A Food deep dive
Cheese
I have eaten hundreds and hundreds of cheeses, which is why it always struck me as strange that I didn't make one until the early nineties. That first cheese was mozzarella — raw milk from the farm down the road, vinegar, flake salt — and it was so good that thirty years and thirty-odd books later I'm still at it. This is all of it: where cheese came from, how it actually works, every family and how to make it, the world's cheeses including the ones nobody here has heard of, and the fridge in my basement I rebuilt into an aging cave.
Start here
What Cheese Actually Is Four ingredients, one trick, and the reason a food that spoils in hours became a food you can keep for two years. Explore →
The Family Tree The one diagram the whole section hangs off. Why soft/medium/hard sorts cheese by its symptom instead of its cause — and what to use instead. Explore →
Thirty Years at the Bench Hundreds of cheeses eaten and none made until the early nineties. Raw milk from the farm down the road, vinegar, flake salt — then the books, the two presses, and a refrigerator with motors in it. Explore →
How to Read a Cheese Recipe It looks like a cooking recipe and it is not one. Most of the numbers describe somebody else’s kitchen; only a few are real instructions. Which are which, and why the pH beats the clock. Explore →
My Bookshelf Thirty-odd books, nine I actually use — and they disagree with each other on cultures, on precision, and in one case on whether it is cheese at all. The disagreement is the education. Explore →
The whole thing, in wings
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