Most people know me as a bread guy, but some who knew me back when remember me also as a cheese guy. Yes, before embarking on the baking career that has defined my professional life, I thought I might instead be a cheese maker, fermenting milk rather than grain. I had studied a small book on making cheese at home and worked out a deal with a local raw milk dairy to buy all their unsold milk for one dollar a gallon, about thirty gallons a week. I borrowed a stainless steel, double-jacketed cheese maker on wheels from the same dairy, and every week I rolled it out into the driveway of the ranch where I lived with thirty other people in a Christian community (I was known as Brother Peter back then), and transformed that milk into six small wheels of cheddar-style cheese that, after some aging, was pretty tasty. We called it Abbey Jack even though it wasn’t anything like other Jack cheeses, because we liked the sound of the name.
Soon I was looking at a space in a converted wine building (I lived in Sonoma County in the heart of wine country, so old wine buildings were abundant) to set up what I intended to call the Forestville Creamery. After we measured the one stall in the building that was still available amidst the other businesses—the existing winery, a gem and crystal seller, a silk screen T-shirt shop, a comic book collector, and scattered offices—I studied the board of health requirements for cheese making operations. I looked, too, at the requirements for bread bakeries, since I also was a serious amateur baker at the time. It was a no-brainer—the rules governing a cheese operation were far more stringent and costly than those for bread, and so I took the path of least resistance. Had I chosen the creamery path, who knows: perhaps I’d have written a few books like the one you are now holding instead of bread books. But, as we all know, there are no coincidences, and this is why I am so grateful to Mary Karlin, whom I have known for several years and who I consider one of the godmothers of the artisan food movement in Sonoma County, with her popular classes on cheese making and wood-fired cooking and her many years of studying and working side by side with the finest chefs and cheese makers in America (even I had the honor of working numerous times with Mary at the award-winning Ramekins Culinary School in Sonoma). Here, she demystifies essential processes for a new generation of artisans in this, the most comprehensive book ever written for home cheese makers.
There are two key words in the previous sentence that I’d like to revisit: “demystifies” and “artisan.” The category of fermented foods includes bread, wine, beer, spirit beverages, cheese, pickles, cured meats, sauerkraut, kimchi, and more. They all evoke an ancient lineage of mystery that, until modern science grabbed hold, had an aura of alchemy and magic. This is because, in my opinion, each of these foodstuffs represents a type of transformation of one thing into something totally new and different. And the artisans who knew how to perform those transformations attained a vital, honored, and almost shamanistic role in their communities. They had, or so it seemed, a mysterious power. But as science and technology deconstructed the transformational steps into very non-magical, mechanical processes, an important trade-off occurred: volume production supplanted small-scale artistry.
However, as anyone interested in this book probably knows, we are now in the midst of an artisanal renewal. We saw it happen with bread, wine, and beer in the 1980s, followed by a flowering of amazing domestic farmstead cheeses in the 1990s. Lately it’s showing up in salumi and charcuterie. And where the professionals dare to go, home cooks soon follow. This book celebrates these artisan mysteries, if I can be so bold as to resurrect that mystical image. I think it’s allowable, because things exist on many levels, and while alchemy is no longer the rulebook of the day, the yearning for the transformations that it symbolically points to never has and never will depart from us. And so I believe that all of us, whether professional or home cooks, long for the kind of empowerment that comes with the ability to transform one thing into something else.
In my cheese making days I marveled at how milk could become so many different other things and how, if I learned how to properly control the environment in which I performed my transformations, I could tease out flavors and textures that weren’t there in the original source product; I could effect a radical change in the elements, bringing joy to others. I viewed my stainless steel cheese vat as a kind of altar, and my aging room as a sacred, veiled chamber. I believe it is in making connections like this—in seeing the implications embedded in fermented and thus transformational foods (and in all things, for that matter, but it’s so much easier to grasp with fermented foods)—that we do attain a type of veil-splitting empowerment and thus begin to scratch the itch of our deeper yearnings.
So a book like this one, which demystifies and simplifies, also leads us deeper into mystery, because it gives us the tools to effect transformations and to experience the joy of such creation, and also the joy of giving joy. Every now and then I get the urge to track down some rennet and make another batch of Abbey Jack, and with this book in hand, I’ve already begun designating my aging cellar. But more important, because I have the privilege of traveling frequently, I look forward to tasting the cheeses made by you, of sharing in your joy by being the recipient of it.
One final anecdote: During the height of my Abbey Jack days I decided to make small, twelve-ounce wheels to give as Christmas gifts. I even dipped them in beeswax and tied them up with twine, with a little nub of string dangling off the top to facilitate untying them, and happily gave them to my friends to send to their families across the country. I couldn’t wait to hear how everyone liked it (this was in the early 1980s when many people had never eaten homemade, aged cheese). A few days after Christmas I heard one of my friends, who was talking on the telephone, laughing hysterically. He kept looking at me and laughing again. When he got off the phone he said, “My folks wanted me to tell you thank you for all your hard work, but to also let you know that it was smelliest candle they’d ever burned.”
Over the next few days I heard this same response from three other people. Of course, those who figured out that it was cheese raved about it, but, frankly, I still get notes from old friends reminding me of my days as the smelly candle maker.
So as you dive into the world that Mary Karlin describes in the following pages, I leave you with this thought: Know that you are entering a long tradition of multidimensional artisanship, with all that the term implies. As you become adept in your transformations of milk into curds and whey, and thus into cheeses of many types, and as you learn how to evoke every subtle nuance of flavor trapped in those curds through proper temperature control, acid balancing, and aging, and as you begin spreading the joy you have created by sharing the cheese you create, remember, above all else, to always label your cheese.
Peter Reinhart
Charlotte, North Carolina
September 2010
Double-Milled Stout Cheddar at 2 weeks