Capturing cheese cultures in the wild!

[TimT]

Before anyone asks - no, I haven't done this. Yes, I do want to do this though. So I'd love to get some feedback from people about this - have you done it? What do you think about it?

Capturing cultures in the wild is a more common idea in relation to another interest of mine - home brewing. In Belgium they have a very old tradition of lambic beers - beers where you do the beer mash, let the wort cool down, and then just wait for some random yeasts and bacteria to drift along and plop into the beers. Essentially what happens is the brew becomes a thriving orgy of all sorts of different cultures; you'll get alcohol from the yeasts - which compete with one another for the resources, so you'd probably get a very alcoholic brew very quickly - and souring from the bacteria, which acts over a longer time. And the cultures are probably spread by insects, jumping from brewing vessel to brewing vessel!

All that's by the by. Anyway, this sort of capturing cultures in the wild seems to me to be less common in the amateur cheesemaking world. And obviously there are dangers. But there are obvious advantages too.

DANGER
- You might kill yourself or someone else. Listeria, for instance.
- Cheese will be edible but disgusting.

That's about all the (relevant) dangers I can think of - I don't think they're that big actually (would happen in very rare instances if you do things right) and I think there are steps that can be taken to make these dangers absolutely minimal.

ADVANTAGES
- The cultures you capture from the wild will probably have much more long-term viability than store-bought cultures. They would certainly have more genetic diversity, though I'm not sure if we're talking true heirloom cultures or not.
- You could get some interesting cultures to use in future cheesemaking.

Obviously the easiest way is to capture a culture by just getting some raw milk and leaving it out during a warm day. You could keep it at a certain temp if you wanted to encourage certain mesophilic or thermophilic bacteria to dominate.

Another way would be to take a jar of pasteurised milk and throw in something - a leaf from a tree, or whatever - to try and capture the native LB that way.

And I'm pretty sure the acidification inherent in the making of yoghurt would tend to make the environment too bad for potentially harmful non-lacto bacilli, yeah? So your aim when culturing the first time would be to make a very acidic batch of yoghurt to really get the right LB cranking and then reculture from there?

ANYWAY! Let me know what you think!

[hoeklijn]

My 50 cents about this:
I think I would go for cultivating the natural LB in the raw milk because IMHO that is the closest to "terroir" you will get.
If I remember correctly Alpkaserei posted something about Swiss farmers using a similiar method?

[Boofer]

And here I am just trying to use known cultures to produce consistently edible cheeses with increasing quality....

Introducing non-sterile foreign matter into my cheeses is not something I'd do or recommend. 

-Boofer-

[hoeklijn]

I agree about adding things to the milk Boofer, but I know that the method of cultivating cultures from raw milk and stimulating meso or thermo by having the raw milk on the right temperature is something that is practiced a lot.
As a matter of fact, I posted something about the cultivation of PR with a method I learned from a MD/microbiologist. The same guy is at the moment trying to "reverse engineer" the cultures that are used in a certain type of Dutch cheese. Because he expected that the used culture is a mix of meso and thermo, he made a slush of a piece of that cheese and added some to milk at 32C and some to milk at 52C.
Within a bit more than 24 hours he ended up with two types of "yoghurt" this way, which he used to incubate a batch of Gouda cheese.

[TimT]

Yes, I think Alpkaserei did a fairly detailed post about how they captured a culture for the season from a bit of raw milk. Also I think someone - is it Tiarella - has made a few raw milk chevres?

But I also remember reading on Sandor Katz's website (http://wildfermentation.com/) feedback from a reader who had captured a wild culture just from the top of a 'pepper' - I'm assuming they just mean a capsicum. Apparently LB love those capsicums.

Yes, the results will be unpredictable. But if you successfully get LB producing lactic acid - over time - a few days at most - I'd think that culture would be effectively quite safe, yeah? I mean, that's one of the natural ways LB must protect themselves - and we're encouraging it.

[qdog1955]

  Have to agree with Boofer----seems awful risky and uncontrollable in a home environment---- way to many of the bad bacteria floating around out there----do a search on human disease caused by bacteria----having been a survivor of a tick born bacteria----some of those bacteria can be real scary.
Qdog

[jmason]

You're a bit off about the lambics, lambics tend to be lower in alcohol because a good share of the sugars are converted to lactic acid rather than alcohol thus giving lambics their characteristic tang. 

In a way we all capture wild organisms in our cheese making.  The funky growths on a cottage cheddar aren't put there by the cheese maker.  I am sure that we would find many organisms in our cheeses that we never added.  The danger as I see it would be the fat content of the unfermented milk and the high pH both factors provide an environment suitable for botulism and lord knows what else.  Now if it's raw milk than the naturally occurring lacto fermentors would likely acidify the milk before harmful bacteria/molds could take hold.  In fact some research indicates that milk contains substances that inhibit the growth of many harmful organisms, these factors and competing mechanisms of the desirable bacteria are destroyed during pasteurization.  Thus pasteurized milk is a much better breeding ground for pathogens then raw milk.  This makes sense as nature would want to insure the food of an infant animal, milk, be safe or it wouldn't survive to reproduce and so such qualities would have evolved or mammals would just be another failed and thus extinct group.  Unhygienic practices could obviously overpower this as they did in the early 20th century and the milk borne illnesses of the time led to pasteurization being implamented. 

