cheeze_whizz

> If you are a cheese connoisseur, knowing how to make your own at home can unlock a world of unpasteurized possibilities.

Gotta push back against that.

If you're a budding cheesemaker and you don't know what you're doing, don't start with unpasteurised (raw) milk. The professional cheesemakers who make cheese with raw milk know the microorganisms in their milk down to the species and they know it's safe to make cheese with that milk. Unless you have a biology lab next to your house who are willing to look at milk samples, then you simply don't have the same information and everytime you use raw milk you're playing the lottery, and a lottery that you win by losing. Heuristics like "but the animals look healthy" are meaningless, there are bacterial diseases that have very different effects on humans and animals, for example brucellosis (caused by the Brucella bacteria) causes recurring fevers to people but only causes miscarriage in animals. And how would you know that an animal is having a fever, or is not healthy, if you're not, yourself, a farmer?

Even if you don't get sick, raw milk cheese can go bad easily and I mean it can blow up and turn into a sponge-like structure in what is called "early blowing" caused by the gases released by bacteria and yeasts infecting unpasteurised milk. If you don't mind your cheddar turning into a cheesy rugby ball with the consistency of carrot cake, go right for it, but don't say nobody warned you.

No, it's just hard to make traditional mozzarella, it takes more than a day and careful control of acidity. The "30 minute" recipes are faster and easier because they substitute the long acidification of the traditional recipes with instant acidification (with citric acid, vinegar etc) but they have a very high failure rate. If you search for "mozzarella" on r/cheesemaking you can see that maybe one out of three are from people who couldn't make it work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cheesemaking/search/?q=mozzarella&r...

That must be an underestimate too, because the people most likely to post on reddit to tell everyone about their mozzarella are the ones who had a "success!!!" with it.

My informed opinion as a cheese maniac is that raw or pasteurized milk doesn't make any perceptible difference in cheese quality. What makes the difference is a) the animals' diet (which imparts flavors that don't go away with pasteurization), b) the manufacturing process (anything made in a factory will be bland, even if it's made with raw milk) and c) the aging.

The most important factor by far is aging. There's a reason why the French have a special name for the special job of aging cheese, "affineur". A good affinage can transform the most mediocre cheese into a culinary tour de force.

Source: I make cheese and age it myself.

That's not true. First of all, as cheese ages all the bacteria (and fungi and yeasts) inside it die out because they run out of food to eat. You see, they're trapped in a solid lump of protein so they have nowhere to go. So they die of hunger. That does make the cheese safe to eat so cases of food poisoning from hard cheeses that tend to age for more than three months, are virtually unheard of.

Second, whether good bacteria will outnumber the "bad" depends on how many of each ... goodness value? there were at the start. If your raw milk is contaminated with sufficiently high numbers of coliform bacteria (E coli and friends) there is no amount of bacterial goodness that can make that milk good for cheesemaking. Most likely you're looking at "early blowing" (literally the cheese blowing up like a rugby ball, with a great big fissure in its center, because of gasses released by bacteria early in its maturation).

Third, some "good" and "bad" bacteria can coexist quite happily with each other simply because they do not consume the same resources and so do not compete for them.

Don't have a fourth one for you.