I was unable to source sheep milk for quite a while, so when I finally found a new source last spring, I promptly made a “young pecorino”, a semi-hard table cheese, which was great eating until it was about 6 months old, at which point it became an equally excellent grating cheese. I just finished the last stub of it last weekend.
I started a second one in early January for the sake of having more Eating Pecorino, having made another smaller sheep cheese in “cobblestone” form a week earlier. Winter milk has more fat than spring and summer milk across all species, but this turned out to be especially pronounced in sheep milk, which is a high-fat milk to begin with.
Here’s a picture I took of the two cheeses side by side, when the winter one was just out of the press and being salted (that’s kosher salt on the rind–you brush it off when you’re done salting). This winter one is ~30% taller. Same recipe, same farm for the milk, both made from 2 gallons of milk.
And I *also* got a full bowl of ricotta, enough to make 2 rounds of truffled ricotta salata. Incidentally, one of the best ways to taste the inherent differences between milks of different species is to make ricotta, because it basically has no other flavors besides “milk”. Cow ricotta is sweet but kinda bland. Goat has a noticeable lemon flavor. Sheep has a rich, buttery warmth to it that you should never hide in pasta fillings with heavy sauces. It’s lovely as a spread on bread (think Rondele, but less processed and gelatinous), as sliceable dry ricotta, and my favorite, mixed with some powdered sugar, lemon zest and tiny shavings of dark chocolate as a cannoli filling.
Here’s the winter pecorino at 2 months of age, at the beginning of March.
It was technically just about ready to eat, but the sheep cobble (pictured below) that I’d made the week before was so rich, creamy and soft-textured due to all the extra fat that I decided it wouldn’t hurt to let the Pecorino age longer and give the fats more time to break down.
But I wanted to point out something about the rind. Compare the two-month-old winter one above with the previous one I made in March of last year:
And here we go: the young Pecorino. Milder than many a Pecorino, nice mouthful for eating. pic.twitter.com/ZHlvFQzx3j
Both rinds were oiled during aging to help keep off unwanted molds. But the one I made in January is entirely covered in white geotrichum mold, while the spring one just has a dusting. I didn’t add any geo powder to the milk. That’s just what grew on the rinds, from spores in the milk and in the air.
The winter one has a lot more fat, which tends to retain more moisture in the curd. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, winter is the dampest time of year. I often have to fight moisture-loving blue molds in the winter, and if you look closely on the winter pecorino you’ll see spots where the local blue started making pits in the rind before I ground lots of dry salt into it. So the winter one is a slightly moister cheese, aged in slightly damper conditions. More geotrichum is the result.
Even though I still have a bit of the super-rich sheep cobble, I opened up my wintertime pecorino yesterday evening.
Texture-wise, it’s pretty similar to the pecorino I made last spring. It doesn’t have the fatty mouthfeel the cobblestone has; it’s more of a proper semi-hard cheese (this is a good thing). There’s a definite flavor difference though. The spring one was nutty and a little sweet. This one has a bit more tang to it, with hints of hay.
I’m now planning to make another one in June with summer milk to get a 3-season comparison.
I had Ep 3 all set up for publication when this video popped in my feed. Since Caciocavallo is one of the cheeses I mentioned in the pasta filata section, here’s an annotated thread on what’s going on in this video:
At :19 they talk about the breed used for this particular version of Caciocavallo, the Podolica cow. At 1:37 they mention that the breed gives only 3-6 liters (.75-1.5 gal) per day. By comparison, black & white Holsteins, the source of most North American milk, give 30-40 liters/day.
You might wonder why they would bother with a breed that gives so little milk when they could just get Holsteins–more milk for the buck, so to speak. Some of it is heritage, a belief in preserving local breeds and foodways. Some of it is flavor: different breeds give different proportions of fat and proteins. Holstein milk tends to be “watery” compared to breeds traditionally used for cheesemaking, so it’s not that great for cheesemaking. In addition, different breeds require diff amounts of water, or get along more or less well on different feed types, which make them sometimes better suited to the local environment than breeds from other ecozones. Holsteins & Holstein hybrids have fared quite poorly in India, for example–they get sick a lot.
At 1:45 they talk about the environment in which the cows are raised: near sea level, close to the coast, with brackish lakes nearby, and presumably salt-tolerant plants to graze on. We are what we eat, and so are animals–and their milk.
