Making Cheese In The 18th Century

Summary

In the 18th century, cheese-making was crucial for food preservation, using excess milk to create a long-lasting and transportable product. Different environments influenced the variety of cheeses, with unique regional flavors stemming from local soil, plants, and livestock. The video by Townsends demonstrates making a small cheese wheel, emphasizing the significance of milk quality, using non-pasteurized and non-homogenized milk for the best results. The process includes heating the milk, adding live cultures and rennet, and carefully managing the curd. Salting plays a vital role in the drying process, and the cheese is pressed to remove moisture. While modern cows produce significantly more milk, 18th-century cheese-making practices required attention to cleanliness to avoid bad cheese. The video concludes by highlighting the cheese’s potential improvement through aging.

Highlights

• Cheese in the 18th century was vital for preserving milk over long periods. ⌛
• Regional influences created diverse cheese varieties based on local conditions. 🌎
• Using high-quality, non-pasteurized milk is important for good cheese. 🐄
• The process involves heating milk, curdling it, and pressing for moisture removal. 💧
• Salt plays an essential role in cheese drying and flavor development. 🧂
• Patience in aging cheese improves its richness and taste over time. 🧀

Key Takeaways

• Cheese-making in the 18th century was primarily for preserving food. 🧀
• The environment significantly influenced the variety of cheese available. 🌍
• Quality of milk is crucial in cheese-making; non-pasteurized milk yields better results. 🥛
• The cheese-making process involves careful curd management and pressing. 👩‍🍳
• Cleanliness in the process is essential to prevent bad cheese production. 🚿
• Aging cheese enhances its flavor and texture; patience is key! ⏳

Overview

Cheese-making in the 18th century was not only about flavor but about practicality—preserving the milk surplus in the form of cheese. This allowed for long-term storage and transportation, especially important for sailors and travelers who needed durable food supplies. The type of milk and local environmental conditions played significant roles in the resulting cheeses, making each region's cheese unique.

The video guides us through a simplified cheese-making process that anyone can try at home. It emphasizes the importance of using high-quality milk, preferably non-pasteurized, and introduces essential steps like heating the milk, adding live cultures and rennet, and the critical role of salting and pressing to remove moisture from the curd. This tactile process highlighted the historical art of cheese-making, where cleanliness was key to ensuring a successful batch.

