DIY
KITCHEN
LET THEM EAT CHEESE
Fermenting your own cheese is easier
than you think. By Wendy Tremayne
Libby Reinish and Tristan Chambers, urban homesteaders and defenders of culture (bacterial and
social), know that ingenuity can stave off a mundane
world of mass production in which machine-made
standbys replace all that once contained the mark of
creativity. They also love cheese.
116 Make: Volume
22
making because of the modern preoccupation with
bacterial contamination,” they relayed. “We’ve really
sanitized our relationship to fermented foods.”
In contrast, the French palate recognizes cheese
as a part of the living world. Advertising guru
G. Clotaire Rapaille revealed, in an interview with
Doug Rushkoff, that he advised the industry to
package cheese in plastic zip-lock “body bags”
made for refrigerators (which he likens to a
morgue). In his view, this kind of packaging gives
Americans what they expect: dead food.
But the cheese maker knows that flavor requires
oxygen exchange and humidity; cheese breathes.
While the cheese dome offers a decent storage
solution, one might have to make a trip outside the
supermarket to actually find a living cheese. Or do it
oneself. Here’s a recipe from Reinish and Chambers
for an herbed goat cheese.
Photography by Daniel Long