The milk is heated to 40C/104F. Most pasta filata–and many other Italian cheeses–are brought to fairly high temps like this, but Caciocavallo is aged longer than Mozzarella, so it’s heated to a higher temperature. The higher heat helps the acid develop more quickly, but there are other reasons to use the higher heat: thermophilic cultures (the one that like higher heat) tend to be more active in the finished curd for longer, so they help maintain consistent rate of fat and protein breakdown over time. And during the make, the higher heat causes the proteins in the curd to tighten more and expel more of the whey. So the curd is drier to begin with, which also allows it to age longer.
At 2:10, the cheesemaker adds rennet & whey from the previous day together to the milk. The whey contains cultures & acid, so it’s what kicks off the fermentation process. This is the traditional way (heh) cheese was made, before the development of freeze-dried cultures.
It also makes for more variability in the cheese esp between seasons: when it’s cooler, the whey won’t be as acidic, certain cultures may be less active, etc.
With many cheeses, you add the culture solution first, wait for a while, then add the rennet. The rennet slows down the fermentation. But in the approach shown in this video, the curd is going to spend a long time developing the right acid levels AFTER the curd is cut so it makes more sense to coagulate the milk relatively quickly, and then cut it.
At 2:15 we’re introduced to the cutting instrument, the menaturo:
It’s quite unlike the metal cheese harps used elsewhere, which cut the curd into nice even blocks. Here, the goal is to cut the curd into very small pieces, so he basically beats it apart.
Notice that it’s made out of wood. And so’s the vat that they move the curd to for ripening. Wood is a wonderfully porous material that absorbs all kinds of local yeasts and cultures to help reinforce what’s already been introduced with the whey.
While the curd sits in the warm whey, it continues to acidify, which is really important in pasta filata cheeses. Fresh milk has a pH of ~6.6. When the curd goes into the warm vat of whey, it’s usually ~6.0. It reaches stretchability between 5.3-5.1. Here’s a nice blog on the subject of acid and stretchiness in cheese if you want to dive further into that.
Once the curd has reached the right pH level, it’s cut into strips to get it ready for stretching. NB. Because it’s stretched at such a high temp (100C/212F!), the curd is pasteurized during the stretching process.
But the USDA doesn’t see it that way: because most caciocavallo in the US is served young, they insist the milk has to be pasteurized prior to cheese manufacture. This does impact the strength of the proteins and ultimately the stretch of the cheese….
Back at 4:22 they talked about the yellowish color of the curd, and the fact that it comes from the milk and what the cows eat. I talked about yellowness a bit in this post: tl;dr some cow breeds retain more of the beta-carotene from grass than others. The hue is also retained in the milkfat, so more fat, more yellow.
Finally, at 8:02, the cheesemaker talks about hanging the cheeses from his “lucky tree”.
It’s not just magical thinking: the surfaces of the cheese get turned without human help and dry quickly thanks to the slightly salty sea breeze. And also the cheese gets an extra dose of local yeasts and other microfauna for that extra terroir before it settles into the cave for aging.
This video on how Gorgonzola is made makes the rounds pretty regularly. When I was first learning to make cheese, I found a lot of these videos interesting but kind of confusing–there’s a lot that goes unexplained. So here’s a thread of annotations!
Here the narrator talks abt where the cheese “can be made”. It’s not that it literally, physically, can’t be made elsewhere, but the name “Gorgonzola” is protected under EU and Italian law, rather like “champagne”…
The EU Protected Designation of Origin (PDO, or DOP in Italian) and the national level DOC are extremely valuable certifications. In many cases the rules specify not only where the product can come from, but also the species of plant or animal that must be used in its production and sometimes, how it’s made.
The species & breed designations have been extremely important in protecting the economic viability of heritage breeds: because the PDO designation allows producers to market and charge for premium products, they can afford to use traditional breeds that may not be as high yielding as the workhorse breeds used by mass-market producers, but have unique characteristics that make them better suited to being raised sustainably in their traditional regions: they require less water for example, or they tolerate cold or heat especially well and can spend most of their time outdoors, or they’ve developed a resistance to local diseases and pests. Tl;dr the PDO scheme and earlier national ones play a significant role in preserving biodiversity in both plants, like wine grapes, as well as livestock.
The specifications about how a product can be made primarily protect the producer economically–it means that they don’t have to find endless ways to speed up their processes in order to stay profitable. But that economic support for slower production turns out to be meaningful on a microbiology level for fermented products like cheese. By allowing the microbes to do a slow, thorough job of working through the curd, we consumers get a greater range of flavors–which are the byproducts of the metabolization of fats & proteins–and also fewer of the proteins that can be inflammatory for some people are intact enough to cause problems. And for everyone, our own guts have to do less of that same breaking down & metabolizing work.