Finally, it's essential to acknowledge the art of aging cheese, which transforms its flavor and texture, offering a richer and more complex taste as time passes. Despite the temptation to enjoy homemade cheese immediately, the wait allows for a more rewarding culinary experience as the flavors mature and intensify. The video provides both historical insights and practical guidance, bridging past and present in the kitchen.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to 18th Century Cheese Cheese in the 18th century was primarily about preservation rather than flavor. It was essential for prolonging the shelf life of milk for long periods, allowing it to be transported over long distances and even last for more than a year.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Varieties of Cheese This chapter explores the diverse varieties of cheese, delving into the history of cheese and dairy from 250 years ago to understand the origin of these varieties. The chapter suggests that historical cookbooks and literature from the 18th century provide insights into the development of cheese varieties. It highlights the role of food preservation, texture, and taste in the proliferation of different cheese types.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Regional Cheese Variations This chapter explores the diversity of cheese types influenced by regional characteristics. It highlights how the environment where the cheese is produced plays a crucial role in determining its variety. Regional variations arise from distinct recipes, techniques, and the types of milk available in different areas. Essentially, the chapter delves into how regional conditions and practices contribute to various cheese characteristics.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Dairy Environment Impact This chapter explores how the environment, including factors like soil type, plant life, and the specific breeds of dairy animals (cows, goats, or sheep), influences the characteristics of cheese. Even when using identical recipes, cheeses can differ significantly based on these environmental conditions. Historical texts provide insights into how the environment historically impacted cheese production, highlighting the unique qualities imparted by different settings.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Dairy Farming Importance The chapter explores the significance of dairy farming, focusing on the production of cheese, particularly cheser cheese, which owes its distinctiveness to special grass and cow varieties.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Household Cheese Making The chapter discusses the high demand for dairy products like butter, cream, and buttermilk. Cheese is highlighted as a versatile product that can be made any time there is an excess of milk, which often occurs during prolific times of the year when milk supply is abundant. Producers need to balance their supply to ensure there's enough milk during lean periods while managing surplus during periods of high production.
• 03:00 - 03:30: The Role of Milk in Cheese Making Cheese is a popular food item due to its long shelf life, making it ideal for long voyages, travel, and distribution over long distances, unlike liquid milk which is limited to local markets.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Heating the Milk The chapter introduces the process of making cheese at home, specifically a three-pound wheel of cheese. It acknowledges the learning curve involved in the process, encouraging viewers that their first attempt may not be perfect. The narrative emphasizes the journey and experience of making cheese together, highlighting that the starting point is focusing on the milk, which is the first essential component in cheese-making.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Adding Cultures and Rennet This chapter focuses on the importance of using quality milk in the cheese-making process. It emphasizes that the quality of milk greatly influences the final product. Non-pasteurized or minimally pasteurized milk is recommended, and non-homogenized milk is preferred for making a better quality cheese. The example given uses three gallons of milk, suggesting that at least two gallons should be used for home cheese-making.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Curd Cutting and Processing This chapter focuses on the process of transforming milk into cheese, specifically detailing the step of cutting and processing curd. The narrative includes practical instructions on heating milk—typically two gallons per pound of cheese—to a particular temperature (around 90°F) to facilitate proper curd formation. It recommends using a kitchen thermometer to ensure accuracy, whether preparing cheese over a fire or using a kitchen stove.
• 07:00 - 10:00: Pressing and Forming the Cheese The chapter 'Pressing and Forming the Cheese' discusses the process of determining the right temperature for cheese preparation, which is about 90°F, by using a kitchen thermometer or by testing it against body temperature. Once the target temperature is reached, the cheese is left to sit briefly before adding live culture. Historically, people did not need to be as concerned with the sterility of this process due to the naturally abundant bacteria in their environment.
• 10:00 - 12:00: Cheese Production in the 18th Century In the 18th century, cheese production relied on adding live cultures to milk, akin to using plain yogurt today. Since milk wasn't pasteurized back then, such additives were necessary to replicate traditional cheese-making. The method involved mixing yogurt into the milk to ensure an even blend, highlighting historical parallels to modern techniques.
• 12:00 - 15:00: Cheese Aging and Tasting The chapter explores the process of cheese aging and tasting, beginning with the mixing and stirring of ingredients. This involves ensuring the mixture is well-blended with constant motion, followed by letting it sit for about 10 minutes. During this time, live cultures are introduced to the milk to become incorporated. The chapter also touches on the preparation of rennet, which is essential for cheese-making. Different types of rennet, whether liquid or in tablet form, are mentioned as options depending on availability.

