in the meantime try something low risk, such as a recipe for quark or queso fresco, that you will be eating the same day you make it.

A note on making cheese- my husband cannot cook worth a damn, basically boxed macaroni and cheese is as advanced as he gets EXCEPT for cheese. He bought the book Home Cheese Making and started with the 30 minute mozzarella. He now makes cheese almost every week. Its fantastic and I think anyone can do it, especially with a fresh milk source.

Here's the book I started with: http://www.amazon.com/Home-Cheese-Making-Recipes-Homemade/dp/1580174647
I started with quest fresco.
Unfortunately, ultra pasteurized milk is the norm now & even though dairies are required to label it as such, I suspect they don't. I've had lots of problems with milk labeled as normal pasteurized so, if you don't live near a good dairy farm, you might want to try using goats milk or raw milk which is now available at some markets like Whole Foods.

Hi, welcome!
I recommend a little reading, your local library should have these books, https://gianacliscaldwell.com/books/ https://www.amazon.com/Home-Cheese-Making-Recipes-Homemade/dp/1580174647 , both are good to start with.
Gavin Webber's YouTube channel is excellent and shows many useful techniques.
If a local cheesmaker does day courses, they are really good for getting a feel for things, nothing like hands on ;)
Have fun!

Well, I think that also includes the cost of overnight delivery of perishable items. That said, I've had several that retail for 29.99/lb and they are actually amazing enough for that price.

Cheese of the Month is a good splurge to get you exposure to new and different types of cheeses (think of it as an educational expense). Once you know what you like, you can try to find it locally. Or make your own varieties.

I just follow the recipe in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Home-Cheese-Making-Recipes-Homemade/dp/1580174647