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SELF-RELIANT CHEESES

8 Perfect Reasons to Make Caleb Warnock’s Self-Reliant Homemade Cheese:

1 This recipe, which I worked for hundreds of hours to create, is available nowhere else. You won’t find a self-reliant cheesemaking method anywhere on the Internet!
2 It’s simple. Once you have practiced the recipe a couple of times, “the cheese practically makes itself,” as a friend of mine says.
3 It costs a third less than store-bought cheese and a fifth less than Romano and Parmesan!
4 Its fresh taste is unbeatable.
5 You need no special equipment! No thermometer, no rennet purchased on the Internet, no acetic acid crystals, no citric acid crystals, no cheesecloth. If you have ever tried cheesemaking before, you know that you have been required to buy all of these. No more!
6 It’s self-reliant and completely local. The whole world would be better off if we practiced more self-reliance and less “rely on the government” or other such nonsense. We would be healthier, wealthier, wiser, and less afraid.
7 You get to control the amount of salt in the cheese.
8 It’s fun. And it’s the only cheese recipe in the world that begins with a shovel!

Breaking News!
Ancient Cheese

My fascination with self-reliant cheese was jump-started like a firestorm in February 2014 when I stumbled upon this headline: “World’s Oldest Cheese Found on Mummies.”

Global news outlets told the story: Protein chunks found on necklaces on newly discovered Chinese mummies were, in fact, kefir cheese. The Journal of Archaeological Science announced the findings of chemists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. And it was not just any cheese—the world’s oldest confirmed cheese, by a long shot. The mummies had been essentially vacuum-packed in tight leather casings and buried in a desert where dry soil and salt preserved them nearly perfectly.

None of this, however, was what caught my eye. What fascinated me were the words “kefir” and “necklace.” Kefir is an ancient way of making a yogurt-like food from milk. Kefir grains are a combination of beneficial bacteria and yeast that naturally remove the lactose from milk and turn it into yogurt at room temperature. I knew that kefir had been used worldwide for thousands of years. I had kefir in my fridge. I drank kefir for its health benefits—it is a natural probiotic. I had known that people made some soft cheeses from kefir, too. But I had never heard of anyone making hard cheese from kefir.

Having some experience with soft cheese, I also knew it would be nearly impossible to make beads of soft cheese to put on a necklace. There was no way that the 3,600-year-old cheese in China was soft. But chemists had confirmed beyond doubt that it was kefir cheese. Hard kefir cheese.

Hard cheese has been a sore spot for me for a long time. If you have read any of my popular Backyard Renaissance books, you know that I am big on self-reliance. I knew people had self-sufficiently made cheese for thousands of years. But I had not been able to find anyone who knew how to make self-reliant hard cheese without harvesting the fourth stomach from a calf or sheep. Here was proof beyond a doubt that hard cheese, made of kefir, had once existed. I was immediately determined to re-create this ancient recipe.

Why Backyard Rennet?

Rennet is the word that cheesemakers use to describe a variety of naturally occurring enzymes that are capable of producing hard cheese when used correctly. Almost all rennet available today is synthetic—created in laboratories using GMO bacteria. If you want to make cheese, a line of companies are ready to sell you rennet. The problem is that rennet does not self-produce, so you have to buy it every time you want to make cheese. This violates what I think of as the natural law of abundance—prosperity always arrives in abundance, with enough for everyone. (I could write a book on this subject. Perhaps one day . . .) For example, kefir is self-producing, so once you have kefir grains, you have them for life and you don’t have to buy them again. You can give them away to anyone who wants them, because the grains multiply. The same is true of natural baking yeast, all animals that people eat for food, and all heirloom vegetables that people eat for food (before the invention of hybrids and patents and lawyers, which all violate the law of abundance). My point is this: those Chinese mummies made clear and obvious to me that 3,600 years ago, there had to be an easy, abundant way to get rennet. Rennet occurs in nature in both animal and vegetable varieties, so I started looking for a source of backyard vegetable rennet. I didn’t have to look far.

Malva neglecta

For a long time, I’ve been fascinated with the uses of the plant that scientists call Malva neglecta—the rest of us call it “mallow,” “common mallow,” or “dwarf mallow,” and most people know it as “cheese-plant” or “cheese-weed.” Mallow is the world’s most amazing plant. I use the root to make powerful medicine for sinus infections, colds, flu, coughs, and asthma (for more information, see my book Forgotten Skills of Backyard Herbal Healing and Family Health1). I use the plant to make hand soap and dishwashing soap, as has been done for hundreds of years, and even to make homemade marshmallows. We eat the leaves in salad and eat the peas. It is such an important plant that the settlers of the country brought it to America in the first place.

But why is it called “cheese-plant” or “cheese-weed”?

You don’t have to go far on the Internet to find “the answer.” Thousands of sites will tell you it is because mallow peas look like tiny rounds of cheese. For years, I have thought this answer was nonsense. Historically, people have named plants after important uses. For example, soapwort is a flower that I grow in my backyard that has been used for thousands of years to make soap. We know for a fact that it was used in the time of Christ to make soap. If you look closely, you can still find original patches of soapwort flowers, which pioneers regularly used to make simple homemade soap. This is just one example of how plants have historically been named after their uses. For a long time, I had suspected that mallow was used to make cheese. It wasn’t until I read about the world’s oldest cheese that I began to wonder if kefir + mallow = hard cheese.

So I started to experiment.

