Thursday, April 28, 2005
Cuisine: Cheese, making of
I recently started reading about cheese making, and I've found it to be very similar to bread making and beer brewing (and I suppose wine making, but I have yet to try that). Cheese making works due to yeast and bacteria doing all the hard work. Before the days of refrigeration, cheese was the way that the extremely-perishable milk could be stored.
I found this awesome page on making cheese here. It's done by a professor of biology and chemistry who also happens to raise goats and make his own dairy products. He took the time to document his efforts with photographs and explicit instructions as well as explanations behind why things are done. This site is right up my alley!
Since I already have a healthy Lactobacillus Sanfrancisco (and yeast) culture in my refrigerator, I felt very comfortable reading about starter cultures for cheese. As it turns out, home cheesemaking is very popular in Europe.
I went to Star Provisions today to buy raw milk. It turns out that it's not legal to sell raw milk of any mammal in this fine state of Georgia. Stupid laws! Why can't they let us make our own informed decisions and suffer the consequences? Anyway, I ended up buying two quarts of (ultra-pasteurized) goat milk from Publix. My first project: yogurt.
I found this awesome page on making cheese here. It's done by a professor of biology and chemistry who also happens to raise goats and make his own dairy products. He took the time to document his efforts with photographs and explicit instructions as well as explanations behind why things are done. This site is right up my alley!
Since I already have a healthy Lactobacillus Sanfrancisco (and yeast) culture in my refrigerator, I felt very comfortable reading about starter cultures for cheese. As it turns out, home cheesemaking is very popular in Europe.
I went to Star Provisions today to buy raw milk. It turns out that it's not legal to sell raw milk of any mammal in this fine state of Georgia. Stupid laws! Why can't they let us make our own informed decisions and suffer the consequences? Anyway, I ended up buying two quarts of (ultra-pasteurized) goat milk from Publix. My first project: yogurt.