Making Cheese In The 18th Century Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 today we have available to us hundreds of varieties of cheeses now we do that because we like different cheese flavors but in the 18th century cheese was a little different 250 years ago cheese was about food preservation how can we bring milk way into the future how can we have it be good A year later even longer than that how can we make milk so that we can take it on board ship or carry it over land although we make it
• 00:30 - 01:00 for food preservation it turns out that we really enjoy its texture and its taste and why do we have all these incredible different varieties of cheeses well the idea of what's happening with dairy and what's happening with cheese 250 years ago gives us a hint about where all these varieties of cheese come from if we go looking at the Historical cookbooks and books about say cheese and dairy in the 18th century we find
• 01:00 - 01:30 references to different kinds of cheese say different recipes but not really that many the variety of cheeses are really built out of the environment about where the cheeses were made so these different varieties have to do with the region and sometimes the regional variations of cheese have to do about the way people make cheese basically the recipe and the technique and a lot of it has to do with the milk that's available so each region has a
• 01:30 - 02:00 different kind of soil a different kind of plant life and a different variety of cow or goat or let's say sheep that the milk is coming from each one of those locations is going to make a different kind of cheese even if they used exactly the same kind of recipe if we read in the historical texts we really get this whole concept of what the environment does to each and every sort of cheese that's being made it's fascinating that
• 02:00 - 02:30 the authors really kind of go into depth about the fact that cheser cheese is cheser cheese because of the special grass that they grow and the variety of cow that they're using as we look at all the different European cultures in the 18th century all the ones that really sent people to the new world they all have their special cheese cultures it turns out that the most important product for the Dairy Farmer in the 18th century is cheese now he has all kinds
• 02:30 - 03:00 of products right milk is always in demand everybody wants butter everybody wants cream we even want buttermilk but cheese is the product that they can make at any time that they have an excess amount of milk and that happens whenever you have a prolific time it's the perfect time of year and you've got milk running out your ears because of course you always want to have enough milk for the low time so inevitably at certain times of the years you have excess milk
• 03:00 - 03:30 so Cheese is where you're going to go for that and cheese is always popular because it can be kept for a great periods of time so cheese is even used onboard ship as a way to give food to the sailors it's also used for travel and it's a product that you can send to Market miles and miles away which is not easy to do with regular liquid milk that really has to sell into your local market you can't send that 100 Mil away
• 03:30 - 04:00 the cheese we'll be making today is scaled down to a small household size we'll be making one just just about a three lb wheel of cheese today we're going to make some cheese and this is it's an interesting process your first wheel is not going to be your best wheel it's there's a learning curve to this thing and I am still learning but it's okay cuz we're going to do this together and we're going to make some cheese and it's going to be really tasty and wonderful the first thing that we need to worry about for our cheese is milk
• 04:00 - 04:30 milk is the most important ingredient here and the better milk that you get for this process the better your cheese will turn out in the end so what we're looking for is something that is not pasteurized or at least it is very little pasteurization in the process if you can find nonhomogenized milk that's going to be even better that's going to make a better wheel of cheese in the end what I've got here in the pot is three gallons of milk if you're doing this at home I wouldn't go any less than two gallons of milk milk and you can go as
• 04:30 - 05:00 high as you want to it's usually a pound of cheese two gallons of milk equivalent so I've got three gallons of milk I should roughly have just a little bit shy of three lbs of cheese and what we want to do with this milk is get it over the fire if you're at home obviously get on the stove you're going to want your burner to be around medium cuz we're going to heat this up slowly so I'm going to get this hanging over the fire and what we want to do is we want to slowly bring this up to about 90° and if you have a kitchen thermometer that's great you're going to be doing better
• 05:00 - 05:30 than I am cuz what I have is my body temperature and that's how we're going to test it once this is 90° and you're going to be able to judge that at home with your kitchen thermometer if you're cooking in a in a setting like I am you're just going to stick your finger in it and when it's about the same temperature as your body that's when you're going to pull it off when you do that you're going to let it sit for a couple of minutes and then you're going to add your live culture in the time period this isn't something that they would really have to worry about because they were living in a world with bacteria they're not living in a very
• 05:30 - 06:00 sterilized world like we're living in now but we have to add because our milk is pasteurized we need to add something to it we need to add something with live culture for this purpose I'm using plain yogurt and they could have used something like that in the time period as well you're going to take your yogurt and you're going to add oh about a cup with this amount of milk and you're going to just get a little bit of of milk and you're going to Stir It Up so that it's going to mix in easily we don't want to just plop kind of almost solid yogurt in here we want it to be
