Making cheese begins here, where the cows are milked.
Hello!
My name is Anthony Shawn Meerman. My Uncle Jesse makes cheese. Many people ask how cheese is made. In big cheese-making plants, it is a little different, but here on the farm, we make cheese quite close to how it was made for hundreds of years (except for a little more stainless steel). If Uncle Jesse gets the timing right, he will get the milk into the big vat while it is still warm from the cow. It comes through some pipes through the wall of the milkhouse. Uncle Jesse puts hot water into the jacket of the vat to heat the milk to the right temperature (about the same as inside a cow).
I'm helping Uncle Jesse with the pipes.
Then he adds a freeze-dried starter culture (bacteria) to begin to lower the pH, or raise the acidity. Also, an enzyme called rennet (which is grown in a laboratory by tiny things called microbes), is added to make it set up like jello. This takes about one hour.Next, Uncle Jesse cuts the "curd" with wire harps. This makes lots of little cubes, with lots of surface area, so the whey can come from the curds. Uncle Jesse says, "Barring spiders, this is all it takes to make Miss Muffet happy."
Uncle Jesse's writing this down for me.
Heating the mixture drives out more whey, and replacing the whey with water keeps the pH from dropping too far.When the curd is firm, Uncle Jesse loads it into the moulds, about 15 of them, and presses them under some horizontal bars sticking out of the wall. This makes them stick together and drives out more whey yet. They perform remarkably well under pressure (ten times their own weight) but he has to bring it on gradually. We can't do anything that might upset those precious bacteria that are working so hard for us in there (they determine the specific taste of the cheese in the end).
Little Miss Muffet, here are your curds!
After 5 hours of this treatment, they are left overnight to make them beautiful and round.The next morning, Uncle Jesse plops the cheese rounds into a 20% salt solution (the Dead Sea in Israel is 7%, and it's dead) to cure the outside and dry it out, forming a rind (my favorite part) that protects the cheese. It also puts the nice salty taste into the cheese and slows down the bacteria, so it (the bacteria) doesn't quickly rot the cheese.


The wheels are floating!
The pH is also quite low in the brine tank, because of the whey that keeps coming out of the cheese into the brine (where salt goes, water follows, remember?). The brine also helps to seal the outside of the cheese. Brine is magical.After three days in the brine, it's all up to the ripening room. In an ideal ripening room, the mold or bacteria that is desired in the cheeses overtakes the room, driving out all yeasts, undesired molds, pathogens, etc. Uncle Jesse likes to say, "Cheese is powerful stuff (hence the commercial exhortation to behold it)", but it works slowly. Sixty days later there's a beautiful cheese for you and me to eat. We don't add any preservatives, coloring, artificial rind, or other silly additives. It's just plain, yummy cheese.

Anthony Shawn Meerman (written by his Uncle Jesse)		 That's a lot of cheese!