The Complete Guide to Making Cheese Butter and Yogurt At Home

There comes a point in every civilised life when buying dairy products in a shop begins to feel faintly inadequate. Why merely purchase cheese, butter and yogurt like some ordinary mortal when you could instead transform your kitchen into a small, determined outpost of agricultural self-sufficiency? The Complete Guide to Making Cheese, Butter, and Yogurt at Home is the book for that moment?or for the moment just before it, when you are still sane enough to wonder whether making your own cultured dairy products is admirable domestic craftsmanship or the beginning of a very specific kind of obsession. Richard Helweg?s 2012 manual is exactly the sort of volume that appeals both to practical homemakers and to people who look at a gallon of milk and see not a beverage, but a challenge. Here is the alluring promise that with sufficient patience, correct temperatures, a little bacteria, and a robust tolerance for terminology like curds, whey, cultures and rennet, you too can produce the sort of things most of us have spent our entire lives unthinkingly lifting from refrigerated supermarket shelves. It is at once empowering and faintly hilarious: the modern reader, armed with stainless steel pans and a thermometer, bravely reclaiming ancient foodways from the tyranny of convenience. And really, there is something deeply satisfying about the whole enterprise. Cheese-making has about it an air of medieval seriousness, as though one ought to be wearing an apron, living near a hillside, and answering only to the seasons. Butter suggests a more cheerful kind of labour, all wholesome exertion and gratifying solidity. Yogurt, meanwhile, occupies that peculiar zone where health, science and faint domestic menace meet?milk left to its own devices under controlled conditions until it becomes something tangy and virtuous. This book promises to guide you through all three, allowing you to move from passive consumer to dairy alchemist with an authority that may alarm your friends. Of course, the true charm of a book like this lies not only in its usefulness but in its glorious seriousness. There is always something wonderfully comic about a comprehensive manual devoted to something most people solve by walking into Tesco for six minutes. But that is precisely why such books endure. They appeal to the noble, stubborn part of the human character that refuses to accept that industrial civilisation has already done the hard bit. No, says the home dairy enthusiast, I will make my own mozzarella, thank you. I will churn my own butter. I will become the sort of person who casually says ?my yogurt? and means one produced not by a multinational corporation but by a sequence of choices made in a domestic kitchen. As a Very Good copy sold by Crappy Old Books, this one has exactly the right pedigree. It has clearly survived the world without disgrace, but still looks presentable enough to inspire confidence. Crucially, it is not so pristine as to suggest it has never been consulted by an actual aspiring cheese-maker, nor so battered as to imply the previous owner met with catastrophic dairy-related setbacks. Very good is ideal for this kind of title: respectable, practical, and still fully ready to usher a new generation into the occasionally lumpy pleasures of cultured milk products. Published by Atlantic Publishing, the book belongs to that noble strain of American practical guides which assume, admirably, that what the reader really wants is not airy inspiration but the full operational toolkit. One imagines clear instructions, useful background, troubleshooting advice, and enough encouragement to carry one past the first minor setback?because any craft involving bacteria, temperature, fermentation and patience is bound to generate at least one moment of staring into a saucepan and wondering whether this is how all great dairy traditions began. In the end, The Complete Guide to Making Cheese, Butter, and Yogurt at Home is more than just a manual. It is a q.…