NPR’s The Salt blog explores the world of French...

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NPR’s The Salt blog explores the world of French raw milk cheese, and talks to Bronwen Percival of Neal’s Yard Dairy, the creator of the Kickstarter “Raw Milk Microbiology for Cheesemakers”. Via The Salt:

Unlocking France’s Secrets To Safer Raw Milk Cheese
Anglophone cheesemakers say translating a French government cheese manual will help them make safer raw milk cheese.
In the English-speaking world, our approach to making cheese for most of the last 60 years has been like a Texas gunslinger’s: kill bacteria, ask questions later. If it’s not pasteurized, it’s dangerous, the thinking goes. But in France, raw milk cheese is a very big deal, long considered safe and revered for its flavor. The country cultivates its 350-plus cheeses — many of which are made with raw milk — like children, claiming that the bacteria in the raw milk impart unique characteristics – grassy, metallic, buttery and so on.
In recent years, America, England and Australia have discovered the pleasures of making their own farmhouse cheeses with raw milk, but it seems the French still have some secrets.
In fact, French scientists seem to have figured out the Holy Grail of raw milk cheese: how to make it safer. And a lot of how they do it comes down to how to use good bacteria to battle the bad ones.
Learning those French secrets could help cheesemakers in the Anglophone world make safer and more delicious cheese, says Bronwen Percival, a cheese buyer with Neal’s Yard Dairy in London. So she’s spearheading a Kickstarter effort to raise about $20,000 to translate a technical French government manual on cheese microbiology into English.
“Over the past five to ten years, we’ve been more interested in what makes cheese tick,” says Percival. Like how it grows, how it changes — the technical stuff. But understanding cheese microbiology is “not the kind of thing you can just look up on the Internet,” she says. Understanding the microbial communities of raw milk is only the beginning. Percival and others in the tight-knit Anglophone artisan cheese community want to learn to harness the good microbes to block the bad microbes, like listeria and E. coli, that make people sick.
“Instead of having a war of annihilation on microbes, we should be working with them,” Percival says.

Check out the full post.