Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Homemade Cheeses

I've never made cheese before, but, with this book, I think I have a good chance of getting it done!!

This book is very detailed yet easy to understand. We have recently purchased cheese making kits for making cheeses at home since where we live, they are quite expensive and not readily available, especially for the goat cheeses in Australia. THe 1st book we bought was good enough for beginners (if you are afraid of making cheeses, don't. Everything we did came perfectly all right). But this one goes into more details and explanations. So we recommend it!

I got interested in making cheese after I meet the artisan cheesemaker at a local winery near Herman, Missouri. She told me that she had started in her kitchen and had developed the hobby into a professional culinary skill, after further education in Europe and Israel on the fine art of cheesemaking. She enthusiastically recommended this book, and I received it for Christmas. It is very well written, with logical chapter layout for ingredients, equipment, and techniques, followed by lots of recipes for the different families of cheeses (hard, soft, Italian, etc.) The beginning establishes the cheese makers vocabulary, which is then used throughout the book. A great book for a beginning cheese maker.

I had tried to make cheese from recipies I had found online with little success. I was rather frustrated and decided to buy this book and see what I was doing wrong. My first batch was a chedder cheese which came out exactly as the book promiced first time. My second batch was a gouda cheese which I upsized to a 3 gallon batch from the 2 gallon recipie using the instructions in the book and once again it came out perfect. For the money it has to be the best aid to a home cheesemaker that one can buy. I highly recomend this book to anyone who wants to start out making cheese.

`Home Cheese Making', 3rd Edition, formerly `Cheesemaking Made Easy' by cheesemaking equipment supplier, Ricki Carroll is one of those books like Sandor Ellix Katz's book `Wild Fermentation' and Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions' which a dedicated foodie should read, if only to appreciate exactly how cheese is made and to thereby appreciate the differences between hard and soft cheeses as well as cheeses made from cow, goat, buffalo, and sheep milk. The procedures for cheesemaking can give us a much closer connection between everyday cooking and the transformations which turn milk into cheese than can be achieved by even a close reading of Harold McGee's chapter on milk in `On Food and Cooking'. Aside from dedicated foodies and the armchair foodies whose experience is largely from Food Network travelogues, there is the hard core cheese hobbyist and unregenerated counterculture `Whole Earth Catalogue Hippie' who grows a lot of their own food and makes their own wine or beer to foster an independence from commercial products. This book is really for you. The first thing which both pleased and surprised me about the book is that it does not limit itself to soft, fresh cheeses such as queso blanco, mozzarella, cream cheese, mascarpone and mozzarella. It doesn't even stop at cured mozzarella, giving provolone. It goes all the way to the hard grana cheeses such as Romano and Parmesan, plus cheddar, blue cheeses, and the soft cured cheeses (Brie, Camembert, Limburger) along the way. One thing I should not minimize is that while the learning curve from conventional cooking to cheesemaking is not very steep, the investment in time, equipment, and special techniques for cleaning and sterilization may be a bit more than you will encounter when you get into some new culinary fields such as bread baking, souffles, and preserves. While buttermilk and crème fraiche may be pretty easy, even a product as simple as cottage cheese requires at least two specialized ingredients not carried by your local megamart. In fact, if you are already familiar with the techniques involved in home beer brewing, canning, pickling, or wine making, you are probably already halfway to having the necessary skills and space needed to do serious cheesemaking. Unfortunately, this does not give you a leg up to access to the best raw materials. I suspect that serious cheesemaking for most types of cheeses may be beyond the resources of a typical city apartment or condo dweller, unless you have the time to take regular trips to farms to obtain the right kinds of milk. While I have not looked for them in New York City, I suspect that even Zabars doesn't have a lot of the raw materials you will need for recipes in this book. While my favorite megamart does have only conventionally pasteurized cow's milk, it has no goat's milk, sheep's milk, unpasteurized milk, or single pasteurized cream. The very best location for getting into serious cheesemaking is probably in a standalone house a

I have read this book very carefully from cover to cover and find the information very accurate and easy to follow. It takes you in a very easy step by step manner through this most ancient art. Start small by trying the easiest recipes and making the cheeses you like and then as you start to become better, you can slowly try your own little variations.Using this book, I have made Cheddars, Goudas and even Blue cheese that has won my Bed and Breakfast quite a reputation.Find out a little bit about the cheeses I make by visitingwww.geocities.com/cinnabarfarm