This really is the way to run a culture.

What have you done to plan for the very distant future?

See here.

Sorry, I’m in the middle of some interviews and other career-minded stuff and haven’t had time to write up about the PA raw milk statutes. I hope to have those done next week.

Meantime, I thought this essay on the problems with U.S. legal education was strikingly good. I have often said that law schools should better focus on narrative, rather than the stilted dialectic of the Socratic method. Unfortunately, the Socratic method scales a lot better than hiring good professors.

More on Raw Milk in Pennsylvania tomorrow. Today I found very interesting the Turf Wars article in this weeks’ New Yorker. It’s been my intuition that as energy and food costs rise, particularly if the economy begins to really slip, we’re going to see a great deal of suburban and urban yard converted into “victory garden” use, but my fear is that these will go the way of the original victory gardens: that is, they will exist until economic conditions enable our return to irresponsibility. Of course, the the emergency may wind up being rather longer than we think.

Tangential to this, Matt Yglesias has a good bit of writing about offshore drilling (which is intended to increase the supply of energy) as compared to high-density mixed-use zoning (which is intended to decrease the demand for energy).

Keystone Staters may have reason to rejoice: identical legislation has been introduced in the state house and senate to make the sale of young raw milk cheeses legal. Stay tuned; Law for Food will be following this story as it develops in the next legislative session.

Audubon Magazine has an article on the ecology of cork forests, now threatened as wine manufacturers move to more economical screw-top bottles. I don’t really have anything to add to the article, but I thought you might find it interesting.

Having already solved all of the other food safety problems that place thousands, of U.S. citizens at risk, Federal, State, County, and Local officials today dedicated their remaining resources to fighting vendors in small, open-air food markets in rural Riverside and San Bernadino Counties, California.

“There’s not a proliferation of these cases,” said Stephanie Weissman, an assistant district attorney in Riverside County, who is part of the team. “We’re just catching them” [emphasis added]

So, this must be a serious problem, then, if, even though there are only a few cases, the district attorney’s office is taking them on. I guess the crime rate in Riverside County is so low that the ADAs were just sitting around hoping to catch a jaywalker in the act, before all this raw milk cheese business caught their eye. I wonder how many people were at risk of eating raw milk cheese?

Chandler said the task force’s aggressive approach is paying off. At most sites, fiesta attendance has plummeted from 300 to 30, evidence that that the word is getting out.

Wow. I bet those 30 people are glad that los federales came in and saved them from themselves, and that the good people of California were willing to dedicate their hard-earned tax dollars to this endeavor, especially in this time of economic decline.

He doesn’t know how many Inland residents have been sickened, because food-borne illness often manifests itself with flu-like symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or fever.

“They may not realize that they might have gotten sick drinking raw milk taken from an infected goat’s teat,” Chandler said.

But they might realize it and avoid the particular vendor that sells bad cheese. They might also not be getting sick. This meddling nabob just admitted that he spent who knows how much of other people’s tax money saving 30 people from a danger that could very well never materialize. Anyone want to do a quick cost-benefit analysis on that?

Even better is Chandler’s attack on parajetes, a drink made from raw milk, “coffee, cocoa, cinnamon, chocolate sugar, and 100[%?] pure cane alcohol.” Chandler says two things about it:

“Parajetes is very close to wood alcohol,” Chandler said, citing its high alcohol content. “I’ve seen people drinking it destroyed by 8 o’clock in the morning.”

Uh, Mister, first of all, wood alcohol is not poisonous because it has a lot of alcohol in it. Wood alcohol is poisonous because it’s a special kind of alcohol called methanol, which is a poison. And second, if I lived in a place where ignorant puritans like this guy could compel the police to go break up a farmer’s market just because he doesn’t know how many people might get sick from eating there, I’d probably have to tie one on early in the morning too.

I can’t believe we’re losing to these people.

Since switching to sea salt some years back, I have occasionally wondered whether I was setting myself up for iodine deficiency. I wonder no more.

Too right.

Not to gloat or brag or anything, but I am staying the summer in a jurisdiction where it is legal to sell raw milk. I have today turned a gallon of locally-produced raw milk into a few balls of mozzarella and about a third of a pound of ricotta. They are certainly not the best cheeses I’ve ever had, but they were a lot of fun to make, and I am kind of proud of them.

I highly recommend Dr. Fankhauser’s Cheese Page for detailed, step-by-step information. Dr. Fankhauser has recipes (with photos) for all sorts of soft and semi-soft cheeses, as well as for things like homemade rennet. (I’m eager to make his Limoncello recipe, too.) From my background as a cheesemonger I was not lacking for theory, but this process has reminded me that there is a great deal of daylight between theory and practice.

I have typed up a few notes in case anyone else wants to try this. It’s a great deal of fun and totally worthwhile. I pasteurized the starter base — last night I added active yogurt to a few cups of raw milk to keep as future starters, and I pasteurized that milk because I wanted to be sure that it had nothing but the yogurt culture in it. I did this more for consistency of product than for safety, and I do not believe it will affect the ultimate flavor as very little starter goes into each batch of cheese (2 oz. starter per gallon of raw milk.) After a while, I may make a new starter from raw milk.

I was surprised by how acid the starter was this morning, and a little worried that I was going to have acid cheese, but however it happened, the cheese is mild and soft-tasting, with a little bit of that milky sweetness that you want from cow’s-milk mozzarella.

Invest in a good thermometer before you get started. A thermometer is the single object you will most interact with while making cheese. It should clearly show the temperatures without you having to guess between them. I made do with a candy thermometer which broke the temp into five-degree intervals so I was doing a lot of guessing. It turned out alright, but the anxiety isn’t worth it. You really only need to see the temps between about 60f and 200f, so a candy thermometer or a roast thermometer aren’t going to be great for this. Also, the thermometer should clip to the side of the pot so you don’t have to keep sticking it in, taking it out, washing it, forgetting where you set it to dry, &c.

When you make ricotta, you will smell the same flavor that you can taste on, for instance, Cheetos. That doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong: processed cheese products such as Cheetos have dessicated whey in them. I gave my whey to a local pig farmer because I’m angling for some guanciale or lardo this fall.

Working clean: I used quat sanitizer that I got from a restaurant supply store as a final rinse on all my utensils and so on. You can also use distilled vinegar if you rinse everything off with really hot water (you don’t want the vinegar to contaminate the cheese.) I think it’s important to be as safe as possible when making raw-milk cheese at home because this is how raw-milk cheese has gotten a bad name. This means using fresh milk from grass-fed cows, using clean containers and utensils, and being ever-mindful of cross-contamination. Most raw-milk disease outbreaks have been traced back to so-called “bathtub cheeses” made under unsanitary conditions. Don’t take any risks. Don’t make it harder for the rest of us.

Be careful with pasteurized milk, though, too. All pasteurization means is that many of the bacteria were cooked at the time of pasteurization. It doesn’t mean they can’t come back, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t cross-contaminate after pasteurization.

But do make the cheese. Support a local dairy. Have something to brag about when tomatoes come in. It really is a lot of fun.