Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Delicious Cheeses (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“[Ricki Carroll] has inspired artisans from Lorie to Las Vagas. She’s the Billy Graham of Cheese.” – Barbara Kingsolver, from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

 

“This book covers everything the novice cheesemaker needs to know about making delicious cheese on the first try” – San Francisco Examiner

 

“A thorough and practical guide.” – Bon Appetit

 

“A must-read for anyone interested in cheese making!…offering abled cheese makers knowledge to excel at their craft and novices a world of information…” – Jodi Wische, Old Chatham Sheepherding Co.

 

Product Description

The classic home cheese making primer has been updated and revised to reflect the increased interest in artisanal-quality cheeses and the availability of cheese making supplies and equipment.

Here are 85 recipes for cheeses and other dairy products that require basic cheese making techniques and the freshest of ingredients, offering the satisfaction of turning out a coveted delicacy. Among the step-by-step tested recipes for cheese varieties are farmhouse cheddar, gouda, fromage blanc, queso blanco, marscarpone, ricotta, and 30-minute mozzarella. Recipes for dairy products include crème fraíche, sour cream, yogurt, keifer, buttermilk, and clotted cream. There are also 60 recipes for cooking with cheese, including such treats as Ricotta Pancakes with Banana Pecan Syrup, Cream Cheese Muffins, Broiled Pears and Vermont Shepherd Cheese, Prosciutto and Cheese Calzones, and Grilled Vegetable Stacks with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce. Profiles of home cheese makers and artisan cheese makers scattered throughout the text share the stories of people who love to make and eat good cheese. Plus information on how to enjoy homemade cheeses, how to serve a cheese course at home, cheese tips, lore, quotes, cheese making glossary, and more.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC; 3 edition (October 14, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580174647
• ISBN-13: 978-1580174640
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,560 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cheese Gromit!, March 19, 2006

By	Scott Graves (Colorado) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

135 of 142 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, but there's better out there., June 21, 2003

By A Customer

After much experience with wine and beermaking, I decided to try making my own cheese. Well, it is defiantely not a trivial matter. We are not making pasta here... This book was not bad, and helped me understand the process of making cheese but the actual recipes were confusing and hard to follow. If you have never made cheese before, try another book. There are better ones out there by Shane Sokol & Barbara Ciletti for beginners. In summary: a nice book if you want some insight into the cheesemaking process, but on the "how-to" side, the book is of limited use once you have gone past your first steps.

229 of 246 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Foodie Background Reading. Good cheese too, April 25, 2005

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

`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 and garage located close to goodly supply of dairy farmers. Living close to people like the Amish or Mennonites who just may do this on a regular basis, not to mention have a handy supply of raw cow's milk may be the very best venue for mastering cheesemaking.

It occurs to me that I have not given this book enough credit. In addition to many recipes for some very, very serious long-term cheese making, there are a number of recipes for things such as buttermilk, crème fraiche, sour cream, kefir, yogurt, butter, ghee, paskha and clotted cream. Unlike recipes you may find in most general cookbooks, the recipes for buttermilk, sour cream, and crème fraiche are not `approximations' or close substitutes. They are the real deal, which means that the recipes call for the kind of starter culture that can only be bought from a speciality mail order source.

Note that while the book does cover some simple yogurt recipes, I would not push it as a book on yogurt making. If that is your real interest, look for a title specializing in yogurt.

The general utility of the book is further enhanced by Chapter 11 that includes a quick course on the proper techniques for cutting and serving cheese. This same chapter contains several recipes for staple products using buttermilk, ricotta, fromage blanc, and yogurt. These are mostly breads, muffins and biscuits. It also has several recipes for dairy-based dips, spreads, dressings, appetizers, salads, pizzas, and veggie dishes. Personally, if I ever wanted to go beyond the fringe with foodie mania, I would much sooner go in the direction of cheese making and artisinal breads than towards the raw food doctrines. Those ancient Greeks and Romans knew a good thing when they saw it!

It will probably not be lost on you that the book's author happens to be in the business (New England Cheesemaking Supply Company) of selling equipment for making cheese in small batches, so the book is pretty self serving, but it is still an excellent introduction to the craft with several references to sources other than the author's own company. The end of the book also gives a generous number of references to artisinal cheesemakers, cheesemaking journals, and a very nice bibliography with some more advanced texts.