Milk Into Cheese by David Asher

Reviewed by Lily Massee

For David Asher, the right to clean water, access to good food, and the right to make, sell, and eat natural cheese should all be considered human rights. Asher is a nomadic natural cheese educator and advocate. He travels the globe to establish a new culture of cheesemaking, one grounded in ecological principles and biological science, and to show that natural methods are the best approach for making all styles of cheese. Milk into Cheese: The Foundations of Natural Cheesemaking Using Traditional Concepts, Tools, and Techniques encapsulates all that Asher practices and teaches today. 

Milk into Cheese is not a recipe book, but a philosophy book. According to Asher, making natural cheese is not just the following of a recipe but can require a deeper familiarity. As such, the first part of this book is dedicated to helping readers gain that deeper understanding of the philosophy, history, and science of natural cheesemaking. The next section explores the various aspects of cheese making and the tools used by cheesemakers. Asher dives into the different ways of preserving cheese and outlines the multiple relations among the styles of cheese. The final portion of Milk into Cheese is the techniques or recipes, which are organized by the season in which each style of cheese is best made. 

Asher says this is a book for cheesemakers. However, I would argue that it is for anyone who seeks a comprehensive understanding of the world of cheese and natural cheesemaking. I recommend this book to cheesemongers, sommeliers, chefs, restaurateurs, and cheese-lovers. This book is for anyone at any stage of their cheesemaking journey.  It is for folks who have never laid hands on a cow and those who come from a long line of dairy farmers. You do not have to be European or have grown up in the countryside to make good cheese.  Milk into Cheese aims to democratize and decolonize cheesemaking so that making any cheese becomes accessible to anyone, anywhere. As you will learn early in this book, we are all natural-born cheesemakers, for every mammal, including human infants, curdles their mother’s milk into cheese. Natural cheesemaking should thus be intuitive.   

The techniques in this book range from exceptionally challenging to remarkably simple. It is important to note that the most critical ingredient in natural cheesemaking is also one of the most restricted and difficult to obtain: milk still warm from the udder. In addition, natural cheesemaking also requires the use of rennet — the fourth stomach of a calf, kid, or lamb, which contains the milk curdling enzymes, which may also be challenging to acquire. Asher offers some ways around these hurdles, but unless you can obtain these key ingredients, the extent to which you can put this book into practice will be greatly limited. 

It’s no accident that natural cheesemaking is difficult for most people to practice. One of the things I most appreciate about Milk into Cheese is how Asher contextualizes natural cheesemaking, situating it within the hegemony of industrialized agriculture. He is quick to point out that cheesemaking today is most often done on a factory floor rather than on a farm, taking a defiant stance against the industrialization of dairying, which is continuing to run small-scale dairy farmers out of business, upending traditional foodways, and destroying the planet. In a world dominated by corporations and mechanization, making cheese the natural way can be viewed as a radical act. It is a reclamation of food sovereignty, food security, and food safety. 

Milk into Cheese is an incredibly well-researched book. Although dense, Asher’s writing is explicit and free of any convoluted jargon. With so much information, this book reads much like a textbook. For this reason, I wish he had included more infographics or diagrams in addition to the artful images present throughout the book. If you want to know anything about natural cheesemaking, let this book guide you.