Then jumping down the centuries and across the Atlantic, there was Cristina Potters with one of her lovely photos and a recipe of one of the many contemporary Mexican versions.

Scroll down through the whole post on Mexico’s great Lenten dishes.  I wonder how long these will survive now that the fasting rules have been so thoroughly weakened by the Catholic Church.

Food entrepreneurship is alive and well in Mexico. I am constantly amazed by the small start ups selling fruit cakes or home made flour tortillas or typical sweets or fruit liqueurs or crepes or cookies or, in this case, cheese. Penajamo, a small municipality (county roughly) in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico has no less than four small cooperatives making goat cheese.

Now goat cheese is new to Mexico and is still far from being as well known and liked as it is in the United States, say. And Pénjamo is a center of big agriculture and meat processing plants. So how in the world did artisanal goat cheese making get under way.

At the Expigua livestock show in Irapuato last month, María Carmen and her niece Susanna who were demonstrating the products of the Joya de Lobos coop, explained.

About a decade ago, the parish priest somehow made contact with the Secretario de Desarrollo Económico y Turismo and with the French Embassy in Mexico City. As a result a French woman by the name of Solange Manier turned up in Pénjamo and spent several month teaching goat cheese making. Then she left and there’s been no further contact as far as I can tell. This, and other stories I heard, raise echoes of the mythic origins of many European cheeses, something I’ll talk about in another post.

Now they milk twice a day, refrigerating the evening’s milk for the following morning. Then they pasteurize the milk, coagulate it, wait twenty four hours, and mold it, and the fresh cheese is ready twenty four hours later. Apart from natural, they turn out cheeses rolled in ash, red pepper (pimiento), sesame, pecan, and one flavored with chipotle (very mildly flavored). They also make an aged cheese.

Their products are whisked off to Mexico City on the Flecha Amarilla bus line–much cheaper than using one of the messenger services. There they go to prestige restaurants (Águila y Sol, Ginos, Au Pied de Cochon), hotels (El Marquis, Fiesta Americana, Intercontinental) and organic stores (The Green Corner) and El Museo de Queso.

Cost: MN$25 for 200 grams (about US$2.50 for 4 ounces).

Another group.

If you’re interested in visiting, Joya de Lobos is at Matamorros 37-C, Col.Centro, Pénjamo, Guanajuato. The phone in Mexico is 469 692 3517 or Cel. 044 469 100 1419. Agustín and María Elena Gutiérrez are the proprietors. They can point you to other makers. Combine this with a visit to the pyramids, to the two Guanajuato tequila makers close to town, and to the birthplace of Padre Hidalgo, one of the leaders of the Mexican independence movement, and you have a lovely day.

The only milk available was not just pasteurized but homogenized and had Vitamin D added as well. No lovely layer of cream rose to the top. The cheese came in foil or plastic packs. Butter was outweighed by margarine twenty to one. Cream was thin and oily and had to be semi-frozen before it could be whipped.

How could the richest country in the world tolerate such stuff? I cut a panel off the side of a milk carton and sent it to my English dairy farmer father.

True, some things have improved since then, particularly if you search. You can get some decent cheese. Ditto yogurt. But it’s still the case that gums hold cream cheese and yogurt together, that you have to hunt down plain yogurt, that cream that has not been ultra-pasteurized is a rarity, and that–amazing–whole milk is a sign of a neighborhood in serious need of gentrification.  In the average grocery store, it’s still slim pickings.

Now milk and milk products have found their advocate in the form of Anne Mendelson. Today is the official publication date of her book, Milk, published by Knopf. Anne Mendelson will be known to many of you. She’s the author of the incisive biography of America’s most famous cookbook, The Joy of Cooking. And she writes informative, generous cook book reviews for pubications such as Gourmet and the New York Times, the kind of reviews that actually move discussion of the topic at hand to a new level.

I should probably say that I was the recipient of one of those kind reviews. And that since then Anne and I have sat together, usually on benches it seems for some odd reason, to chat about milk and Milton and many other matters. I like to think, though, that I am not unreasonably swayed by all this.

Because whether Anne is known to you or not, you’re in for a treat with Milk. It’s as delightfully written as everything she publishes while not pulling punches, condescending, or dodging tough issues. She has many sub-themes that I shall return to later: clear explanations of complicated food science of milk; good sense on the virtuous food camp’s ideas about raw and organic milk; and provocative claims about milk’s historical geography among others. I’ll be returning to some of these themes over the next few weeks.

