Author Topic: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?  (Read 4508 times)

Offline Kate Downham

  • Young Cheese
  • **
  • Location: Tasmania
  • Posts: 5
  • Cheeses: 0
  • Default personal text
    • The Nourishing Hearthfire
What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« on: July 17, 2023, 02:55:43 AM »
I'm putting the finishing touches on a book about cheesemaking and would like to find out if I've missed anything...

I'm wondering - from other cheese books or online information that you've read - what do you feel has not been covered enough?

Can you think of any troubleshooting issues that it would be important to have in a troubleshooting section?

Or anything else important that does not get explained enough by other sources?

Anything that you would really like to see?

The focus of my book is about making small batches (2 to 6 litres/quarts), from a homesteader's perspective, without using packaged cultures.

Offline MacGruff

  • Mature Cheese
  • ****
  • Location: Pittsburgh, PA
  • Posts: 401
  • Cheeses: 23
  • Default personal text
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #1 on: July 17, 2023, 02:27:31 PM »
Yes.

Troubleshooting!!!!!

I'm in the U.S. so we use the British units and get pasteurized AND homogenized milk for the most part. It was not until I found a source of cow's milk that was NOT homogenized that I was able to move my cheesemaking forward. Until then, I had lots of problems with all the published recipes in books and on line. People on this board were very helpful and I was able to resolve many issues, but a book that had some of those ideas incorporated in it would have been a great help.

Also, depending on who is your target audience and how technically adept is it will determine how much you need to put in. For instance, it took me several months to figure out what the floculation method was and how it worked and how to use it - and I am still not quite sure I am doing it quite right. Also, sections on using pH meters for the various cheeses vs "by feel".

Many more ideas, but see my comment on who your audience really is...

Offline broombank

  • Mature Cheese
  • ****
  • Location: Aberdeen Scotland
  • Posts: 149
  • Cheeses: 12
  • Default personal text
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #2 on: July 17, 2023, 09:05:22 PM »
I have just produced a cheese book - see post in Library -however the prohibitive cost of postage will mean we are not in competition !! The comments by Macgruff are exactly what I hope to address. I start with milk as without good milk you are frankly wasting your time. I also hope that as a recent cheesemaker ( 3 years ) I can still relate to complete beginners as my own mistakes are fresh in my mind. A lot of books introduce a level of complexity that is really off-putting for a beginner. It is frankly unnecessary to introduce culture units at this level. I also think that working in grams reduces error to a minimum. Good luck with your venture. I am still trying to decide where is best to sell it - probably on line and through cheese making websites. it doesn't seem to sell in cheese shops but its early days yet ...

Offline Kate Downham

  • Young Cheese
  • **
  • Location: Tasmania
  • Posts: 5
  • Cheeses: 0
  • Default personal text
    • The Nourishing Hearthfire
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #3 on: August 02, 2023, 04:37:26 AM »
Yes.

Troubleshooting!!!!!

I'm in the U.S. so we use the British units and get pasteurized AND homogenized milk for the most part. It was not until I found a source of cow's milk that was NOT homogenized that I was able to move my cheesemaking forward. Until then, I had lots of problems with all the published recipes in books and on line. People on this board were very helpful and I was able to resolve many issues, but a book that had some of those ideas incorporated in it would have been a great help.

Also, depending on who is your target audience and how technically adept is it will determine how much you need to put in. For instance, it took me several months to figure out what the floculation method was and how it worked and how to use it - and I am still not quite sure I am doing it quite right. Also, sections on using pH meters for the various cheeses vs "by feel".

Many more ideas, but see my comment on who your audience really is...

My audience is largely homesteaders and people who want to homestead in future, along with anyone looking for small batch recipes to learn from, so that has really influenced the focus of the book - I put a lot of information in about the best practises for milk handling and storage and working with seasonal variations. I also include a bunch of information about working with purchased milk, and what ones will work for which cheeses.

I wrote this for a future blog post about the book and it describes the direction of the book:
“I think a lot of books come for a position of specialists: Someone that has focused on just one thing, written about it in isolation, without providing any guidance for those who do not have the same perfect conditions. I like to think of my book as being written by a generalist: Yes, I am making lots of cheese, it’s an important part of my homestead and I love it, but I am also fermenting, baking, canning, preserving, gardening, butchering, and all the other tasks that make for a diverse homestead.”

I’m trying to explain cheesemaking not from the professional cheesemaker’s point of view, but from someone making cheeses to feed their family. I’m putting a lot of depth in the book, but providing it in a way that someone can either skim the surface, read the basics, and get on with making a cheese, or get more in depth and really understand how it all works.

