greetings from southern wisconsin

[jrheling]

Hi everybody - I'm new here, so thought I'd introduce myself. I'm Josh, and I live about 30 minutes away from Madison WI in the southwest corner of the Driftless region.

I'm a small-scale livestock farmer who primarily raises sheep and poultry on 13 acres of hills. We also keep a dairy goat whose surplus milk caused me to get interested in cheesemaking. So far I've only worked with raw goat milk for cheesemaking. I've followed a lot of David Asher's recipes and techniques from The Art of Natural Cheesemaking (using kefir as a culture), with mixed results. I've had successes so far with chevre, a few cheddar techniques, feta, paneer, a queso fresco, and shanklish. I've got a few tommes that are aging now and seem to have worked out, but the oldest still has a few months more aging to do.

As I write this (August 2023) I'm in the final steps of finishing construction on a cheese cave space I've been building in the lower level of an outbuilding on our property. It's about 4'x10', so will hold far more cheese than I'll be able to make, but has two walls that are completely underground and another two that are massively insulated, so I think I'm going to be able to maintain cave-like temp/humidity conditions without cooling for much if not all of the year.

I'm super interested in learning more about cheese and becoming more competent.

[mikekchar]

The Art of Natural Cheesemaking (using kefir as a culture), with mixed results.

That's pretty typical, I think.  He has some interesting ideas, but IMHO some of the basics of what he proposes is a little off (and in some cases there are some pretty big errors).  His techniques are pretty unique to him and while he's very keen on the idea of "natural cheese making", he sometimes veers away from historically traditional techniques by a large margin.  I highly recommend Gianaclis Caldwell's Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking if you want a more thorough background and understanding of traditional cheese making.  I'm quite hard on David Asher, mostly because I had really high expectations from the book, but was ultimately quite disappointed. There are lots of people who make cheese using his techniques that are very happy.

Lots of really knowledgeable people around here (both present and in the past). It's *very* much worth going through old, old, old threads as there are several very amazing cheese makers who posted a lot, but who aren't around any more.  I would say that 90% of what you want to read is in those old threads.

[Aris]

Mike is right. In a cheesemaking group I frequent to, David Asher's book is not recommended by the admins because of his unsafe practices and unconventional methods. I read David Asher uses clabber exclusively nowadays. I myself use clabber and had excellent results but I still prefer commercial cultures because they are reliable and easy to use. Although they are expensive while clabber is practically free, the microbes that is. Welcome to the forum.

[jrheling]

Thanks much, mikekchar and Aris - that tracks with my experience and commentary I've read about him in other places. I've started working through Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking, and agree it seems like a good, thorough reference (and about as stylistically different in approach from Asher as one could imagine ).