But running through the book is a single thread. We need to recover a huge heritage milky delights. We’ve been led astray by the emphasis on milk as a drink and milk as a source of hard cheese. Both are fine but they are a recent by-way in the long distinguished history of milk products. She wants to re-introduce us to all the lightly fermented yogurts, buttermilks, and fresh cheeses, to real butter and cream, to the boiled down milk products of India and Latin America.

To illustrate this she has all kinds of recipes all of which she has obviously tried in her own kitchen. Some are for classics-béchamel, hot chocolate, rice pudding. Some are a little more unusual-ají de leche, hoppelpoppel, buttermilk-caraway soup. And some ease the reader into new adventures. Look at this.

“Fresh white cheese: Kindergarten version

Go buy a cardboard carton–two, if you’re game–of cultured buttermilk. It should be made without salt or gummy stabilizers, and preferably should have a milkfat content of at least 1.5 percent. Place the unopened carton)s) in a deep pot such as a stockpot or asparagus steam and add enough cold water to come close to the top of the cartons. Bring the water to a full boil over high heat. Remove the pot from the heat and let the whole thing cool to room temperature.

Open the carton’s and dump the contents into [a cloth-lined] colander. [Then tie the cloth with a string and hand to drip]. When the whey stops dripping, turn out the drained curd into a bowl and briefly work it with a wooden spoon. Work in a pinch or two of salt and a dash of cream, if desired. Store in the refrigerator, tightly covered, for three or four days, and use in any way you would use commercial cottage or pot cheese.”

Enticing.

A book to treasure.

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/10/lets-take-back-the-world-of-milk-lead-on-anne-mendelson.html/feed 2 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/queso-oreado-and-is-sock-cured-cheese-just-a-joke.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/queso-oreado-and-is-sock-cured-cheese-just-a-joke.html#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:30:06 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/?p=564 Cheese,  it is famously said, is milk’s leap toward immortality.  Sometimes.  But fresh cheeses kind of hop instead of leap.  So what did Mexicans do with their fresh cheeses before refrigeration?

MexicoBob took on the job of tracking down a Mexican cheese that did not feature in Los Quesos Genuinos Mexicanos. It’s called queso oreado and it sheds some light on this matter.

He heard about it from a blogger, Alfredo, whom we’ll be hearing more about.

“I am from Pueblo Nuevo and my grandmother used to make capirotada. She used piloncillo, rebanadas de bolillo, cinnamon, cloves, pecans or piñones (de los rosa) queso “oriado” crumble aged fresh cheese and chile ancho, devained, fried in lard and chopped. Of course, a cape of bread, all those ingredients, again a cape of bread, etc.

They used to make it in a big or so it seemed cazuela de barro. It was really, really good. I have not had capirotada in years. I better get busy and make some myself.”

So here’s Bob’s quest.

“The verb “orear” means “to air” or to “take air”.

Subsequently I found out that “queso oreado” is queso fresco that is “oreado”, or air-dried, which gives it a more concentrated taste and deeper color. It is a mature fatty cheese which is pressed from pasteurized cow, goat and sheep milk. It has 45% minimum fat in dry the matterand a minimum dry matter of 50%. It is aged for a couple of weeks at least.

Another name for it is “panela oreado”. No doubt there are several variations depending upon fat content, pH, moisture content, aging etcetera.

Up until electrification which in many places didn’t occur until the 1930′s and 40′s there was no way to refrigerate milk and cheese. The only cheeses that could be stored and sold in small shopes were the dried or aged type. Queso oreado was popular back then for that reason.

It came in a big brick and it would sit out on the counter for a fairly long period until all of it was sold. It was covered with chile powder for protection. It was very dry and hence crumbled easily and that is why the recipes for capirotada at that time called for crumbled queso oreado to be sprinkled on top.”

And here’s Alfredo again on how to make queso oreado.

Now, “queso oreado” is fresh cheese wich you will leave uncover in the cooler. In a few days it will form a “crust” and will crack a little and if you leave it long, will become very hard. It taste like aged cheese and I love it. You probably can find it at el mercado Hidalgo and do that procedure.

