Cheese!

Our first batch of chevre (technically fromage blanc since I don't have the chevre molds) is hanging to drain, and within the next few hours, we'll be sampling our first goat cheese.

There were a wide range of recipes that varied in complexity for this relatively simple goat cheese.  Some had you use pasteurized goat milk, or pasteurize your raw milk ahead of time, and others called for using the milk "straight from the goat" and not bothering to heat it to the culture temperature, because it was likely at the point already.  Others called for special "chevre" starter that has included rennet, and others had you use a standard mesophilic starter and liquid rennet.  

And all of this suddenly got me to thinking: people have made these "simple" cheeses before online cheese supply shops and detailed instructions.  How did they do it?

For example, I imagine there was a time when heating a cheese to 170 degrees before cooling it down quickly with ice was technologically impossible, not to mention gathering pure starter cultures.  I am enough of a microbiologist to understand the point of culturing "good" bacteria in your cheeses as a method of preservation, but we haven't always had access to these cultures.  So, how did we do it?

I do know that if you want to wildly ferment cheese, the last thing you want to do is heat it to 170 degrees and kill all the organisms in it.  I wonder if pasteurization became important only after we started mixing the milk from hundreds or thousands of animals before sending it to market.  If you just milked your own goat, and you have assessed the health of the animal and cleanliness of the facility, is it really a worry?  Or are their deadly pathogens waiting in every gram of fresh milk, waiting to kill us all.

I don't know the answer, but I do know that the recipe I used was as simple as I could make it.  Fresh milk, lightly warmed, inoculated with factory cultures...

I'd like to see about getting rid of that last part!