My Bookshelf

I have somewhere north of thirty books on cheese, which is more than any reasonable person needs and fewer than I will end up with. These nine are the ones I actually go back to.

I want to do something more useful than list them, though, because a list of nine cheese books is a list of nine cheese books. What’s worth writing down is this: they disagree with each other. Not on trivia — on fundamentals. On what to culture the milk with, on whether you should be watching a clock or a pH meter, and in one case on whether the thing being made is cheese at all. Working out why they disagree taught me more than any single one of them did.

So: the nine, and then the three arguments they’re having.

The nine

Ricki Carroll, Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses. The one to buy first, and the one I’d hand to anybody. First published 1982, over 400,000 copies in print, and it reads like somebody talking to you rather than at you.

And here is the thing I did not know until I sat down to write this page. Ricki Carroll owns and operates New England Cheesemaking Supply Company — the outfit that has been my source for rennet, cultures, moulds, presses and wax for years. They’ve been supplying home cheesemakers since 1978; she’s been teaching classes since 1980; she is a founding member of the American Cheese Society and has their Lifetime Achievement Award. They call her the Cheese Queen.

I bought the book. Separately, later, I found the company. I have been ordering from my own favourite author for the better part of thirty years and had no idea. That’s the sort of thing that happens when a craft is small enough that the person who wrote the primer is also the person who ships you the rennet.

Gianaclis Caldwell, Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking (Chelsea Green, 2012) and Mastering Basic Cheesemaking (New Society, 2016). Two of the nine, and the pair is the point — Basic is the on-ramp, Artisan is the deep water, subtitled “the ultimate guide for home-scale and market producers.” Caldwell runs Pholia Farm, a licensed dairy making aged raw-milk cheeses, so she is writing from a bench she actually stands at. Artisan is the book I open when something has gone wrong and I need to know why rather than what to do instead. (Its foreword is by Ricki Carroll. It’s a small world up there.)

David Asher, The Art of Natural Cheesemaking (Chelsea Green). The dissenter, and I mean that as praise. Subtitled “using traditional, non-industrial methods and raw ingredients,” it argues against nearly everything the other books take for granted — freeze-dried culture packets especially — in favour of raw milk and living cultures you keep yourself, principally kefir. Sandor Katz, of Wild Fermentation, is involved, which tells you the philosophical neighbourhood. This book is why my shelf is an education rather than eight copies of one opinion.

Mary Karlin, Artisan Cheese Making at Home (Ten Speed Press, 2011). A hundred cheeses, a serious primer on milk and cultures up front, and a full chapter on cooking with what you’ve made — which most cheesemaking books skip entirely, as though the cheese were the finish line. The companion site carries reference charts and downloadable record-keeping forms, and the record-keeping is not the boring part. It’s how you find out what you actually did on the wheel that came out well.

Margaret P. Morris, The Cheesemaker’s Manual (Glengarry Cheesemaking, 2003). 250 pages, 50-odd recipes across fresh, soft, hard and washed-rind, cow, goat and sheep, leaning European, with a proper troubleshooting section and colour plates of the process. Less famous than the American books and more precise than most of them.

Steve Shapson, Camembert, Brie & Blue Cheese Guide. Narrow on purpose, and that’s its value: the mould-ripened cheeses are the ones where general advice fails you, because they’re less about a recipe than about managing a living rind for six weeks. A short, specific guide beats a general chapter here.

Robyn Jackson, Cheese From Scratch: Natural Cheesemaking From Home. Homestead-angled, sits closer to Asher’s end of the argument than Carroll’s.

Julie Piatt, This Cheese is Nuts!: Delicious Vegan Cheese at Home. Seventy-five recipes for nut-based cheeses from almonds and cashews, mostly built around fermentation and a dehydrator. Piatt co-wrote The Plantpower Way with Rich Roll. Amusingly it is also seventy-five recipes, same as Carroll — the number cheese authors apparently agree on.

I’ll be straight about this one, because my own definition page forces me to be. There is no milk in it, so there is no casein, so there is nothing for acid or rennet to do — none of the chemistry the rest of this section is built on applies. By the tree I drew, it isn’t cheese; it’s a different craft that has borrowed the word because “fermented cultured nut paste” would sell nothing. That’s a statement about vocabulary, not about quality: what it does — culture a fat-and-protein emulsion, ferment it, age it, develop flavour — is legitimately skilled work, and some of the results are very good. It just belongs on a different tree, and I’d rather say so than pretend my own definition doesn’t apply to a book on my own shelf.

The three arguments

1. Where do the cultures come from?

The mainstream answer, and Carroll’s, is a freeze-dried direct-vat-inoculation packet: a measured dose of specified organisms, sprinkled in, consistent every time. It works, it’s repeatable, and it’s why a beginner can get a decent cheddar on the first try.

Asher’s answer is that this is industrialisation wearing a homesteader’s hat — that a packet gives you a handful of organisms selected for factory behaviour, and that a living culture you maintain yourself (kefir, or a mother culture off good raw milk) gives you a richer, more robust community and costs nothing forever.

Both are right about something. The packet buys reproducibility, which is exactly what you want while you’re still learning what “right” looks like — if the cheese fails, you know it wasn’t the culture. The living culture buys complexity and independence, and it makes you a better cheesemaker because you have to actually pay attention to it. I started with packets and I’d tell anybody to do the same. I would not stay there forever.

2. Clock, or numbers?

The entry-level books say hold at 90°F for 45 minutes. Caldwell and Morris say hold until the pH reaches 6.4.

The clock is a proxy for the pH, and it’s a proxy that assumes your milk, your cultures, your kitchen and your season match the author’s. Mine don’t. The same recipe genuinely behaves differently in June and October, because the milk is different and the room is different, and if you follow the clock you will get a different cheese and have no idea why.

This is the single biggest step up in skill available to a home cheesemaker, and it’s why reading a recipe gets its own page. The number is the instruction. The minutes are an estimate.

3. 🔴 A third of my shelf is written by people who sell the equipment

Worth noticing, and I had not noticed until I laid them out side by side:

Ricki Carroll owns New England Cheesemaking Supply Company
Margaret Morris published through Glengarry Cheesemaking
Steve Shapson sells through The CheeseMaker

Three of nine, and Carroll’s is the most-recommended home cheesemaking book in the English language.

I don’t think this is a scandal and I’m not building to an accusation. It’s how the knowledge got distributed: there was no institution teaching home cheesemaking in North America in the seventies and eighties, so the people who cared enough to import the cultures also wrote the manuals, because otherwise nobody would know what to do with what they’d bought. I’ve benefited from that enormously.

But it does mean something practical when you’re reading. A recipe calling for a specific culture blend by product name may be calling for it because it’s the right organism, or because it’s the one on that company’s shelf — and usually it’s both, which is precisely why you can’t tell from the page. It’s an argument for owning Asher and Caldwell too: neither is selling you anything, and where they agree with a supplier’s book, you can be confident it’s the chemistry talking.

If you’re buying one

Carroll. Get the cheese made, get the win, get hooked.

If you’re buying three: Carroll to start, Caldwell’s Artisan for when you want to know why, and Asher to be argued with. That trio covers the ground and disagrees productively, which is better than three books that agree.

Next: what cheese actually is, or the whole shape of the craft in one diagram — the family tree.