At 1:09 we see a tool is called a trier. You’ll see it a bunch of times throughout the video. It allows the producer to check on the state of the interior of the cheese without disturbing the whole rind or exposing too much of the interior to new things.
After they look at the sample, they carefully fit it back into the tunnel they made, and then seal the cut mark on the rind (traditionally with a smear of the cheese) to prevent oxygen and ambient yeasts from further entering the interior.
This tool at 1:57 is called a cheese harp. Once the milk has coagulated into a gel, it’s used to cut the curd into squares in order to release the whey.
Americans are often weirded out by mold, but it’s absolutely part of the cheesemaking process, and its presence on the rind as the cheese ages is a big part of what flavors the cheese.
Producers will often brush off the ones that grow too tall, sometimes spot-treat any that they don’t want there. Big producers of long-aged pressed cheeses that normally have “natural rinds”–especially those selling to the American market–often slap a breathable film on their cheeses as it makes it easier to brush off “unsightly” molds and maintain even, pristine-looking rinds. But this is the opposite of how cheeses are normally aged, and it comes at the expense of complex flavor.
Here at 2:28 you can see a sort of plastic girdle around the center of the cheese. This isn’t something that’s used on every type of cheese. It’s just that these cheeses are both tall and very soft, and the girdle helps it stand up straight and maintain its shape during the aging process.
The same sort of thing is used on Vacherin Mont d’Or, a very soft, gooey cheese from the French Alps. I used spruce versions for aging my Spruce Button cheeses.
Here's the spruce girdle. It's made from the inner bark of spruce trees, which is a whole craft and profession of its own pic.twitter.com/eLT66G5GyL
At 2:51 they talk about the 2 different kinds of gorgonzola, the softer “dolce” and firmer “picante”. They start out the same, but one is aged longer. They don’t say in the video which is older, but it’s the picante version.
This is true for most cheeses: they dry out as they age and that intensifies the flavors. The exception are surface-ripened cheeses like bries and other bloomy rinds, where yeasts & molds work their way into the interior of the cheese, eating through the protein structures as they go.
At 3:32 they talk about penicillium roqueforti, the blue mold, being added to the milk along with the other starter cultures. P. roqueforti is the most common strain used in blue cheeses, but its cousin P. glaucum is used in some blues instead such as Bleu d’Auvergne and, in fact, some gorgonzolas. Glaucum is more of a grey-blue and has a slightly milder flavor than roqueforti.
But these are just 2 of many, many blue strains that exist in the wild, and there are numerous substrains within each of those. These are the ones that people decided they liked and isolated so as to ensure consistency in cheesemaking. The blue mold that grows on the bread you keep in a plastic bag may be one of these, or it may be a slightly different one. If I let my aging cave get too moist, I risk having it get colonized by my local blue mold–which is a purple-blue, and has an acrid peppermint flavor which can permeate a cheese even if it only gets on the rind.
The section from 3:37-3:42 is kind of confusing, because they just jump from adding starter cultures & rennet to liquid milk, and then cutting the coagulated curd, and it’s not obvious that time has passed. But at a later point they say it’s abt 20 mins.
At 3:45 we see the curd harp again. The worker does one cut, then walks 90 degrees around the pot to cut again, forming a checkboard of cuts so that there are evenly cut squares of curd throughout the vat.
20 mins is not long at all, and as you can see at 3:52, the curd is extremely soft and delicate. If you watch other videos about harder cheeses, you’ll see the curds are often smaller, but also much firmer and easier to pick up.
At 4:02 you see the workers scooping the curds up w/bowls and pouring them, whey and all, into the molds. Because these curds are so soft, they naturally slip together and close up open space left as the whey drains out the bottom.
At 4:30, the cheeses are left to drain overnight. People often assume these means they’re refrigerated, but that won’t happen for several days. The starter cultures need fairly warm temps–75-90F usually–in order to work on consuming the lactose in the milk and convert it to acid.
Acid means flavor. If you’ve ever had a really bland cheese, that’s a cheese where acid production is stopped at an early stage in the cheese making process. The salting shown at 4:34 is the point where that acidification is stopped the next day.
Stopped on the rind, in any case. There’s still stuff going on inside the cheese. There’s still lots of whey in the curd at this point, and the cheeses will continue to shed whey for several more days. The salt on the rind helps draw it out.
