A Food deep dive
Cheese
I have eaten hundreds and hundreds of cheeses, which is why it always struck me as strange that I didn't make one until the early nineties. That first cheese was mozzarella — raw milk from the farm down the road, vinegar, flake salt — and it was so good that thirty years and thirty-odd books later I'm still at it. This is all of it: where cheese came from, how it actually works, every family and how to make it, the world's cheeses including the ones nobody here has heard of, and the fridge in my basement I rebuilt into an aging cave.
Start here
What Cheese Actually Is Four ingredients, one trick, and the reason a food that spoils in hours became a food you can keep for two years. Explore →
The Family Tree The one diagram the whole section hangs off. Why soft/medium/hard sorts cheese by its symptom instead of its cause — and what to use instead. Explore →
Thirty Years at the Bench Hundreds of cheeses eaten and none made until the early nineties. Raw milk from the farm down the road, vinegar, flake salt — then the books, the two presses, and a refrigerator with motors in it. Explore →
How to Read a Cheese Recipe It looks like a cooking recipe and it is not one. Most of the numbers describe somebody else’s kitchen; only a few are real instructions. Which are which, and why the pH beats the clock. Explore →
My Bookshelf Thirty-odd books, nine I actually use — and they disagree with each other on cultures, on precision, and in one case on whether it is cheese at all. The disagreement is the education. Explore →
The whole thing, in wings
The History The sheep-stomach story I always believed, tested against the evidence — and the older, stranger answer to why anybody bothered making cheese at all. Explore →
The Families A page per branch of the family tree: what defines it, who belongs to it, and what it actually takes to make one. The taxonomy that replaces soft/medium/hard. Explore →
The Science What is actually happening in the vat. Milk is a suspension held stable by a mechanism cheesemaking exists to defeat — and there are three different ways to defeat it. Explore →
The Milk Cow, goat, sheep, buffalo — and the ones that barely work at all. Fat and protein are what is printed on the carton; casein composition is what makes the cheese. Explore →
The World Tour A region at a time, led by what is actually eaten there rather than what reaches an American cheese counter. Climate, animal, altitude and distance to market predict the cheese; national character does not. Explore →
Making It The craft fundamentals — what you actually need, what each tool is for, the universal sequence every rennet cheese follows, and the one number most home recipes get wrong. Explore →
Making Each Kind Twelve families, twelve makes. The temperatures, the pH targets, what "right" feels like at each step, and what goes wrong — one page per family, paired one-to-one with the family pages. Explore →
Aging & the Cave Low fifties, about 90% humidity, and a gentle breeze — plus the two places I hold them: a rebuilt refrigerator that turns its own wheels, and a walk-in I found in my own basement. Explore →
Rules & the Michigan Angle A protected name turns out to be fifteen different instruments wearing one label — and the same word can be protected in one country and a generic noun in another. Plus what it would actually take to sell a wheel where I live. Explore →
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