Offline Kate Downham

  • Young Cheese
  • **
  • Location: Tasmania
  • Posts: 5
  • Cheeses: 0
  • Default personal text
    • The Nourishing Hearthfire
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #4 on: August 02, 2023, 05:04:40 AM »
I have just produced a cheese book - see post in Library -however the prohibitive cost of postage will mean we are not in competition !! The comments by Macgruff are exactly what I hope to address. I start with milk as without good milk you are frankly wasting your time. I also hope that as a recent cheesemaker ( 3 years ) I can still relate to complete beginners as my own mistakes are fresh in my mind. A lot of books introduce a level of complexity that is really off-putting for a beginner. It is frankly unnecessary to introduce culture units at this level. I also think that working in grams reduces error to a minimum. Good luck with your venture. I am still trying to decide where is best to sell it - probably on line and through cheese making websites. it doesn't seem to sell in cheese shops but its early days yet ...

Congratulations about your new book!

It’s good to have more books out there from all kinds of perspectives. Different ways of writing and cheesemaking styles will suit different people, so good to have many options out there, including the beginners perspective.

I have a weird unrelated question for you, as I see you are from Scotland - I’ve heard a rumour that Scottish Highland cow milk is naturally homogenised, so that you need a cream separator to make butter - is this true? Or just a horrible rumour designed to keep me away from those beautiful cows?

Offline mikekchar

  • Old Cheese
  • *****
  • Location: Shizuoka, Japan
  • Posts: 1,015
  • Cheeses: 118
  • Default personal text
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #5 on: August 02, 2023, 11:46:26 AM »
"Naturally homogenised" milk is a bad description.  Milk fat floats around in milk in something called "globules" (yes, it's a technical term :-) ).  There is a membrane that acts kind of like a bag that holds the fat.  In cow's milk from modern, milking cows the globules are big.  Because fat is lower density than water, it naturally floats to the surface over time.

You may wonder why it doesn't just rocket up to the surface in a few seconds.  The reason for this is "brownian motion" (also a technical term :-) ).  In things like liquids and gas, small particles are kind of floating around everywhere.  Small particles bump into each other causing mostly random motion.  Imagine that you are headed for the toilets at a crowded bar.  You make a bee-line to the door, but every time you try to make a step, somebody bumps into you.  You end up wandering all over the room.  If there are enough people wandering around energetically enough, you may never make it to the toilet.  In fact, if someone were to take a video of you, they might not even be able to tell that you were trying to get there since you keep bouncing off of random people.

That's kind of what's happening in the milk.  You have these fat globules and they are floating to the surface of the milk, but they keep getting bumped by other particles.  The bigger the fat globules, the more energy they have to make it to the surface.  Also, the bigger they are, the less influence each of those bumps have.  Milk with very large globules will have the cream rise to the top very quickly.  For milk with very small globules, the cream will never rise.

Homogenised milk is made with the same goal: to have a milk where the cream does not rise.  However it is accomplished in a very different way.  In homogenisation, the membranes in the globules are broken.  The causes the fat to leak out.  Because the fat is sticky, it coats the milk protein bundles and never rises to the top.  In reality, there *is no cream* in homogenised milk.  The fat is just coating the protein bundles.

Homogenisation causes a lot of problems in cheese making.  Because the fat coats the protein bundles, it makes it very difficult for the rennet to react with those protein bundles.  This makes a *very* weak curd set in rennet formed curds.  You basically have lots and lots of protein bundles that will not set and so the curds do not form a good, strong bond with each other.  There is nothing you can do to fix this problem.  Additionally, because the fat is more accessible in the final cheese, it is more susceptible to being broken down by lipolysis processes.  This causes potential funky flavours and aromas as the cheese ages.  On the plus side because the fat is all stuck to the protein, virtually all of it ends up in the cheese, which gives you more yield.

TL;DR: No.  It's not naturally homogenised.  It just has much smaller fat globules that don't rise to the top of the milk.  This gives you a milk where the cream doesn't separate, but which is great for cheese making (as opposed to homogenised milk).  The reason we don't use this wonderful milk commercially is because of economics (much lower milk yield by these breeds even though the milk quality is dramatically higher in many cases).

Offline Kate Downham

  • Young Cheese
  • **
  • Location: Tasmania
  • Posts: 5
  • Cheeses: 0
  • Default personal text
    • The Nourishing Hearthfire
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #6 on: August 14, 2023, 04:55:12 AM »
Do you know if Scottish people successfully make butter from their highland cow's milk? I have enough goats for cheese, just wanted to get a house cow for the butter and cream : )

Offline mikekchar

  • Old Cheese
  • *****
  • Location: Shizuoka, Japan
  • Posts: 1,015
  • Cheeses: 118
  • Default personal text
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #7 on: August 14, 2023, 06:18:58 AM »
My niece's SO's family breeds Scottish highland cows. They don't even milk them.  They feel the yield is too low to be worth it.  I live on the other side of the world from them, but when I was visiting I tried to get them to give it a try.  They were dead set against it.  They *are* lovely cows, though, with (mostly) very gentle personalities.  My niece and her SO have a bull as a pet, which is saying something.  Their goat and the bull often play together which is entertaining to watch.