• 06:00 - 06:30 able to mix throughout and we're going to put that in there Stir It Up for about a minute and we're going to stir that trying to get bottom to top as we stir so that we have this constant motion that's bringing all of that and blending it together we're going to let that sit for about 10 minutes while that's sitting while your milk is sitting there and the live cultures are kind of swimming in there and getting Incorporated we're going to get a ren it put together now depending on the kind of Ren it that you have it's either going to be liquid or in a tablet or a
• 06:30 - 07:00 pet of some sort most likely just follow the instructions for the Rena on the packaging different amounts of milk going to require different amounts of Rena but once we add that we're then going to stir that again and once we stir that for a minute we're going to let that sit and some packages say 45 minutes and some people have success with letting that sit for 45 minutes I let mine set for 45 minutes and that wasn't enough I went about an hour and said this is enough but really the next batch I tried I let it go to an hour and
• 07:00 - 07:30 a half and then the next batch I let it go to two hours it seems like an hour and a half from my Ren it was about the right amount of time for it to sit and incorporate and you're going to set that somewhere where you can keep it warm so at home you might be able to put a lid on your pot you might be able to do like a water bath that you put this whole pot inside of in the sink or put a blanket or a towel over it but you want to try to maintain that heat as best as you can our Curtis set and there are a
• 07:30 - 08:00 couple of indicators that you're looking for now let's talk about curd just a little bit because it's easy to read and think if it's not exactly like what you're reading this like nice firm curd that it's not correct and that's just not the case because I have made cheese with what I would consider something that seems like pretty loose curd it just doesn't always set up the way that we'd expect it to or that we'd like it to depending on the ingredients that we have at hand not everybody has has the perfect milk to make cheese and not
• 08:00 - 08:30 everybody's going to get this huge piece of curd at the end we're trying to break some of that down and and get some of the moisture to come out of it anyway so we're going to be okay even if it doesn't feel or seem like something that you might see when you look up how to make cheese I think that you'll be all right uh we're going to go ahead and cut this and the indicator to know that it's ready is that you're looking for a clean brake and so you're going to insert your knife kind of like a 5° angle or you
• 08:30 - 09:00 could just even use a finger and you're going to pull up and that curd is just going to it's going to split apart and that's when you know okay we're ready to move on to the next step we saw the clean brake and now we're going to get in there and cut it now don't make this difficult don't make it harder than it has to be this is simple all you need is a long knife and I absolutely love this knife that John made for this very purpose and we're going to go in here and we're going to go straight up and down we're going to cut about every half inch to an inch back and forth all the
• 09:00 - 09:30 way across and then we're going to do that side to side same width and then when that's all done we're going to go in kind of at a 45 and we're just going to cut that horizontally and the whole point here is that we're trying to break this Cur up into little bits and then we're just going to let it sit for around 10 or 15 minutes really the whole point of all this process is we're doing everything that we can to get moisture to get liquid to come out of the curd so that we can make a good cheese now we're going to stir the curd and just kind of
• 09:30 - 10:00 help that along what we want is that basically we cut those into inch little blocks right but we want the edges to soften around those blocks we don't want hard edges and when we're done stirring this is kind of going to break up to where most pieces are going to be kind of like a size of a peanut automatically just from the motion that's going on here you're going to start seeing a change in the curd those hard edges are going to break off we're going to start getting smaller pieces as it releases more and more moisture the next part of this process we're
• 10:00 - 10:30 actually going to start forming our cheese wheel and this process here has a few different steps but basically we have our pot where our curd is and it has fallen to the bottom and has separated from the way and so we need something slotted to scoop that out and you can use a slotted spoon at home or whatever you want to but we're going to scoop that way out when we do we're going to scoop it into a piece of cheesecloth that's set over anything that can strain so a colander or a SI
• 10:30 - 11:00 will work and you'll want some kind of bowl underneath to catch liquid we're going to put the curds in there and we're going to give them just a little bit of a squeeze to kind of get some of that very loose liquid out of there and then at that point we're going to shift over to we have a ring with cheesecloth inside of it and that is what our wheel of cheese is going to be and we're going to start putting our cheese in there kind of little baseball size clumps at a time until we get that filled up with one layer across the bottom and then
• 11:00 - 11:30 we're going to salt and we're going to do it again and we're going to keep that process going until we fill this cheese ring up we've got our curds in our waist separated squeezed and now we're kind of forming our wheel inside of our ring here now I I did salt this and salting is a big part of this because it's part of the drying process be judicious go more salt than you think that you should I think the first time that you do this you think oh that's way too much salt and it's not so salt more than you think
