On August 27 I took a few hours off in the middle of the day to attend a cheesemaking workshop. Sponsored by the Lane County office of the OSU Extension Service, the class was absolutely packed with eager would-be cheesemakers, some of whom had come with friends or partners. In fact, the first class session had closed, with 32 students, and there was so much demand a second session of 32 (mine) was scheduled. Apparently class size is usually around 18 people. The instructor told us that there were about 32 more on the waiting list! Clearly, home cheesemaking interests a lot of people in this community.
Our instructor, Susie Busler, was an experienced and knowledgeable Master Food Preserver and cheesemaker, and she was aided by a number of other Master Food Preservers. These folks go through more than 40 hours of training to get their title, and in return volunteer for 40 hours during food preservation season. One of the volunteers was an older man, who showed us how he had made his own cheese press for $10 from common household items and some maple he'd cut into rounds. It looked almost as spiffy as the $175 press that was also displayed.
We weren't making cheeses that needed pressing in our class. Susie focused on the basics and the easiest types of cheeses to introduce us to the craft. Before we started, she emphasized three crucial concepts: sanitation and sterilization, accurate measuring, and precise temperatures. All utensils and pots used for cheesemaking should be sterilized, either by boiling for a few minutes or by cleaning with bleach and then rinsing very thoroughly. Pasteurized milk ingredients should always be used if you want to avoid salmonella, listeria, and other very unpleasant diseases, which can be borne in raw milk from even the cleanest of dairies.
As in baking, accurate measurements are important in cheesemaking if you want to get the result you expect. Someone asked if it was possible to mess the cheese up so badly that you had to throw it away. No, Susie said, you will always get something healthy and edible, but you may not get the result you wanted. And you will not get the exact same thing twice in a row. She pointed out that of our four cooking groups, each one had different results although we all used the same recipe. And that was true! In my group of eight's big pot of queso fresco, the thin yellowy whey rose to the top and the white curds were at the bottom. Other groups had the opposite result! Susie told us that your cheese results are influenced by, oh, just about everything — the food the cows or goats were eating, the time of year and temperature, the room temperature where you are making the cheese, the wild yeasts in the room where you are cooking, whether you heat the milk slowly or quickly...a million little variables make each home-crafted cheese unique.
The class time was divided between lecture and hands-on. For the first cheese, the queso fresco, we poured milk and buttermilk into a big pot, added vinegar, heated it, and then took it off the heat and added rennet. The pot then stood for half an hour or so while we prepared the next cheese, a simple farmer's cheese. Rather than using rennet to set the cheese, lemon juice or vinegar was added after the milk heated, and the mixture was stirred til the curds separated from the whey. Then it too was left to stand while we returned to our seats. Susie answered many questions, gave us more information about cheese and cheesemaking, and passed around examples of cheesemaking equipment, most of which was stuff you already have in your kitchen if you cook at all, and the rest of which is not terribly expensive (except for the cheese press). People who made cheese or yogurt at home already talked about what they use the whey for: some drink it, some cook rice with it, those who have animals feed it to their cats, chickens, or pigs, and many said they use it in bread baking.
After that break, we dashed back to our cheeses to drain off the whey into cheesecloth-lined strainers. We twisted and pressed the ball of cheese inside the cloth to drain it thoroughly of the whey, which we used to start batches of ricotta cheese. When the farmer's cheese was dry enough, it was dumped into a bowl and salt and chives mixed in. Oh yum! The tiny white curds resembled ricotta, but had a smooth, bouncy mouth-feel rather like the queso fresco. If I were making it at home, I would have probably used the recipe for garlic cheese (of course adding more garlic than was called for!). I would have also added tons more chives, and just a bit more salt — but it was certainly delicious just as we made it.
Because I'm a salt fiend I liked the fresh queso fresco best. (I found it to be less salty-tasting 12 hours later, but still delicious.) When we first dumped the curds into a bowl, it looked a lot like the farmer's cheese. But Julie, our table's Master Food Preserver, kneaded and squished it around the bowl, so that it ended up with soft, smallish curds rather than a spread.
While those two cheeses were being finished, we heated the whey they had given up with some sour milk, stirring, til it reached 200°. We'd had too ambitious an agenda, but even starting the ricotta was informative.
We did have time to sample some cheese logs, cookies, bread, and lemon cake, all made with cheeses from the recipes we'd just used. And we all got a few ounces of queso fresco and our farmer's cheese We also got samples of previously-made ricotta, which I found to be very smooth, with a slightly gritty feel as opposed to actual visible curds. Sharp yet somehow bland, I think it would be great to cook with.
The class was a nice mixture of people. There were four or five men there, and like the women they ranged in age from early 20s to 60s or even 70s. Some students had previously tried cheese making, some like me were complete neophytes, some were obviously experienced cooks, and others seemed less knowledgeable. All were bubbling over with energy, interest, questions, and excitement, and there was a happy buzzing noise the whole session which came from the hum of questions, comments, and exclamations as we saw the transformation of a gallon of milk into a pound of cheese.
