I've been researching what I would consider safe guidelines for raw milk usage in cheese making. It's hard to find any solid advice, or even what the actual risks are. Simple googling one easily gets two extreme positions. The FDA in the US thinks that raw milk is a hazardous material and should be handled like a biohazard and *
never* be used un-pasteurized. On the other extreme raw milk advocates claim that it will improve everything in ones life.[1] When encountering such polar opposites there's usually a lot of middle ground where the truth is nuanced. Murphy has said there is a simple answer to every problem and it's wrong. I will explore this middle ground and invite discussion and corrections as I'm an aspiring cheese maker sharing my frugal notes.
A bit about myself as introduction. I grew up in dairy country in rural Arkansas and we bought raw milk products from neighbors my entire childhood. Further I was named after my uncle "Cheese", who loved nothing more than cheese. I seemed to have inherited the cheese head gene. I'm very analytical and seek evidence for claims, but also a bit morbid about personal health risks ("Oh my there's a mole I must be dying of cancer"). Given this, I sought out actual statistics and found a paper by Gould at the CDC.[2] This paper compares reported disease outbreaks in the United States over fourteen years between pasteurized and unpasteurized cheese sources.
The first thing that struck me is that the overall numbers were far less than death by snail[3]. That's right, you have far more to fear snorkling for shells than from raw milk. Absent from the report were consumption rates or in statistics what one would call exposure. So raw counts are not as informative, but it's a safe bet that pasteurized consumption is far greater than raw milk. So the counts between the two being close, one can infer the greater risk that raw milk consumption has over pasteurized. If someone has a source for total consumption of milk products in the USA with pasteurization status estimates, I could produce a chart of relative risks and place the risk on a better scale.
The next striking thing about the paper is that the majority of the cases for raw milk (20 or 56%) were from illegally imported Queso fresco and other Mexican cheeses. The plurality for pasteurized were from pre-prepared cheese trays and dip sauces (14 or 39%). Mexican cheese ranked up there with 5 cases (14%) for pasteurized as well. Homemade cheese from raw-milk had 7 cases (19%). The remainder for raw milk is mostly soft cheeses. Oddly, ricotta and mozzarella for raw each had a reported case. Another interesting fact is that hard cheese cases were 2 for raw milk (6%) and 6 for pasteurized (16%). Note that these numbers are quite low for a 14 year period.
What I draw from this is avoid Mexican cheese, especially from shady dealers; better to make it oneself. Most of these are raw milk acid coagulated, then transported and stored in questionable conditions.
Secondly the ricotta and mozarella I make ends up pasteurized by the method (195F), there are "quick" acid coagulated recipes out there I don't use and I suspect these are what is referred to in the case listings. I would personally avoid any recipes with raw milk that don't involve culturing. One is creating a perfect environment for any bad culture to propagate by not adding culture. Similar (but not as egregious) as the Mexican cheese cases.
Third, just avoid all those precut cheese trays and tubs of pre-made cheese dips. Make ones own using your fromager knowledge--no compromises.
Lastly, soft aged cheeses and hard numbers are comparable on the cases stats and it's hard to say much from this data. Personally, I'm going to soft temp pasteurize my raw milk for making soft cheese till I perfect my technique. Semihard cheeses, I'm just going to use raw and age them sufficiently.
Overall, I find the FDA's position on raw milk to be overstated. Pasteurization is important when you have long distribution chains of product sitting on shelves, many hands in the chain, and long periods of time. When making cheese and going straight from farm to culturing, a lot of the risk is mitigated. The FDA is trying to use simple enforceable rules for a large network of milk distribution, whereas the context of artisan cheese production is very different.
[1] Portlandia S05E03, "
Healthcare"
[2] L. Hannah Gould, Elisabeth Mungai, and Casey Barton Behravesh. "
Outbreaks Attributed to Cheese: Differences Between Outbreaks Caused by Unpasteurized and Pasteurized Dairy Products, United States, 1998–2011". Foodborne Pathog Dis. 2014 July ; 11(7): 545–551. doi:10.1089/fpd.2013.1650.
[3] E. Shockman. "
Why snails are one of the world's deadliest creatures." August 13, 2016, PRI Health and Medicine.
https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-08-13/why-snails-are-one-worlds-deadliest-creatures