How to Make Cheese and Influence People

This week, I learned how to make my own cheese. The workshop was taught by Saskia Esslinger of Red Edge Design. She does workshops about how to raise chickens in Alaska (hint: insulation and electric bear fences) and how to get the most out of your Alaskan garden. She hosts lots of gardening workshops, and other activities like seed swaps, and she has a garden blog. Her husband works on sustainable buildings and does home energy audits, and they are generally working on the concept of the “urban homestead.” Saskia knows an amazing amount about living locally and sustainably, and is definitely working to make Alaska a better place. The book Saskia uses, and that I just bought, is "Home Cheese Making," by Ricki Carroll. It is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and apparently is occasionally seen in Title Wave Books, but they don't currently have any copies. The book is full of information about cheesemaking, including about the ingredients and the science involved, and is a good book to read if you are interested in food, even if you are not going to make your own cheese. And of course, it has recipes for everything from cheddar, cream cheese, and feta, to ghee and paneer.

In some ways, making cheese is simple. Generally, you heat milk, and add enzymes. In other ways, it is complicated. Lots of attending to pots so things don’t sit too long or get too hot or cold. You need thermometers, large stock pots, some sieves or colanders, and cheesecloth. These are all things that you can get at several stores in Anchorage, like Fred Meyer or Natural Pantry. Butter muslin, which is a fine cheesecloth that retains more of the milk, and is used for making soft cheese or butter might be harder to find at a regular store. If you want to make hard cheese, you need a cheese mold/press and cheese wax. Saskia had a homemade cheese press, so I’m sure if you don’t want to pay for this more expensive piece of cheese-making equipment (over $100), you can make one yourself for less than $20 if you are handy. You need non-chlorinated water for diluting the enzymes and bacteria, particularly the rennet, but if you don’t have a filter you can just leave a glass of water out overnight and most of the chlorine will evaporate. Some books say you need “cheese salt” for a lot of recipes, but basically you just need fine grained, non-iodized salt.

In Anchorage, you can get most of the specialized equipment and ingredients you need from Arctic Brewing Supply on Abbot near the New Seward Highway, and you can get some stuff from Alaska Mill and Feed. You can also order everything online from the New England Cheese Making Company. If you’re buying a lot, just order from there, because Arctic Brewing gets their stuff from them, too, so it will be cheaper to order direct. Arctic Brewing started as a supplier for home brewers, but have now expanded into all kinds of home food- and drink-making equipment. The New England Cheesemaking Company sells lots of equipment and ingredients, and also has a blog and tips for making cheese.

You also need various starter bacterias, enzymes, and rennet."Starter" bacteria convert the lactose in the milk to lactic acid, and are necessary to convert the milk to cheese. The rennet contains enzymes that coagulates the milk and separates it into curds and whey. Traditional rennet is from one of the stomachs of a calf or kid, but there are lots of plants that contain natural coagulants as well, like yarrow, nettles, and fig tree bark, so it’s totally easy to find vegetable rennet. Lipase powder is another enzyme that is needed for some cheeses, particularly Italian cheese.

And of course, you can’t make cheese without milk. Basically you can use any whole milk as long as it is not ultra-pasteurized, because that kills off everything and the enzymes and bacteria aren’t effective. Regular pasteurization is fine, because there are still enough enzymes and other "flora" left in the milk for the things you add to work on. And of course, better quality milk means better quality cheese. Saskia belongs to a co-op and so she gets fresh goat's milk. I’m all for fresh local milk, but the milk she gets is raw, not pasteurized. Now, the raw milk thing is a very contentious issue right now, so I will try not to get too much into it here; everyone needs to weigh the risks and benefits themselves. Marion Nestle, who knows an amazing amount about the American food system, including food safety and food politics, has some entries on her blog about raw milk here (I also have a link to her blog on the right). Bill Marler also discusses the statistics and scientific studies regarding raw milk safety at Real Raw Milk Facts. I will say that neither Nestle nor Marler are fans of raw milk, but there are plenty of advocates that say it is more nutritious than pasteurized, that it is good for allergies, etc. At any rate, there are options for both in Alaska. There is at least one co-op, as I mentioned, in which you buy a goat share and pay for its care, and are provided with milk. Matanuska Creamery is a farmer cooperative that makes all kinds of dairy products, including delicious sharp cheddar cheese, and sells pasteurized cow's milk in several Carrs stores and in both New Sagaya markets. This workshop piqued my interest in local milk, so I will be looking into this more, because I'm sure there are more farms and cooperatives that sell both goat's and cow's milk. The best bet regardless is to get to know your farmer, and take a look at the farm itself. Whether you want raw or pasteurized, goat or cow, you have options here in Alaska.

In the workshop, we learned how to make mozzarella cheese, chevre, lemon cheese, and ricotta cheese. The chevre and lemon cheese were the easiest and I will totally be attempting to make them both at home in the near future. The lemon cheese is the simplest, you heat your milk, add lemon juice, and after it starts to curdle, you put it in cheesecloth and hang it up to drain off the whey. The acids in the lemon juice do the work. It was really delicious, kind of like a ricotta in consistency. A lot of the lemon juice drains away in the whey, so it doesn't taste very lemony, just really fresh and bright, if that makes sense. The chevre is also pretty easy, you heat the milk, add starter bacteria (Saskia gave us some at the workshop), and let it set for about 12 hours, then drain it for about another 12 hours. I said easy, not quick. All cheese making requires heating milk slowly and to precise temperatures, and lots of draining, straining, and things like that. It also requires a lot of trial and error, and lots of paying attention, to what the milk is doing, to the texture, etc.

The mozzarella is more complicated, and the process is more like making a hard cheese. You heat half the milk slowly, add lipase powder, let it sit, add citric acid to the half of the milk you have chilled, combine the two, bring the temperature slowly back up, add the rennet, let it form curds, drain them, and then put some curds into a pot of warm water and stretch them and form them into mozzarella balls or knots. Again, the temperatures all need to be very precise in order for the chemistry to work properly. And then, once you have done this, you can use the whey you have leftover from the mozzarella to make ricotta. You heat the whey until it is foaming but not quite boiling, let it set, and then drain it, and voila, ricotta!

So, that is what I learned this week about making cheese. It takes a lot of milk to make cheese, and it takes a lot of work. Will I stop buying parmesan at the store? No. Will I look into buying local milk, and start wowing my friends and family at parties with homemade chevre? You bet!