Home Cheese Making

[library_mama]

Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll This is the easy cheese cookbook that was mentioned in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (reviewed September 7). Carroll is obviously in love with milk in general and cheese in particular. She starts with a short history of cheese, outlines the cheese-making process, and goes over ingredients and equipment. We learn that there are three levels of milk pasteurization – regular, high heat, and ultra. Regular, which you can do at home with raw milk, kills your ordinary pathogens. High heat can’t be used for cheese. This isn’t labeled, either, so you just have to experiment. Finally, ultra pasteurizing, the results of which comes in tetra packs, destroys both the proteins and nutrients in creating a shelf-stable product. Her instructions are clear, if filled with cheesy puns. Soft cheeses can mostly be done fairly quickly, some needing overnight draining, but not a lot of hands-on labor. The equipment starts at a low-temperature thermometer and cheesecloth, both easily available. Citric acid is supposed to be in grocery stores seasonally, for tomato canning. Some of the soft cheeses also require a bacterial starter (like yeast for bread making) which would need to be bought on-line. Mostly, though, they look doable and yummy – I’d say weekend level, as opposed to weeknight or holiday weekend. The 30-minute mozzarella amnachaidh tried was truly fabulous. Hard cheeses, by contrast, look hard – more like a full day to weekend of work to start with, plus daily attention for a week or two, and a couple times a week for a couple months. They nearly all require the special starters, as well as cheese presses and mats. They still look delicious. After these recipes are some for other dairy products – buttermilks, yogurt, kefir, etc. There are also recipes for dishes in which to use your homemade dairy products, and profiles of small American cheese makers. If you can make bread or beer and like cheese, give this a try.