As I looked around the room, I couldn't help but relate the scene to the reading I've been doing recently. I've almost finished The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century by James Howard Kunstler. His conclusions about the end results of running out of oil and the untenable way of life that easy oil has supported for the past 150 years or so are probably not what one wants to contemplate. I certainly found it sad reading. But what I was thinking of was how his vision of the future has an emphasis on small local communities, rather insular, focused around food production. (How we get there and the trauma we might go through before things settle down to that is another question.) Kunstler has a lot more than that to say, and the reasoning he uses to lead up to his conclusions is interesting, so I will simply say it's a book worth reading, if only to challenge oneself.
I've also just started Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford. He makes a point that we've lost the daily exposure to many skills and abilities that was prevalent in our parents' or grandparents' generation. In the case of cheese making that is certainly true. Nearly any woman who lived on a farm in the nineteenth century or earlier would have known this simple craft.
It makes me think of my stepdad, who has built two houses and remodeled two more, fixes furniture and the plumbing, can ride a horse, milk a cow, kill a chicken, and fell a tree. My mom can sew, knit, can, bake, paint a house or a watercolour, garden, quilt, split wood, refinish furniture, and do a million other practical things. If they had to live off the land tomorrow, as Kuntsler thinks many of us will be doing perforce by the end of the century, they would have the practical skills to survive.
Extension Service is all about teaching those of us who lack them, need a refresher, or want to take our knowledge to a higher level the practical skills of life: cooking, food preservation, finances, caring for your wood lot, maintaining your septic system, caring for your animals on the small holding, gardening, composting, and so on. Extension will soon deliver the training for Climate Masters at Home as noted on their blog on August 26. The skills Extension staff teach allow both country and urban people to live more independently and, in my view, better. These days a growing number of people seem interested in learning to raise their own chickens, grow their own vegetables, and cut out the "experts". In the "back to the land" movement a few decades ago, people were interested in regaining the skills that were formerly so common. With the spreading of the concept of "peak oil" and the hard financial times many have suddenly plunged into, these skills are once again seen as important, by a wider and more mainstream group of people. I noticed an article in the newspaper recently about all the backyard chickens in Portland. Although I haven't actually seen any in my immediate neighborhood, I don't doubt it's a growing trend here too. In fact I hope to someday have a couple of chickens of my own!
Cheese is one of those "expert" types of foods in many of our minds — certainly it was in mine. Susie told us about the Tillamook cheese factory, where everyone is in bunny suits, and the chemists are constantly taking all sorts of measurements to ensure every block of Tillamook cheddar is like every other block of Tillamook cheddar. That has its place, of course. And lord knows I eat plenty of Tillamook extra-sharp! I appreciate it's consistency. But the interest I and my classmates showed in this craft, and the burgeoning genre of "how to make cheese" books, seemed to me to go beyond the "foodie" aspects. People want to be creative and to cook something healthy, with ingredients they feel are good for them, and they want to be more self-reliant (or at least have that fantasy for a block of cheese or two). Many of my classmates were clearly already into gardening, canning, baking, and so on, so this was just an extension of their interests in the art and craft of cooking.
A word of caution: sanitation. I ate most of the cheese I came home with after my husband, who tends to have a sensitive digestion, said it made him feel ill. These bugs usually don't afflict me, but this time I spent the weekend with a mild stomach "flu" as well. I think it is because in those hectic, crowded conditions, in a hot lecture hall not really meant for hands-on cooking and with a large excited group of somewhat inattentive people, it was difficult to maintain proper sanitation. This is not a slam at Extension. They did the best they could, and emphasized sanitation in the discussions. It's simply the reality of the conditions we had to work in, which included a hall that was probably built in the 1960s, and the number of us milling about.
In addition to using pasteurized milk, utensils and pots should be boiled for at least 10 minutes or otherwise sterilized. Spoons and other utensils should be rinsed off and kept in hot water rather than laid down on just any old surface, and hands should be scrupulously washed and rinsed without toweling immediately before plunging them into the cheese. I will try this at home, but with even more than the care and level of cleanliness I use for canning!
Some of the resources Susie passed on to us are:
The Junket Rennet tablets site, which is where some of the recipes we used were modified from. Junket rennet is animal-based.
New England Cheesemaking Supply Company. They carry liquid, vegetable-based rennet, including organic vegetable rennet.
The Home Fermenter Center. Susie said that stores such as this and Valley Vintner and Brewer often carry items of interest to cheesemakers.
David B. Fankhauser's Cheese Course (he's Professor of Biology and Chemistry at University of Cincinnati Clermont College, Batavia, Ohio). Fankhauser's site is worth exploring, not just for the cheese but for the many other pages he's put up on a number of different topics, include his Freedom Rides experiences and photos of "star hailstones".
Fiasco Farm has some interesting cheese information (and a sister site, Molly's Herbals, about "natural health care for animals".