Cheesemaking is somewhat of a lost art. In former times, most farm wives regularly made cheese from the milk of their family cow. Since there was no refrigeration, making cheese was the only way to preserve the surplus of spring and summer milk for winter when fresh milk was hard or impossible to obtain.
Before refrigeration, milk would quickly sour - within hours of milking. Pasteurization was unknown and unnecessary. Sour milk is even healthier than fresh milk. The most common use of milk was to let it "ripen" (that is sour slightly), and then churn it into butter. The liquid remaining is true buttermilk, which was cultured naturally with the organisms that come in the milk.
The other food that could be made from the quickly souring milk was of course cheese. The farmer's wife would save the evenings milking and add it to the mornings milking, and make cheese from that combination. Without clean-room produced cultures, that special mixture of the two milkings would have the right proportion of culturing micro-organisms to make good cheese. After warming the milk for a sufficient time to fully ripen it, rennet, a natural substance found lining the stomach of a calf, would be added.
Interestingly, man was not the inventor of cheese, but rather God. Man only discovered it. It turns out that fresh milk is not the best food for a calf, but rather curdled milk. Therefore, God put a substance in the lining of the calve's stomach for that purpose. Somewhere along the way, some enterprising individual discovered that this same substance could be used to make cheese for people too.
Now getting back to our story. After the rennet was added, the milk separated into two components: curd, a gel-like substance, and a watery liquid call "whey". After curdling, the curd was cut up gently with a knife, and gently heated. The whey was drained and usually fed to the family pigs to turn what would otherwise be wasted into delicious meat. The curds would be put into a mold and pressed with weights to removed any remaining whey. It was then usually salted, dipped in wax and allowed to age.
Cheesemaking today is not much different than it was in times of old - at least in artisinal cheeseshops like Zimmerman's. Industrial cheesmaking probably doesn't even resemble anything that looks like the traditional way, and may not even result in real cheese. Even if it does, the result is bland an boring.
In our case and other artisan cheesemakers, the primary difference is the process is more precisely controlled. Laboratory produced cultures replace natural ripening, and rennent is produced to exacting standards using either animal or veggetable sources depending on the cheesemakers preference. Ripening temperatures are precisely controlled, and the pH of the milk is monitored to ensure consistency from batch to batch. Different cheeses differ in temperatures used, types of culture, and other processing to the curds.
Since all of Zimmerman's cheeses are made from raw milk, Elvin (our cheesemaker) has had to modify some of the traditional recipes such as Swiss in order to prevent heating the milk to temperatures that might be detrimental to the fragiles enzymes in the milk. Also, all of our cheeses are made from whole milk as it comes from the cows. They are much richer in healthy butterfat, and may vary slightly from the traditional kinds because of that differenc as well. Our Baby Swiss again is a good example. Traditional Swiss cheese is made from skim milk. Because our Baby Swiss is made from whole milk, it tends to form less holes. While our cheeses have these differences from the kinds you are used to, the resulting cheese is much better for you.
Butter for example is recovering from the "bum rap" it received years ago. Science is now discovering that butter from grass-fed cows is extremely good for you - probably the best kind of fat you can eat. In fact, if the cows are grass-fed, their fat contains special fatty acids that will help prevent cancer, heart disease, arthritis,and many other modern plagues. Our cheeses have not only this kind of fat, but it has it in much higher amounts than found in milk from conventional dairies which feed their cows lots of grain.
For more information on the healing properties of milk-fat from grass-fed cows (of which our cheese has in abundance), please see EatWild.com