He likes good eats, and favors trying out new things. When he recently moved to an area that has many healthy/natural/organic/local-food stores, assortment of cheeses caught his taste. The natural progression, for my brother at least, was to start making his own cheese.
It took him a while to find a place that sells non-homogenized, low temp.-pasteurized milk, the best, if not the only, kind that will produce cheese (I won't pretend to know anything about cheese making). A North Central Texas dairyman Mark Ganske, who's now doing business as "Way Back When Dairy," would bring his dairy products at the downtown farmer's market, which is where my brother first found out about them. They used to sell their milk at one local store, but it often wasn't available. Just this year, the Wheatsville Co-op started carrying the "Way Back When Dairy" non-homogenized milk, so every 2-3 weeks my brother gets few gallons of milk or few pints of heavy cream from them.
He also had to acquire all sorts of gadgets: several brew kettles, molds, utensils, cheese cloths, food-grade plastic mesh, griddle and containers, thermometers, build his own press, get a mini fridge, cheese making book...it's quite a production!
He started with soft cheeses, feta and cream cheese, and gradually moved to hard and aged cheese. So far, he's made: feta, Neufchatel, cream (several kinds), Camembert, Emmental, Gouda, Parmesan, Swiss, and Cheddar. Some of these take just a few days, but others more than 6 months until they are ready. Now that he is staying at my place for the summer, I got to sample some of his creations. Um, um, yummy!
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