And my take.  I think this would work only in very dry climates. Otherwise I think the cheese, without additional salt, or pressing to remove the moisture, or smoking, would just go bad.  Certainly wrapped fresh cheese in the fridge goes bad though I have to try leaving it unwrapped at Alfredo suggests.

]]> http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/queso-oreado-and-is-sock-cured-cheese-just-a-joke.html/feed 2 http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/preserving-milk-in-mexican-history.html http://www.rachellaudan.com/2008/09/preserving-milk-in-mexican-history.html#comments Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:54:15 +0000 Rachel Laudan http://www.rachellaudan.com/?p=547 And addendum to my post on cheese in Mexican history. A classic way of preserving milk in Mexico (as in India) was to boil it down until the milk sugars became so concentrated and the water content so low that it did not spoil. We don’t have any figures. But given the attention paid to milk sweets in colonial Mexican cookbooks, it seems likely that much of what milk production there was went into sweets not into cheese.

And if you’re a bit confused about milk sweets, think of cajeta (dulce de leche) which is a fairly liquid form. Boil the milk down further and you will get fudgy solids.

No seriously, here’s what I took away from Los Quesos Mexicanos Genuinos, set in a context of what I know about Mexican history and history of dairying elsewhere.

Plus two caveats. (1) Goat and sheep cheeses are not considered. They appear not to have had a presence in Mexico until the last few decades. And (2) We’re not here considering the making of foreign-style cheeses in Mexico, of which there is a fair bit.

Cattle arrived in Mexico with the Spanish five hundred years ago, they did well and multiplied. In fact, they did so well that they had to be moved out of the Mexico City area to less populated areas, particularly to the north.

For four hundred years from the 1530s to the 1930s, milk was of small importance. Cattle were for meat, for tallow for industrial purposes, for hides, for working the fields. They weren’t bred for dairying and most of Central Mexico with a dry season of nine months is hardly ideal dairying country. Milking began on the feast of Santo Domingo (25th June) about a month after the rains had started and went on for three months. To make it less perishable, most of the milk was probably turned into cheese about which little is known.

The next period is the late 19th century-1930s. Some changes take place. Crosses with Holstein and Swiss breeds are tried, producing better milkers. Some experimentation with hay and alfalfa for feeding in the dry season. And from the 1920s, milk sold in Mexico City by law has to be pasteurized.

1930s-1990. There’s a big push for liquid milk (this follows similar pushes in the US and Europe as milk is declared nature’s perfect food). Most of this appears to have been as milk powder (still a major source for milk consumption in Mexico). Nestlé arrives, an event of paramount importance in Mexico’s use of dairy products. Large amounts of skim milk powder are imported, I assume from the US which still exports this to Mexico.

Most milk production is still small scale. State price controls mean that there’s very little money to be made with milk. Small farmers or artisans produce cheeses that they can be made with simple equipment and that are liked by local people.

1990s. Price controls are removed and the peso is devalued so that less milk powder is imported. Both Mexicans and foreigners invest in the dairy industry so that now about 50% of Mexico’s milk and cheese production is large scale, with modern equipment and regional or national distribution. This is where most of the cheese in the grocery stores comes from.

30-45% of the milk and cheese production is still with small farmers. They and the small cheese makers they supply continue to make cheeses for local distribution. These vary greatly from place to place though most are simple and fresh. These are what you find in markets and in small stores.

So. What’s the bottom line? Most of the typical Mexican cheeses are less than three generations old. Mexican taste for cheese has probably boomed in the last three generations. There’s probably more artisanal (in the sense of small scale for a local market not in the US sense of hand crafted for the discerning buyer) cheese produced now in Mexico than at any time in its history. That there are probably more kinds of artisanal cheese than at any time in Mexico’s history. That in fact the taste for cheese has boomed so much that to satisfy the demand for inexpensive cheese, half the “cheese” on sale and consumed in Mexico is artificial cheese.

All this means that many of the cheese dishes we associate with Mexico–cheese quesadillas, chiles rellenos con queso, molletes, as well as the sprinkling of cheese (or crema) on dishes are probably of recent vintage where recent means less than a hundred years old. And for ordinary people, perhaps much less than a hundred years old.

The question is whether this is the peak point for small cheese makers? Will they quickly go under as the big operations expand?

