The Curious Alchemy of Cheesemaking
By: Jennifer Tarnacki
Tags: Environment, Resilience, Cheese, Homesteading, Food

”Milk’s leap into immortality” ​ — Clifton Fadiman

The ancient Swiss Alps method of cheesemaking required 100 days of manual labor. The summer, so hot in the valley, was the perfect season to take the herds into the mountains. There was plentiful wildflowers, grasses, and herbs to forage. The cheesemaker could work with the herd to capture the nutrients of the season and provide for the community through the winter. They did this by turning milk into one of mankind’s oldest foods: cheese!

Milk contains all the nutrition you need to stay alive, and turning that milk into cheese is a way of preserving that nutrition. Mountain cheeses are a bit of sun on a winter’s day.

All around the country, such old time cheesemaking traditions are being fostered. Curious about the process and how hard it really was to make your own cheese, I headed over to the home of a friend who had recently begun the care of a small herd of goats.

It takes a while to make cheese, so we start early. We were going to make feta from scratch, as well as some chevre.

To start our feta from scratch, Ann took out two jugs of her goat’s milk, unadulterated from her herd. This means raw and unpasteurized.

All good cheese starts with good quality milk, and what makes good milk depends on good feed, good health, good environment, and lack of stress on the animals.

The first step is to warm the milk to 86 degrees and add in a starter culture and lipase.

Once the milk is poured, microbial culture is added. Starter culture it’s called. The cultures are microorganisms that are eating the sugar lactose in the milk and producing lactic acid, in a “lacto” fermentation.

In old world European methods, the barrels were made of wood, the better to hold in microbial culture. Or, one might use cultured whey from a previous batch. Much like continuing a sourdough bread culture, cultured milk contains live probiotics, especially if it’s raw. Today we are using starter culture specifically designed for feta.

We wait 45 minutes for the starter culture to work it’s magic.

At this point, rennet is added, an enzyme that causes the milk to coagulate.

Rennet for cheesemaking was made for a long time from the stomach of suckling calves. Since digestion turns milk into cheese, consumption of milk technically predates humanity, starting with the first mammals. The stomach acid of a prehistoric baby mammal nursing separated the whey and curds of milk. How did we ever find this out? It is believed that ancient humans carried milk in the dried stomach of animals, and that on a hot day it curdled, and they found that it both was edible and preserved longer.

Rennet is a protease enzyme that causes the proteins in the milk to coagulate, causing it to separate into solids (curds) and liquid (whey). Don’t worry, nowadays, rennet can be extracted from lots of different, including vegan, sources. Even non-GMO fungal sources, or vegetarian options like nettle and yarrow.

When we peer under the lid 45 minutes later, it’s an amazingly different consistency.

The rennet has done it’s job. The milk has turned from pure liquid into curds and whey.

The next step is to cut the curd: this separates the curd from the whey. After cutting the curd, you must mix it up every ten minutes while alternately letting it sit still.

Every ten minutes we give it another swirl.

Next, the curds must be scooped out and strained through a cheesecloth.

The curds are pressed into small molds. For feta, we use small plastic molds, though anything could be used. The remaining whey can be cultured as well, into ricotta cheese.

In this feta method, the weight of the curds themselves is what ends up pressing out more of the whey and pressing them into each other; it knits itself together. It works surprisingly well, and quickly. An hour later they were ready to flip, and had already formed their own unique masses.

Before air drying, they need to be salted. If you didn’t live near the sea and had access to salt, such as in old time chèvre making in France, you’d use ash.

They can age for as long as you desire. Traditionally, as cheese ages in caves, it begins to change pH, and as it ages, new microorganisms take root to imbue it with even more and subtler flavor profiles. Cheese, it turns out, is very much alive. It’s its own ecosystem. As many as 2,000 species of organisms can be thriving on cheese. This battalion of probiotic bacteria keeps the bad ones at bay.

Aging the cheese brings together pollens, molds, and yeast in the air, and incorporates them into the flavor of the cheese. This is where the countless variations of texture, flavor, and consistency arise; from the terroir not just of the grasses, animals, and milk, but from a wild microbial array growing on the cheese.

The final feta of the process is tangy, salty, and delicious. It seems to taste all the better when you’re sitting on the same farm it came from. Whether terroir is detectable or not could be debated, but the knowledge of the place, animals, and creative labor that goes into the cheese seems to add a sweet flavor indeed.

It’s a curious narrative nowadays — people are heading back to the land to produce artisanal food products. Books adorn shelves with titles like: “One city-dweller’s radical move to the country!” “Couple drops all to invest in small family farm! ” Artisanal cheesemakers are on the rise. Real cheese is making a comeback.

One cheesemaker calls it America’s cheese revolution. An artisan revival of dairy heritage. A resurgence of connection to people and place.

Historically, traditional local cheese said quite a bit about the person who made it; their identity. If they produced Cheddar cheese it meant they were from Somerset County in the United Kingdom, nearby Cheddar Gorge, that they were milking cows, and had access to salt.

Your regional cheese spoke of where you were from: your geography, kin and home. Your belonging in the word.

In the same way, making local cheese could be a connection of people and place. Working with its textures and flavors, coaxing something delicious out of your environment with your ingenuity and perseverance, food in context becomes a story. Deeply satisfying; cheese for the soul.

A well earned breakfast: goat milk chevre drizzled with local honey. Yum!