Whey flows faster at higher temps, which is why the cheeses then spend a few days in a “warm” room (usually in the 60s F). The picante versions spend more time there both to draw out more whey, and to give the mold spores more oppty to grow aggressively.
Puncturing: not all blue cheeses are punctured, but most are–and it’s pretty unique to blue cheeses. The holes in the rind are there to allow the blue mold spores access to oxygen as they’re starting to sprout.
These are still very young cheeses, though. The curd and rind are soft and still actively trying to knit together. So just like a cut on your skin, the holes will close up pretty quickly as the cheese ages. But by that time the mold spores will have gotten going. Because the cheese wasn’t pressed and the curds just kind of found their own places as they were placed in the molds, there are actually a lot of little open seams within the cheese, which allows the mold spores to effectively send out runners and spread thru the cheese. By the way, Cheesescience.org is a great resource for all the microbial details of cheesemaking for the Average Joe. He has a good article on the doings of P. roqueforti inside a cheese.
Finally, at 7:34, they talk about the foil wrapping. But in the video they mostly talk about it in terms of displaying the DOP designation I talked about earlier.
But there’s a reason it’s foil, and not some other type of wrapping: blue molds are REALLY aggressive. They will happily colonize anything given the chance. Many cheeses are wrapped in special papers or plastic films (think of that white paper around your Camembert) that allow the cheese to breathe as it’s transported from the manufacturer to a store.
But no retailer wants the blues colonizing the rest of their cheese case, and you don’t want them doing that to everything else in your fridge. So, just as tinfoil hats are good for keeping your thoughts from getting out to Them (whomever you’re afraid of), foil is used to keep your blues contained. /fin
Cheese isn’t naturally orange. These days the orange color comes from the seeds of annatto, a Central/South American plant. But the desire for yellow-hued cheeses goes back at least to the middle ages, and possibly even earlier…
The yellow and orange-colored cheeses are especially common in Northern Europe, where the majority of cheeses are made from cow milk. Cow milk has less fat than either sheep or goat milk, so it tends to have a more translucent quality to begin with.
In the later middle ages, especially in England & Holland with their rapidly growing urban middle classes, demand for butter–long a great luxury–was soaring. Which left dairyfolk w/a bit of a dilemma. They made a lot of money on butter, so there was real incentive to skim the cream off their milk before turning it into cheese. Certain breeds of cattle retain a fair amount of beta-carotene in their milk, but it mostly stays with the fat. Lower fat cheese, more of a dull-white hue. So for sales purposes, there was now also incentive to add colorant to the cheese. The video that spurred this post mentions marigold, in the days before South American plants were readily available in Europe.
As that blog describes, Lady’s Bedstraw has long been used for dyes and also medicinal purposes. But it has yet another property: it’s a coagulant.
We don’t actually know when people started using animal rennet, but for most of history, plant rennets would have been more accessible for most people. I describe this a bit more in Ep 2. In the Mediterranean basin, fig sap, thistles and nettles were commonly used. But those aren’t things that grow as widely in northern Europe. OTOH Lady’s Bedstraw grows all over the place.
So it’s possible that Northerners were used to cheese being slightly yellow for centuries, long before the issue of fat levels came into question.
In which I walk through the entire process of making a cheese in under 22 minutes. We’ll talk about the main ingredients of cheese and how they work together to turn liquid milk into a solid that you can take to into the next life with you!
Show notes:
At the beginning of the episode I mention CheeseScience.org as a great resource if you get interested in the inner workings of cheese microbiology. For this episode, I recommend opening 10 Steps of Cheesemaking as a useful visual aid as you follow along, and Microbes 101 and Rennet 101 for further reading.
Many home cheesemaking books also provide a basic overview of the cheesemaking process in their first pages. The first chapter of Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking (see the Resources page) is one of the best.
Got questions about anything in this episode? (Probably a lot!) Drop me a line via the Contact page and I’ll be sure to get to it in a future episode.
Have you ever found yourself in front of the cheese counter at your local supermarket and felt a bit bewildered? How do you choose between four kinds of Cheddar? What’s the difference between Brie and Camembert? How can one simple thing–milk–take on so many different forms?
This podcast is intended for the curd-curious: people who eat cheese on occasion, don’t necessarily know a lot about cheeses or how to choose between them, but are always up for learning something new. And for people who like cheese a lot. We’ll talk about lots of different kinds of cheeses, how they’re made, and how you can try them. There will be a bit of science as we go, a bit of history, and maybe some armchair travel to various places across Afro-Eurasia.
But first, we have to start with the most basic question: what is cheese?
Into The Curdverse 