Hi,
Beginner cheese maker (originally from Australia) now living in the Netherlands. I have been experimenting with raw milk and natural cultures (no powdered cultures) after reading David Asher's book. Currently have had more fails than successes, but really just enjoying the process (as well as a lot of cultured butter and labneh!). Mostly here for troubleshooting advice so I can start having more successes than fails!
Happy cheesemaking!
Welcome! I'm originally from N. Ireland, and spent time in Canada, and am now in Greece.
I have been making cheese (mostly Feta style) for years - but got away from it for about 3 years. Now, want to get make more styles.
I recently read Asher's book myself - interesting and probably not for beginners, although he claims to write for beginners.
I did try his method of using a yogurt whey to inoculate milk for cheese, and it turned out fine when making a feta style!
I recently received a Kefir culture, and am thinking of trying his idea of using Kefir to culture a cheese. Intrigues me to think I could use one culture - Kefir - and all it's various types of strains, to make multiple types of cheese.
Welcome :-)
I'm not a fan of Asher's book. He's got some interesting ideas, but also a lot of serious errors in the book. Kefir is also not a traditional culture in cheese (for relatively good reasons). It's not that you *can't* make cheese from kefir. It's just that there are much better options available. I recommend just maintaining a single Greek yogurt culture and a single buttermilk culture (which you can get from commercial Greek yogurt and cultured buttermilk). Just make yogurt from the Greek yogurt at 42 C (a yogurt maker is cheap and convenient, but you can jury rig lots of other things). I like doing buttermilk at 25 C (but 30C is quicker). A day or two before you make cheese, make up a batch of each and use 50:50 at a total of 15 grams per liter of milk in your raw milk.
Some of Asher's claims about kefir (and especially Geotrichum Candidum) are just plain wrong and it's very frustrating. Geotrichum will absolutely show up on your cheeses when you age them no matter what you do. It does *not* come from kefir (although it seems it can be made to carry it).
Asher's recipes are also... not exactly bad, but so far away from traditional ways of making those cheeses, it's painful. His recipes are nice in that they are simple and relatively easy to do. However, they are almost always absolutely wrong for the style (in almost every case). He basically makes the same cheese over and over again with different aging techniques. I'm sure it makes good cheese. It just doesn't make the cheese he says it makes. I could go into detail, but there is no point.
If you want to learn from a better source, I would highly recommend using Gianaclis Caldwell's Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking. It's a really amazing book with a minumum of errors and a lot of detail about what's important in cheese making. You can still choose to maintain and use your own cultures (I do), but it's better to start with a source that has much fewer errors in it.
The one thing I'll say about Asher's book is that it's the only book I know of that gives any description at all of doing natural rinds. I'm frustrated that it occupies such a small part of his book since he has some good ideas in there. Still, there are things he has overlooked on that front as well. I think the main problem he runs into is that he's really convinced himself that traditional cheesemakers have little to offer in terms of understanding cheesemaking. He seems to prefer his own experience to the hundreds of years of experience of an entire industry. Because of this, he misses some fairly substantial (and sometime critical IMHO) things.
Sigh... I guess that's it for my yearly rant on Asher's book :-) I should probably say less. Writing a book is hard and once it's out there, it's hard to correct mistakes that you had. He wrote that more than 10 years ago and I have no idea if he's changed his mind on somethings or improved his techniques. I shouldn't be so grumbly. But I think it's worth people realising that it's a good book to enhance your knowledge and not necessarily the *only* book you should read.
Thanks for the welcomes!
I'll definitely check out the book by Caldwell - as I said I'm at the beginning of my journey so trying to absorb as much information as possible! I do like the book as it makes the steps very simple however there's been quite a few times I've noticed things don't work as he says. I've been using it as more of a guide but in that sense I've found it helpful.
I have tried making feta myself recently, and storing it in the brine has become a "fail" - I salted the whey as Asher mentioned but then found it's turned alcoholic (or at least smells like it has). I'm assuming I've probably not added enough salt or would there be another reason?
Asher's advice for feta (as I remember it) is not bad, but I'll give you my quick tips:
- If you are going to use whey for the brine, you *must* get rid of the whey protein. So this means making ricotta.
- To make ricotta, you need to make it when the whey is at a pH of about 6.1, ideally. Unless you make the ricotta immediately after draining the curds, you will need to kill off the culture by brining the temp up to 65 C or so.
- After you make the ricotta, you actually want the brine to be acidified again, so the easiest way to do that is to reserve about 100ml of whey from before you heated it and then add it back. This will get your culture going again. If you don't do this, then it could referment after you add the cheese (possibly the problem you ran into)
- After you make the cheese, you should dry salt it to about 5% salt and let it sit for 3 days. This amazing tip comes from Jim Wallace and it makes a *huge* difference in the texture of the feta. He actually says to salt it higher than that, but I've found 5% is fine.
- After the cheese absorbs the salt, then make up a brine with your whey to 7-8%. Then add the cheese. Because the cheese is already pre-salted, there won't be a huge density difference between the whey in the cheese and the brine and so you basically won't have your cheese disintegrate as the salt exchange happens.
If you follow Asher's advice exactly as he writes it, I think you can potentially end up with a lot of stuff being sucked out of the cheese into the brine and then run the risk of having the brine referment with whatever can grow in 7% brine. By keeping the pH of the brine low and fermenting out all the lactose, you make that impossible. Especially with raw milk, I think it's quite important. YMMV.