Art of Natural Cheesemaking

4.45 (159 ratings by Goodreads)
Regular price €34.99
A01=David Asher
A23=Sandor Ellix Katz
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
alpine styles of cheese
Author_David Asher
automatic-update
bacterial starter cultures for cheese
basic elements of cheese
beginner cook
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=WBTR
cheese cave
cheese cookbook
cheese recipes
COP=United States
cultures
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
do it yourself cheesemaking
eq_food-drink
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
fungal ripening cultures for cheese
Home Cheese Making
home cheesemakers
how to source milk for cheese
kefir
Language_English
make your own rennet
natural cookbook
natural ingredients
PA=Available
paneer
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
raw milk
rennet
salt
Sandor Katz
small-scale commercial cheesemakers
softlaunch
sustainable cooking
The Art of Fermentation
traditional recipes
washed-rind cheese

Product details

  • ISBN 9781603585781
  • Weight: 907g
  • Dimensions: 204 x 254mm
  • Publication Date: 24 Jul 2015
  • Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Co
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

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Including more than 35 step-by-step recipes from the Black Sheep School of Cheesemaking

Most DIY cheesemaking books are hard to follow, complicated, and confusing, and call for the use of packaged freeze-dried cultures, chemical additives, and expensive cheesemaking equipment. For though bread baking has its sourdough, brewing its lambic ales, and pickling its wild fermentation, standard Western cheesemaking practice today is decidedly unnatural. In The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, David Asher practices and preaches a traditional, but increasingly countercultural, way of making cheese—one that is natural and intuitive, grounded in ecological principles and biological science.

This book encourages home and small-scale commercial cheesemakers to take a different approach by showing them:

•    How to source good milk, including raw milk;

•    How to keep their own bacterial starter cultures and fungal ripening cultures;

•    How make their own rennet—and how to make good cheese without it;

•    How to avoid the use of plastic equipment and chemical additives; and

•    How to use appropriate technologies.

Introductory chapters explore and explain the basic elements of cheese: milk, cultures, rennet, salt, tools, and the cheese cave. The fourteen chapters that follow each examine a particular class of cheese, from kefir and paneer to washed-rind and alpine styles, offering specific recipes and handling advice. The techniques presented are direct and thorough, fully illustrated with hand-drawn diagrams and triptych photos that show the transformation of cheeses in a comparative and dynamic fashion.

The Art of Natural Cheesemaking is the first cheesemaking book to take a political stance against Big Dairy and to criticize both standard industrial and artisanal cheesemaking practices. It promotes the use of ethical animal rennet and protests the use of laboratory-grown freeze-dried cultures. It also explores how GMO technology is creeping into our cheese and the steps we can take to stop it.

This book sounds a clarion call to cheesemakers to adopt more natural, sustainable practices. It may well change the way we look at cheese, and how we make it ourselves.

David Asher is a natural cheesemaker, bringing the traditions of dairying, fermentation, and coagulation back into this age-old craft. A former farmer and goatherd from the west coast of Canada, David now travels widely, sharing a very old but also very new approach to cheese production with his Black Sheep School of Cheesemaking. Through teaching about the use of in-house starter cultures and natural rennet from calves and kids, David helps cheesemakers around the world reclaim their traditional cheeses. He also explores the connections between all fermented foods and the important role of small-scale and traditional food production in our modern world. Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, his explorations in fermentation developed out of his overlapping interests in cooking, nutrition, and gardening. He is the author of four previous books: Wild Fermentation, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, The Art of Fermentation—which won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2013—and Fermentation as Metaphor. The hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world have helped catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. The New York Times calls Sandor “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.” For more information, check out his website: www.wildfermentation.com.