• 11:30 - 12:00 that you should and kind of really mix it in there with everything now we're ready to press the sucker and this is my favorite part about it because all these wonderful juices just come out the bottom and you can really see the cheese starting to happen in this stage we're going to fold all of our cloth in and you know some people are going to be more concerned than others about what the end result of their cheese wheel looks like I'm a pretty utilitarian person so if there are some fold marks it's not going to bother me me but if that is you you can trim your cloth and
• 12:00 - 12:30 you can make sure that it looks really pretty and that's fine I'm not making fun of that that's wonderful to start off for the first 12 hours we're just going to get our follower in here and then we're going to put the 30 lbs of pressure on and you can already see when I just put a little bit of pressure on moisture is coming out and that's what we're working on here we're trying to get as much moisture out of this wheel of cheese as we possibly can so in about 12 hours I'm going to flip this then I'm going to put but as much as 75 lbs of
• 12:30 - 13:00 pressure because we still want to see little bits of drip coming out of the bottom of it and that's how you're going to be able to tell if you've got enough weight it was fascinating that as I was reading the books about uh dairying in the 18th century and about making cheese one of the references was about the amount of cheese that you would get from a cow in a year and that amount that they were mentioning in this particular book that I was reading was 300 lb now generally you're going to get something
• 13:00 - 13:30 like a pound of cheese out of a gallon of milk that means that a cow in the 18th century is producing between say 200 and 500 gallons of milk today our modern cow herds are producing almost 10 times that amount of milk it's amazing how much progress has been made in Dairy farming from 250 years ago to today I thought it was very interesting thing that as I was studying the books where
• 13:30 - 14:00 they're writing about the Dairy Farmer about making cheese that they spend a good deal of time talking about the number of farmers that make bad cheese or in this case let's say the dairy mids because they're the ones who were doing the most of the cheese making and dairy is difficult because there are a lot of natural bacterias that are floating around in the air and in the milk and so if you're not very very strict about
• 14:00 - 14:30 your cleanliness if you're not very very careful about that you will get strange strains of bacteria and different kinds of fermentation happening in your cheese so there were some people that were very very good at it they had their cleanliness down and their system down and their cheese was always good and then other people that just couldn't make the cheese properly and yet these authors knew some of these Concepts but they could never fully describe it in
• 14:30 - 15:00 the 18th century and realize that it was the cleanliness issue and the systematic approach that made good cheese every time or bad cheese every time we do find some recipes for different cheeses in regular cookbooks in the 18th century but the vast majority of cheese at least in Great Britain is being made in these larger Dairy operations now these operations might be a varying size 10 cows cow 20 cows 40 cows up to 200 cows
• 15:00 - 15:30 in a Dairy herd was at least mentioned in one of these books so we have very differing sizes of operations and the cheeses are very different so in a household we might just make a three or 4 PB cheese but it's also mentioned that in chesher they're making 80 lb Wheels 100 lb wheels up to 140 lb wheel of cheese and that's in the 18th century this is our cheese and it's looking
• 15:30 - 16:00 really really wonderful now if you go looking for this on YouTube or different places you're going to see a 100 different cheese makers with all of their different processes of weighing this the point is is that you want to draw as much moisture out of the cheese while treating it as delicately as possible this is after 24 hours this is our cheese it's still a little soft to the touch but as it's out it's going to get a hardened skin across the whole outside of it so now we just need to make sure that we're
• 16:00 - 16:30 flipping it twice a day and then after you know a couple of weeks we're going to go to once a day and then after those couple weeks we're going to go to every few days but we're going to keep flipping it and keep getting air all around it it will get some mold on it as it as it ages and all you're going to do there is get some apple cider vinegar and you're going to clean up those mold spots every time that you flip it just salt it a little bit until it gets a nice hard crust this kind of a cheese you can eat right away if you use
• 16:30 - 17:00 pasteurized milk but it's not really what you want what you want after you put the time into this is you want a nice age cheese you're going to want to wait at least at least two months that's the minimum and then you know 6 months is probably a really wonderful window but you can AG the sucker for years if you want to and it's just going to taste better cheese is finished now I told you guys to wait a couple months before you try the cheese I made this cheese a week
• 17:00 - 17:30 and a half ago and I'm going to try it right now now I'm not suggesting to do that but I can't wait to do it we're going to try it so here's a little slice it smells [Music] cheesy it almost tastes like cheese it's not there yet it needs to age it really does but it's good it's got a good texture you can taste you know what's going to happen to it and I'm glad that
• 17:30 - 18:00 um I suggested add more salt because I don't think I added enough salt to this one and so make sure to put plenty of salt in there but it is good it's just not very it's not very rich yet and it's going to it's going to get more of that as it ages but it is a delicious cheese and you will love it if you make it