The cheese of life

Henri Bortoft tells us not to seek to understand the milk via the cheese. But the cheese can take us on a most edifying journey. The ability of a raw milk cheese to mature itself is a wonder.

I milk two goats each morning and that is more than enough milk for us. So, we have a problem that goes way back into human prehistory: how to turn excess milk into a more long-lasting food. And like many things in ancient culture, the solutions are not just useful and practical but things of subtlety and joy.

If you go to standard advice about making cheese you get to pasteurise the milk and then add freeze-dried culture. That works and produces palatable cheese of various types. But it takes you toward the cheese we get commercially, cheese that does not improve with age and which goes mouldy given half a chance. The bacteria and fungi that are needed to mature the cheese were killed in the pasteurisation.1

It is so counter-intuitive and counter-cultural to keep milk and then curds at room temperature while they develop! We spend our kitchen life avoiding doing that, despite our millennia of cultural history without refrigeration. My guide in my explorations is David Asher in The Art of Natural Cheesemaking.

I also make kefir every day and so I know this is a stable process. Drink the kefir, add new milk to the “grains”, and hey presto a new batch the next day. Kefir is a broad spectrum culture, and Asher says it has all the bugs that are needed for a cheese to start its journey, according to the conditions it finds.

The cheese process also has its continuity, so some slops from a batch of cheese are added to the subsequent batch. The grand raw milk cheeses, the Parmesans if you like, do just that to keep a developing and distinctive character. That puts them alongside the sourdough starter and the beer yeast stocks. If a process depends on microbial action, then the microbes need to be propagated. Stable microbial processes are indeed a wonder.

Raw milk

Clearly the milk inside the goats’ udders does not go off. If you stop milking each day the milk production stops quite quickly: “drying off”. But from day to day, just as in humans, the milk is deemed fresh and wholesome. Normally we refrigerate our milk more or less straight away and it keeps for a week at least.

We know from making cheese at room temperature that the microbes in the milk form a stable ecosystem that does not allow sudden growth of any particular microbe. That seems to make evolutionary sense, but why are the microbes there in the first place? One answer is that there are microbes everywhere and that nature abhors a vacuum. You get sudden souring of pasteurised milk because the balancing and stable ecosystem is not present.

But there are deeper answers. The goats themselves live in a microbial world and depend on microbes for their very nutrition: ruminants feed from the bugs that digest the forage that the goats eat. They need the microbes even more obviously than we do, and they need an immune system that acts against harmful bugs the way we do, too. Apparently, substances from the saliva of goat kids feeding from their mothers can enter the mother and she can produce a response in her milk to help the kids fight an infection.2

This stable and responsive microbial world is also necessarily local. There are generalities across all goats and indeed across all ruminants, but the particulars are specific and local. French farmhouse goat cheeses (“crottins”) are recognisably the same and recognisably different. Different over geography and different over time. The curation of the cheese process is both a guiding hand and a response to differences.

I am not making any extravagant claims to the emerging qualities of my cheese. But some cheeses made in a similar way reach gastronomic heights. The tastes and textures flow from the microbes in the milk. There is a confluence here of human social history and community, of animal behaviour and interaction with shepherds, and of the benign microbial cultures that live in and support that world.

Technologies

The farming world is a bit entranced by technology. There has to be a machine to do it quicker, an agrichemical to solve a problem, a way to squeeze more out of less. We have avoided most of this just by being a smallholding of limited scale. Milking two goats is easier to do by hand. Keeping the nettles and thistles down is easier to do with a scythe.

The cheese story is heir to this tradition: practical peasant low-tech hands-on work. Labour intensive if it needs to be. Involved, observational, continuous, embedded. If I lose my sourdough starter I can grow another one but it will never be the same. If I go on holiday someone has to look after the kefir.

Albert Borgmann is the philosopher who looks at what we lose when things become more convenient. His paradigmatic case is the move from an open fire as heating to central heating. He calls such things focal practices, because they are the foci for many diverse things that happen around them. There is a whole raft of human culture embedded in sitting round a fire that is lost when we can flick a switch, no matter how we try to hang on to it.

I want to know the raft of practical things that go along with letting our foundational microbiota do their magical work for us. I want to know how the processes take shape when we are really just curating. I cannot let convenience technologies like freeze-dried culture interrupt what is trying to be.

There is discovery at the social and personal scale and there is discovery at the metabolic scale. Mental processes are well entwined with the microbiome of the gut and any time we adjust our metabolic milieu to be closer to how we evolved we can expect to think and behave differently. That is as subtle as it is interesting because of the question of how we can be conscious of such changes.

