Books


The art of natural cheesemaking, David Asher, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017

My very first book on cheesemaking, offered by my best friend in 2018. My adventure with cheesemaking started with this book. It helped me discover traditional cheesemaking from natural ingredients. It is a true goldmine for those who want to get rid of industrial ferments and who want to understand the fundamentals of cheesemaking traditions. It explains how to make cheese from kefir and provides recipes (goat cheese, camembert, blue cheese, St-Marcellin, cultured butter etc.).

Artisan cheese making at home, Mary Karlin, 10 speed press, 2011

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first book that ever talked about how to make cheese at home. This book is a very good resource about milk, fermentation, material, techniques. It also gives a lot of different recipes, classified by level of difficulty. The recipes are adapted to small quantities of milk (2l to 4L), which makes it ideal when starting cheesemaking at home.

Cheese ripening guide, Arnaud Sperat-Czar, Sébastien Roustel, Débora Pereira and Bernard Mietton, Profession Fromager, 2014

Technical book on ripening. I love this book! I only know the French version, which is an incredible source of information (I hope it is the same for the English version). This book is written for professional cheesemakers but still, home cheesemakers can learn a lot. It combines scientific explanations, testimonies from professionals, diagrams etc. It is all about how to ripen your cheeses from temperature, ventilation, humidity, cave types, sowing a new cave, failures understanding… There are also ripening explanations for many different types of cheeses (crottins, triple-cream, époisses, camembert, roqueftors, reblochon etc.)

The science of cheese, Michael H. Tunick, Oxford University Press, 2014

This book is about making accessible de scientific aspects of milk, curd and cheese making. Michael Tunick, PhD, has been a research chemist working for the Agriculture Research Service (ARS) of the United States Department of Agriculture since 1985. His research focuses on dairy products, cheese manufacturing techniques and storage, as well as chemical and structural aspects of cheese. In this book he makes accessible the science of cheese making to everyone (coagulation, curd structure, what makes milk turn into different cheeses etc.). No need to master chemistry and physics to enjoy the reading. This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the process of cheese making (and will save you days and years going through the thousands of research publications on cheese making)!

Gut: the inside story of our body’s most underrated organ, Giulia and Jill Enders, Scribe, 2015

From a first glance, this book has nothing to do with cheese, apart its digestion! However, this book has been key in my understanding of microbiom. Humans are giant microbioms. Our survival depends on bacterias and other micro-organisms that live on us and in us (about 2kg from our digestive system only!). Those organisms depend on us (we feed them) and we depend on them (they help us digest food for instance). Understanding the important role of bacterias allowed me to understand better fermentation and thus cheesemaking. I recommend this reading to every bacteria phobics and other sterilization addicts!