I'm not sure how realistic it is to keep these as milking cows, especially solitary ones since you need to breed them.  If you happen to know someone with a herd, you can probably reach out to see exactly what kind of yield you can expect after you wean the calf.  Otherwise, I'd be tempted to try something a little less rare.  It's part of the problem with rare breeds, though, isn't it.

In terms of using it for cream, you can apparently use a milk separator in exactly the same way you do for those breeds of goats that have small milk globules.

Offline rsterne

  • Old Cheese
  • *****
  • Location: Coalmont, BC
  • Posts: 528
  • Cheeses: 54
  • Too many hobbies - too little time!
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #8 on: August 14, 2023, 05:39:14 PM »
Mike, is that why they call it "Brownian Motion"?....  ;)

Bob
Cheesemaking has rekindled our love of spending time together, Diane and me!

Offline broombank

  • Mature Cheese
  • ****
  • Location: Aberdeen Scotland
  • Posts: 149
  • Cheeses: 12
  • Default personal text
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #9 on: December 21, 2023, 10:17:47 PM »
I'm feeling rather bad that I didn't reply to Kate's post of August 14th so if you are still reading this Kate maybe you will finally get my reply. There is no truth to the rumour that Scottish cows produce pre homogenised milk. Most of the milk in Scotland is from Holstein Friesians - the general public don't like cream rising to the surface ( maybe it reminds them of the 1960's when the blue tits would perch on the bottles and drink the cream!) It is therefore becoming more and more difficult to buy non homogenised milk except direct from a dairy. Fortunately there are an increasing number of dairies prepared to sell milk to the public direct, often out of a 24 hour vending machine. The other breed popular here is Ayrshire which is excellent for cheesemaking. If you can get hold of an aged Dunlop it really has a great flavour - nutty and smooth. As Mikekchar says the traditional highland cows are reared for beef not for milk. In Scotland we have a number of areas making cheese commercially. The Rudolf Steiner communities like Newton Dee in Aberdeen have large organic dairies to supply their residents with milk and sometimes to make cheese. In South West Scotland this results in a cheddar/alpine type cheese called Loch Arthur plus some others less easily available. They have a range of cow breeds including Guernsey ,Jersey , Montbelliard and Ayrshire, often cross bred. Local to me a friend makes cheese for which she has won a gold medal for the best small artisanal cheese maker in the UK. She uses the guernsey /monbelliard /holstein friesian mix in the Aberdeen Newton dee community to make an alpine style cheese called White Laggan with great success.
I'm interested to know what the current state of research into homogenised milk reveals. There are suggestions that there might be associated health problems which if you consider Mike's informative reply is not really surprising. If rennet can't get at the protein as it's covered in fat, what is the impact on the digestion and processing of proteins? This is not a natural process after all.  Like many food related issues getting at the 'truth' is really difficult.( as in the case of Aspartame, the artificial sweetener which we now know to have huge health implications ) The commercial interests of producers tend to suppress any anxiety provoking information.

Offline mikekchar

  • Old Cheese
  • *****
  • Location: Shizuoka, Japan
  • Posts: 1,015
  • Cheeses: 118
  • Default personal text
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #10 on: December 22, 2023, 01:03:08 AM »
One of the things that's frustrating is that some people have digestive problems with unhomogenized milk, but don't with homogenized milk.  This is one of the main "excuses" for making homogenized milk ubiquitous.  I haven't done any research to find out why this is, but apparently it's a significant portion of the population.  I honestly think, though, that it's just cheaper for large producers and they get less complaints about milk that's been sitting in the supermarket for 2 weeks (where unhomogenized milk will definitely form a plug).  I think the real fix is to create a legislative structure that encourages small milk producers (minimum milk prices, etc).  In most countries farmers are making only a few cents per liter for milk and so they have no choice but to have incredibly huge herds and sell all of their milk to very large milk pools.  Creating a structure where it is actually possible for a small producer to thrive will probably solve most of the issues.  These small producers will naturally want to differentiate based on quality of the milk.

Offline broombank

  • Mature Cheese
  • ****
  • Location: Aberdeen Scotland
  • Posts: 149
  • Cheeses: 12
  • Default personal text
Re: What would you like to see in a cheesemaking book?
« Reply #11 on: January 03, 2024, 03:40:27 PM »
its interesting what you say Mike about health problems from unhomogenised milk. I think the shelf life is wha the supermarkets crave and if the small market for unhomogenised has to be thrown under the bus then too bad. At the moment a 'raw' milk scandal is occurring as we speak which may well kill off one of the iconic British cheese produces - Mrs Kirkham's Lancashire. Apparently a new strain of E coli has been identified which causes severe food poisoning. I am very suspicious of finger pointing since they used Errington as a scapegoat 20 years ago over a blue cheese, Dunsyre blue. It was never categorically proved that Errington was the source but the damage to a small raw milk dairy was nearly catastrophic. The hidden agenda is from the food standards agency who detest raw milk cheese and want to eliminate it all together. ( sorry that was somewhat off topic !)