I made cheese almost every day from February until June. Sometimes I made three batches of cheese a day. I was determined to figure out how to make self-sufficient cheese. It wasn’t easy. But through lots of trial and error, I found some answers.

Making cheese requires only two things—milk and acid. The reason that kefir is used to make cheese, I discovered, is simple. Kefir greatly lowers the pH of milk. Kefir is between 3 and 4 on the pH scale, making it a pretty good acid. Most cheese recipes today call for the use of lemon juice as the acid source. Lemons are common today, but in most places, cheese could not have been made using lemon juice 3,600 years ago. But kefir, we know for a fact, was in use 3,600 years ago. Through trial and error, I discovered that kefir alone provides enough acid to trigger the production of curd in milk.

But milk + acid makes only soft cheese. To make hard cheese, you must also have rennet. I suspected “cheese-plant” (mallow) was natural rennet. So I started cooking.

And got nothing. It was a failure.

I started searching the Internet. I searched deep and wide. I searched scientific journals and cheesemaking books, but I found only a handful of references to people who had “heard” that mallow could be used to make cheese. After many hours of research, I was not able to find anyone who had actually used mallow to make cheese. There was no one who could tell me why my mallow cheese experiments were going nowhere.

Then one day in the kitchen, it dawned on me that I was doing it all wrong. I knew rennet was a naturally occurring enzyme on mallow, and I had assumed that an enzyme existed on the leaves of the plant. But what if it was on the root? I went in the backyard and dug up a mallow root.

And made excellent cheese.

I was thrilled that I had cracked the code, but I was doubly thrilled to find an extra bonus—not only did the root produce hard cheese, but it nearly doubled the amount of curd that I got from the same volume of milk.

Why does this matter? Because suddenly, the cheese I was making was cheaper, ounce for ounce, than the cheese for sale in the grocery store (and if you are making Romano or Parmesan, it is dramatically cheaper). This was a huge self-reliance breakthrough.

At this writing, cheddar cheese costs 19 cents an ounce ($3.04 per pound) to make, about 25 percent less than grocery store yellow cheese and 40 percent less than mozzarella or white cheddar from the grocery store. Making homemade Romano and Parmesan costs about 80 percent less than in the grocery store!

Since my discovery, I have tried literally every variation of this recipe I could imagine. I have tried different amounts of root to produce the rennet, I have tried different temperatures, I have tried different timing, and I have tried making different kinds of cheeses. After months of work, I am excited to say that I have perfected this recipe. I have re-created what I believe to be the only recipe in existence that makes it possible to make hard cheese in any climate!

Kefir

This recipe also requires kefir, which is an ancient way of making a yogurt-like probiotic from milk. Kefir has been in use for thousands of years and can be produced at home by adding kefir grains to milk at room temperature. Kefir grains are a white, gelatin-like mass of beneficial yeast and bacteria that changes milk into a thick yogurt-like substance called kefir. To this day, kefir is still used by nomadic Bedouin tribes on the African continent, made with goat milk in goat skin containers. Kefir is used widely across the United States for its health benefits as a probiotic and is naturally 98 percent lactose-free. Kefir is very simple to make and in a modern kitchen is made in glass jars or bowls.

You will need kefir for these cheese recipes. Because kefir slowly multiplies, people are usually happy to give kefir grains to anyone who asks for them. If you know someone who makes their own kefir, you should not have to pay for kefir grains. If you are new to kefir, you can purchase milk kefir grains at SeedRenaissance.com. Water kefir grains are also sold here, but water kefir grains cannot be used to make cheese, so make sure you get milk kefir grains for cheesemaking purposes.

Making Kefir

• 1/2 teaspoon kefir grains
• 1 quart whole milk

1 Step 1: Put at least 1/2 teaspoon of kefir grains into a glass quart jar or other non-metallic container and fill it nearly full with whole milk. You can put your kefir in any amount of milk, but keep in mind that the less milk it is in, the faster it will turn the milk into kefir. For the purposes of this cheese recipe, you will need roughly a quart of kefir. Any amount from 3/4 quart to a full quart will work for this cheese recipe.
2 Step 2: Cover the container with a lid and put it someplace in the kitchen that is room temperature and away from direct sunlight. DO NOT refrigerate at this time. DO NOT stir or agitate. Kefir is most often used as a drink, and for drinking, you do not want your kefir to be sour.

3 Step 3: Your kefir is ready for cheesemaking after 24 hours at room temperature, up to 48 hours. After 24–48 hours, you should put the whole container of kefir into the fridge if you are not going to use it immediately. The cold will stop the kefiring action. At this point, your kefir should be very thick and have a clear, water-like liquid at the bottom of the container. The kefir at the very top of the jar may yellow or darken because it is exposed to oxygen inside the container; this is normal. Kefir, with its grains, can be left in the fridge for 1–2 weeks if needed.
4 Step 4: To continue making kefir, you should pour the kefir through a sieve or colander to capture the kefir grains or use a slotted spoon. Before straining, all the grains will be resting at the top of the liquid. Put the grains back into the empty container, fill it with milk, and start the process over again. Kefir grains double in size about every 20 days if they are being fed regularly (every couple days). If they spend most of their time in the fridge, they double much more slowly. After your kefir grains have doubled, you can give half the grains away, compost them, feed them to chickens or your dogs, or throw them away (if you must!). You can also freeze or dry them for later use. See SeedRenaissance.com for more details on kefir handling.

Endnotes

1. Caleb Warnock and Kirsten Skirvin, Forgotten Skills of Backyard Herbal Healing and Family Health (Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, Inc., 2015).