Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Milk from other animals can certainly be made into cheese,
but doing so would require changes in timing, temperature,
quantities of ingredients, and so forth that are simply too
extensive to be treated in a single chapter.
So we are going to use pasteurized, homogenized cow's milk
from the grocery store as the learning medium for your first
forays into cheese making. After you have mastered these
skills, you can branch out from there. You can find specific
types of milk suitable for your needs by finding a local dairy
at
www.smalldairy.com
.
About Raw Milk
Cheese connoisseurs insist that the best cheeses are made
from raw milk that has been neither pasteurized nor
homogenized. The trouble is that raw milk is not readily
available and quite often there are legal impediments to
buying it directly from farmers. The basis for these legal
impediments is widespread recognition of the likelihood of
the presence of pathogens in raw milk.
In former times the largest risks of raw milk were brucellosis
and tuberculosis; today the risks are E. coli, salmonella, and
listeria. Testing of vats of milk in modern times shows that
even from healthy cows, anywhere from 0.87% to 12.6% of
raw milk harbors dangerous pathogens.
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How do healthy
cows give pathogen-infested milk? They don't. Inadequate
sanitation and cleaning of equipment introduces fecal bacteria
into the milk. The reason pasteurization became a
requirement in the first place was that farmers were actively
falsifying their records so that tuberculosis-infected cows
wouldn't have to be removed from milk production.
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