Now I’ve always been puzzled by Mexican cheeses. The names in different Mexican cookbooks, whether for an English or a Mexican public, don’t seem to map on to the names in the market or the supermarket. It’s not clear what their relation is to Spanish cheeses. Or to the cheeses of other migrant groups to Mexico. Now we have an authoritative look by the best available scholars at the cheeses of Mexico. Cheers.

As any reviewer’s first duty is to tell you what’s in a book, here’s what it offers:

a short history of dairying in Mexico

an analysis of the current state of dairying in Mexico

an overview of artisanal cheese making in Mexico (that is, of Mexican cheeses. It does not deal with the growing number of artisanal cheese makers turning out French-style goat cheeses, other European-style cheeses, and so on. I’ll talk about some of these in subsequent blogs).

a description of the 32 main cheeses they believe to be genuinely Mexican (with photographs), where they are made (with maps), technical cheese makers’s description of how they are made and their chemical characteristics, and how they are used. Here’s a typical spread with the photo of a queso en tenate on the left and the introduction to queso adobera that Bob Mrotek mentioned on the right.

I learned more about Mexican cheese history from this book than from anything else I have read. It’s an afficionado’s book of course, not a cook book. If you fall in that group, you’ll want to know how to get it. I ordered it on line from one of Mexico’s main bookstores, Gandhi. They do ship overseas. Be warned that this is not Amazon and you will need to persist.

For the majority of us who are not cheese-making fanatics, wait for my next post on the counter intuitive and thought provoking ideas I took away from this book.

Not just a parking place. As I backed in, a pickup parked in front of me in a no-parking zone. The two lads in the back hopped out and started hauling milk churns and blue plastic barrels of milk across the road and into the side door of Quesos Vaqueiro (dairy cheeses). Here is artisanal cheese making, Mexican style.

Were these for cheeses? I asked the driver, who was seated comfortably on the tailgate. Yes, he picked up milk from six dairies each morning and delivered it to the cheese maker (there are several small cheese businesses in Silao). Small dairies obviously since presumably here you have both the milk from the evening before and from the morning milking and it only fills the back of a pick up truck.

Here’s the proud owner of Queso Vaqueiro whom we interrupted reading a newspaper. He showed off his products.

On the left, queso fresco, on the right asadero (oaxaca essentially) and above requeson (ricotta essentially). Apart from his three products and flour tortillas (for later) he also sold commercial flavored yogurts from the San Juan dairy.

He’d have shown us the cheese making but nothing was happening at that hour. Presumably they left the milk a few hours to ripen before they started.

Here is artisanal cheese making. In some senses–the warm milk–very traditional. In another–the packaging–very modern.

There’s a printed label, after all. Above the name it says “Queso tipo asadero elaborado con leche entera pura de vaca” or “Roasting, that is melting type cheese made from pure whole cow’s milk). The registration is “en tramite” two words meaning going through the bureaucratic process a thought that any Mexican resident dreads. Below it gives the kind of information you expect on products for the American market. Ingredients (milk, coagulant, salt), typical composition (water 55%, fat 19%, protein 22%).  All this for a small business that processes perhaps a hundred gallons of milk a day.

Bottom line. Poised between old and new. Reasonably prosperous by world standards.

And lots to follow up. More about that milk. More about why a melting cheese such as Oaxaca added so much to Mexican cooking.

Even if you don’t understand Spanish you can see the essential step: hot water being poured over the curd so as to produce the long strings.  And you’ll links to lots of other Mexican cheese-making techniques. Great stuff.  Thanks for finding it Alex.

The main narrator, Abraham Villegas, also mentions that many artificial cheeses are also being made.  Mexico, like many parts of the world, has a milk shortage.  That makes cheese expensive for a lot of people.  Yesterday when I was in Mega, I counted and I reckon that more than half the cheese there was non-milk cheese, artificial cheese.  Here’s an example.

And here’s the list of ingredients: water, vegetable fat, milk protein, etc.  (Stupidly I threw away the grocery receipt so I don’t have relative prices. But I’ll check next time I go).

And I have to admit that the taste difference between this and an all milk cheese from the always-reliable firm Aguascalientes was less than I expected.

So next time you have a queso fundido (melted cheese) that seems incredibly reasonable in price, it may well be artificial cheese.

Meanwhile, those who want a wet, fresh, Italian-style mozzarella can pick up this.  From Wisconsin, need I say? About $4.00 for about half a pound).