Roasted meat

We have had a family project called Wild Routes. It involves camping and doing things in a modestly off-grid sort of way. One of the most striking activities is to do a pit roast. Dig a hole, light a fire in it, when everything is hot put a large lump of meat in the hole and cover it up with soil. Several hours later the meat is meltingly tender.

Again this in a bit counter-cultural. We don’t like soil/dirt near our meat and we like to be able to time and control the temperature of the cooking. That is how we believe we get the “perfect” roast meat. We have usually done a couple of the largest lamb shoulder we can find, sandwiched with great branches of herbs and wrapped in foil.3

The practice in our culture that still comes close is I suppose the hog roast. There is all sorts of expensive technology around a hog roast but it still involves cooking a pig for a long time.

It was a bigger project than I imagined but we built an outside wood-fired oven. Such a beast you stoke a fire in its belly until the whole structure reaches 450C. It will then cool if allowed to do so gently over at least 24hrs. The available control is to cook when the oven reaches about the right temperature and to close the oven door which cuts off oxygen to the remaining fuel and gives a moister, smokier heat.

I have eaten a lot of meat in my life, but cooking that much closer to our evolutionary roots was and is a revelation. Put another way the accidents on my learning journey have been stunning. An overnight smoked whole brisket a bit too cool. A whole chuck that was crisp on the outside and falling apart inside. And a pork shoulder that, even though I insist every week that we want the fattest meat, the butcher was embarrassed about: the tenderest crackling I have ever tasted in years of trying.

The other day I gave our weaner pigs a branch of green acorns which they attacked with joy and gusto. They have definitely never seen an acorn before but they knew acorns were pig heaven. I am speculating that we can access our instinct for meat the way we have never known it. For cooking far messier and smellier than you could do in modern house. For cultural roots we have nearly lost.

Who we are

The modern consumer word would have us believe that everything is a choice. We can choose friends and associates, we can choose the values we believe in, we can choose what to eat and what to wear. Who we are becomes a construct. The serial personae of David Bowie, a true magician of this.4

This is important to corporate entities who can then manipulate us. The cultural roots and the focal practices that centre us in our proper social evolution are anathema to marketing. I have a friend, a keen horsewoman, who will write a brief list and go the supermarket, coming away with only what was on the list.

The raw milk cheese and the wood-fired meat roast are capable of helping us find out who we are when we have become lost in the entirely self-referential world of marketing and selling. When the identities thrust upon us have confused and betrayed us. The labyrinth is radically undermined by a sense of who we are together. Some opposite of identity politics, a solidarity with our microbial bodies and their environmental needs.

I used to run a risk management consultancy company. It was sophisticated and intelligent in its way. Through it, I came to understand that getting companies to understand the big risks they faced and the getting them to see how to address them ended up in bad faith. We could only really help with risks that people lost sleep over, and selling people loss of sleep is not a great business model.

This is in microcosm the failure of our education system and our culture. We mistake who we are under the weight of pressure to be someone different. And we don’t know how to regain our footing. Education as we know it is about externals and never about refusing to comply. Many of education’s “successful” graduates are psychopathic in their disregard for what matters to them and to their social milieu.

What we need to know, to understand properly, in the set of focal practices that will support us in being who we are and who we need to become. The focal practice that kept me sane was always wilderness, a fascinating practice where any intervention detracts from the wildness of the wilderness itself. It is the ultimate unpackageable, unmarketable, polar opposite of everything corporate entities stand for. And, yes, there are many “products” that only prove that the focal practice disappears when we try to grasp it.

Conservation grazing

Just as the conditions the cheese matures under need curating to allow the cheese to achieve its potential, our damaged and depleted landscapes cannot be simply rewilded, if that means letting go. We can curate the process of the landscape achieving its potential with animals and plants that belong there in a diverse and balanced system. Highland cows, browsing goats, wild boar, beaver, together with keystone predators like eagles and wildcats can be midwives.

There must be, but I cannot yet imagine, social conservation grazers that will check the rank growth of psychopaths and sociopaths that ruins our society. Something that was always there in more balanced and nuanced societies to keep the weeds in check and allow many more people to find out who they are and who they can be.

1 I once read that, to an American, if a cheese in the fridge changes, then something is wrong, whereas to a Frenchman, if a cheese in the fridge fails to change, then something is wrong. You can guess on which side of that I find myself!

2 This reminds me of the response that certain plants have to being overgrazed; they become bitter and less palatable the more they are nibbled at and restore their native sweetness when growth resumes.

3 The braver among you will source a shoulder of mutton!

4 “The minute you know you’re on safe ground, you’re DEAD.” — David Bowie