[Sca-cooks] Cheese making

Rikke D. Giles rgiles at centurytel.net
Sun Mar 24 20:23:13 PDT 2013


Greetings,

I was slated to teach a cheese class at West Coast Culinary Symposium 
next week.  Unfortunately, my milking goats thought different and have 
the temerity to be scheduled to give birth around then.  So I'll be 
staying home doing farm stuff.  

Anyway, tips I would give to a beginner:  
Keep it clean: clean milk, extra clean equipment, extra clean kitchen, 
clean water, clean clothing, clean dairy maid.  They knew this in 
period too, Markham says the dairy should be as 'clean as a Prince's 
bedroom'.  Heh.  Others advise similarly.

Use the very best milk you can get.  If you can get it raw and fresh 
from the animal, that's the best (assuming it's milked cleanly).  
Having said that, I've used every type of 'freshness' from still warm 
from the animal to a week or 10 days old and raw, to ultra-pasteurized 
and homogenized.  The only failures to 'make' were with the ultra-
pasteurized milk.

You'll fail from time to time.  Failures can be good.  They teach.  
Most of mine I've eaten a bit, just to see.  Never gotten food 
poisoning.  Have had an immediate vomit reaction from the flavor.  The 
typical failure (for me) is when the cheese 'blows' (expands in size).  
It can blow quite quickly while draining or under pressure from stray 
yeasts.  It can blow after pressing from e. coli (usually NOT the 
poisonous kind).  Both will make the cheese smell mighty fine, and 
taste horrendous.  Swiss cheese is a cheese with desired 'blowing' in 
which the propionic bacteria create gas which makes the holes in the 
cheese.  

You can make simple molded cheeses using clean styrofoam cups in which 
you've punched holes with a super clean nail.  It's not hard to move up 
to pressed cheeses, but... the learning curve to make a really good 
pressed cheese with a natural rind is pretty high.  Not because it's 
complicated, but because it takes a long time to get familiar with the 
milk, the seasons, what your husband's instance on baking fresh bread, 
your water source, your bacteria, etc, do to the rind and the aging.  
I've been doing this 8 or 9 years now, and I'm finally making really 
really good natural rinded long aged cheeses.

Good luck and have fun!  

Aelianora de Wyntringham
Barony of Dragon's Laire, An Tir

PS If anyone wants a personal version of the class I was going to teach 
at Culinary Symposium, let me know.  I also run a fairly popular cheese 
making demo at June Faire in Kitsap County, WA (first weekend in June) 
and will be teaching cheese at another event in August if anyone is 
interested.



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