Quintessentially, brewing beer is cooking food. One who participates in the practice invariably begins to see food and drink as more than staple necessities, and those who enjoy craft beer eventually begin to ask for more from the solid foods portion of their diet. If good craft brewed beer, made in the spirit of homemade goodness, tastes so much fuller, more malty and flavorful than the dumbed-down stuff, perhaps then other foods may have more to offer too.
In modern times, food is manufactured predominately with the producer’s, not the consumer’s, needs in mind. We eaters and drinkers have our minds made up for us. Really, it’s true. Millions of dollars of advertising and lobbying has us all eating artery clogging margarine and shortening, thyroid disrupting soy milk, and defatted and elutriated skim milk; none of which tastes even relatively good. That was not our decision. It’s time we make our own food again or at least start buying it from people who care about more than just profits derived from the sale of a commodity. It worked for beer, saving us from the dark age of post prohibition yellow lagers, so where else can we apply this model? How about yogurt and cheese?
Traditionally, cheese is a food made from milk: the nutritious life-giving liquid mammals use to feed their young. Humans utilize the milk of a specific group of mammals called ruminants which evolved from deer and possess the ability to produce milk from their natural diet of fibrous grasses. They include cattle, sheep, goats, water buffalo, yaks and camels. Before modern plastic packaging, homogenization, pasteurization and refrigeration, people quickly drank milk before it soured and solidified. Cheese, thought to have originated when an ancient middle easterner filled the yak stomach she was using as a camel pack with fresh milk and then left it in the sun, is created when the protein rich solids (curds) in milk coagulate and the other liquids (whey) are run off. Making cheese was simply a way of preserving the edibility of milk. Butter is much the same in the sense that the milk solids, fat in particular, are massed together and the buttermilk rinsed away. Sour cream and yogurt, fermented milk products which include the complete milk liquids, are much creamier.
“One of the remarkable qualities of milk is that it invites its own preservation,” writes food authority Harold McGee in his masterpiece On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Yogurt is one of the best representations of this miraculous microbial process. Like the relationship between yeast and malt sugars in beer, naturally occurring bacteria convert milk sugar (lactose) into lactic acid which preserves the altered milk and inhibits the growth of competitive pathogens. It also makes it taste smooth and tangy. Folks who have a digestive problem with dairy products most likely do not have enough of the enzyme lactase in their small intestine to eat up the lactose before it enters the large intestine and wreaks havoc. Fortunately, milk bacteria Lactococcus and Lactobaccillus, encouraged to propagate in yogurt, take care of the lactose problem, allowing easy and comfortable digestion.
Yogurt and beer have lots of other similarities too. No longer do brewers or dairy producers rely on wild yeasts or bacteria to ferment their sugars: isolated and highly predictable cultures are now used instead. The better the ingredients used, the better the product. Also: the fresher the better. For beer, aromatic hops are most pungent in brewery fresh beer. For milk, the only ingredient in yogurt: the closer to the dairy the better. Most all people buy homogenized and pasteurized milk and milk products. We didn’t make that decision. Most craft beer is unpasteurized because heating food is cooking food; why cook something that’s already done and ready to eat? However, modern milk is produced using highly unsanitary methods, making pasteurization indelible.
To keep the ignorant masses safe from last century’s plagues, the FDA has hence banned the sale of unpasteurized milk. Milk is now in its prohibition. However, a few rum runners are working loop holes known as “cow shares” in order to stick it to the man and deliver farm fresh, sanitary, organic and necessarily local raw milk. The farm cannot sell you milk, but they won’t keep you from buying the cow, or at least part of it. With a cow share, what you are technically paying for is their care of the animal, but we all know what’s really going on. Here in West Michigan are two great places to contact if you’re interested in farm fresh natural milk – grassfieldscheese.com and lubbersfarm.com. The health benefits are extraordinary – check out realmilk.com – and the taste? Remember your first sip of IPA?
Most all the cheese, butter, yogurt and sour cream commercially available is made from pasteurized and homogenized milk, so obviously its possible to make great food despite these industrial processes. Only twelve dairies in the US even make cheese from unpasteurized milk that they themselves produced and Grass Fields in Coopersville is one of them (you can find it at farmer’s markets, organically persuaded grocers, and on their farm.) For beer, the equivalent would be if a barley, wheat and hop farmer fermented and sold her own ales and lagers. I’m not sure if that has ever happened.
Being a beer connoisseur has hence led me to ask more from all food and drink. I’m not sure if there’s much of a difference flavor wise between generic band yogurt and the big specialty producers, especially considering FDA mandates, because yogurt is such a simple thing. Cheese, however, is not simple. Processed “American” and other similar Kraft or generic inexpensive “chunk” cheeses really deserve another title altogether in order to properly describe their attributes; how about “Macro-cheese?” The good stuff, like good beer, is produced in far smaller batches by far smaller diaries with a much larger price tag. Don’t feel like paying for it? Make it at home.
My first attempts have been with culturing yogurt. The process goes something like this: raise a quart of milk to 180F and chill to 116F. Stir in yogurt starter culture and hold temp in a thermos for 6 – 12 hours or until the milk coagulates. Refrigerate and enjoy; preferably with fresh local blueberries, cucumbers, or Naan bread. Try sicilianosmkt.com for the yogurt and cheese making info. Get crazy, share a cow, eat seasonally and make your own food!
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