Wild organisms in fermentation are quite common.  Lacto fermented sourkraut, vegetables (pickles) and sourdough use the bacteria that naturally occurs on the vegetable or grain.  The lambic which you mentioned (the acidity of the wort would have inhibited the nasties). Summer sausages and some dry cured hams where the salt, lipase, and now nitrite select for the beneficial or at least non harmful bugs.  And I don't even know what to say about those weird fermented fish things of the Inuits, Icelandics, and Asian cultures, although I do use a bit of fermented fish sauce in my Thai style curries.  I believe that fermented fish sauce was used by the Romans in vast amounts and written about by the Roman physician Galen for it's health giving properties. 

Well that's my 2 cents worth.

Be safe,
John

[awakephd]

As far as capturing bacteria from a finished cheese -- I remember reading somewhere that the bacteria actually die off pretty early in the aging process, and the bulk of the aging is a matter of enzymes, plus any bacteria or mold that is on the surface of the cheese. Blue cheese, of course, has the mold throughout, but only grows if it has access to oxygen.

I don't know if the above is true, but if it is, I would guess the person trying to re-culture the key bacteria from a finished Gouda might really just be capturing wild bacteria -- ??

[hoeklijn]

As far as capturing bacteria from a finished cheese -- I remember reading somewhere that the bacteria actually die off pretty early in the aging process, and the bulk of the aging is a matter of enzymes, plus any bacteria or mold that is on the surface of the cheese. Blue cheese, of course, has the mold throughout, but only grows if it has access to oxygen.

I don't know if the above is true, but if it is, I would guess the person trying to re-culture the key bacteria from a finished Gouda might really just be capturing wild bacteria -- ??

Well, since the guy who's trying this is in fact a microbiologist I'm pretty sure he also took samples of both meso and thermo cultures, put some on petri dishes and looked at it under the microscope 

[Boofer]

I didn't need or want anything from "out of the wild" when I made my Tilsit #5 last year. I narrowly dodged an infection from a questionable "addition" to my normally pristine creamline milk.

Member linuxboy could offer an opinion as to the efficacy of culturing from "in the wild" sources. From what he has written previously, it's not a casual exercise.

-Boofer-

[Kern]

I'd be hesitant about making any analogies between cheese making and fermenting sugar to make beer and wine.  Bacteria ferment lactose to make cheese while yeast ferment sugars to make beer.  Milk has a lot of protein present that is highly attractive pathogenic bacterial.  The big danger in fermenting sugars to make beer and wine is that you end up producing acetic acid - the acid in vinegar.  This is always readily apparent to the brewer or winemaker.  Listeria, a common and often deadly pathogen, is essentially odorless and tasteless.  Milk protein is a good growing media for listeria.  Finally, in a way, what you propose doing has been done for several hundred years.  It is called terrior and is what makes some cheeses unique to certain regions.

When you add all this up you are left with this question:  "Is what you are planning to do worth the risk if some huge failure occurs?" 

[TimT]

I doubt all the bacteria die off. Some would go dormant, maybe- though the ongoing acidification would seem to indicate continuing activity. Hoeklijns story would certainly seem to indicate a mature cheese will still contain sufficient quantities of live bacteria.

I tend to agree raw milk would be the best source for a new cheese culture. The fresher the better; the enzymes that are present in raw milk (enzymes which often degrade during pasteurisation) probably do help somewhat with safety and preservation, but milk is a complex thing. Some of the enzymes seem to be there, counter-intuitively, to help the milk break down; for instance, rennin and lipase.

Perhaps I could try and make a 'mesophilic' and 'thermophilic' culture from the one raw milk sample, like the microbiologist dude did from a Dutch cheese!

[TimT]

It's my understanding listeria can't survive beyond a certain level of acidity, and when you have a yoghurt you won't get listeria - because the yoghurt has already acidified so much anyway. So, if you successfully capture a wild culture and manage to culture milk with it - get the milk to the yoghurt stage - isn't that a clear indication that there will be no listeria present? Because obviously the lacto-fermentation has happened, and there is sufficient lactic acid to curdle the milk?

[qdog1955]

Tim-----in Amrein-Boyes book 200 easy cheese----she has a recipe for a raw milk French Tomme---it has no cultures added----instead relies on the natural culture in the milk and a 12 hour cycle at 50 degrees-----maybe that is what your looking for.
Qdog

[Tiarella]

Tim-----in Amrein-Boyes book 200 easy cheese----she has a recipe for a raw milk French Tomme---it has no cultures added----instead relies on the natural culture in the milk and a 12 hour cycle at 50 degrees-----maybe that is what your looking for.
Qdog

I think the trick may be starting with raw milk that has never been chilled so that the native cultures are viable instead of being shut down to whatever degree they are from temperature drop. Someone mentioned in this thread that I'd done something with native cultures and in my case it's the cultures that are native to the inside of a goat's udder. It's true though that I can't imagine "pristine enough" cheese making conditions that would prevent all native contamination and I've given up before I've started trying to prevent that. My cheese is made in my kitchen where there is a bundle of heirloom wheat hanging on the wall from last year, a bundle of Homegrown rice on the counter, bread cutting boards that aren't sanitized so probably covered in yeasties, kombucha brewing nearby, etc. I've thrown up my hands and waved the white surrender flag. I recognize that for much of history cheesemaking kitchens weren't sanitized and segregated from other activities and I don't boil or sterilize anything except once in a while for no apparent reason.  . I do have occasional contamination but I think it's been about 4 times in several years of cheesemaking. I am always interested in seeing how many "rules" can be broken without compromising the cheese.  I make a lot of tasty cheese without being paranoid that one little detail is off AND I totally admire folks who have the time and focus to do every last detail.