The Essential Book of Fermentation (18 page)

A WORD ABOUT GLUTEN INTOLERANCE

Celiac disease is a genetic disorder that damages the small intestine when gluten, present in wheat and barley and some other grains, is ingested. The immune system identifies a peptide chain in the gluten as a foreign invader and attacks it. Gluten intolerance is not the same thing as celiac disease, and the small intestine is not damaged. However, it causes the same kind of unpleasant digestive symptoms, such as diarrhea, flatulence, abdominal pain, and malabsorption of nutrients.

The treatment of both disorders is the same: the complete removal of all gluten from the diet until the body heals itself. There is some indication that after healing, some gluten-containing products may be reintroduced to the diet if the intestinal ecosystem has been strengthened and the wheat products have been fermented—such as a sourdough fermentation for as long as a month.

Her ovens are fired with dry eucalyptus wood and get very hot—up to 700ºF. Then the fire is raked out and when the temperatures fall to precisely the right level, the bread goes in.

“Baking bread is magic,” she repeats. “It’s a thrill every time a whitish dough goes in and real bread comes out.” As for doing it all with organic ingredients, one look around her property told me why. Beautiful gardens contained cannas, morning glories, sage, rosemary, pomegranate bushes, cactus, yarrow, bamboo, mimosa, and much more, all surrounded by cool green grass.

“I wouldn’t think of doing it any other way than organically,” she says. “I’ve always grown a great garden. I read
Organic Gardening
magazine religiously back in the 1970s when it influenced so many people.

“You know, commercially grown wheat sends out shallow roots that only absorb the chemical fertilizers given to it. Organic wheat roots have to go deep, where they get what they need to add richness and flavor to the grain. It makes better flour. Overprocessed flours from chemically grown grain are gray, not gold, warm, and beautiful like organic flour. As soon as that organic flour gets wet, it gives off a great smell.

“I don’t take quality for granted. My goal is to make my bread the best it can be—and being organic is such a big part of that,” she says.

We finished our little lawn lunch of organic bread, cheese, and wine, and I thanked her as she loaded me up with bread and some of the expensive sea salt from Brittany that she uses. As I got in the car, I noticed a big orange-and-white tomcat snoozing on my car’s rear window shelf. “Is this your cat?” I yelled.

“Yes,” she shouted back. “That’s Logan. People have driven off with him more than once.”

CHAPTER 9

Cheese

Various reasons have been advanced for the invention of agriculture. Early nomadic hunter-gatherers were supposed to have brought back grains of wild barley and emmer wheat to their campsites, where some fell to the earth. When they returned to their campsites months or a year later, they found an abundance of grain growing there. That’s plausible, but I propose another idea. One day the nomads captured a wild cow that had recently freshened, or given birth. They tethered her to a stake, milked her (carefully—she was wild), then found that the milk soon turned to curdled cheese. The cheese was so delicious compared to their normal diet of roots and grubs that they decided to stay right where they were, right by that cow. And in fact, they decided to go catch a few more wild cows and make more cheese.

Fast-forward several thousand years to the time of Julius Caesar. In 54 BC, Caesar invaded the British Isles and found the Britons making Cheshire cheese.

Fast-forward to today. The British still make Cheshire cheese, although most of it is factory made and lacks the quality of real, tangy, artisan Cheshire. Here and there, though, the old hand-done methods have persisted or are even returning. The Appleby family’s Abbey Farm wraps its raw cow’s milk Cheshire in unwaxed cloth, maintaining that this produces a more honest Cheshire than those finished with waxed wrappings. Real farmstead Cheshire today is colored orange with annatto, a natural coloring agent derived from the seeds of the annatto tree (
Bixa orellana
), which is a native of tropical America but has spread by cultivation to many tropical areas around the world. It takes anywhere from two months to a half year to age this cheese properly, after which it becomes the dry, crumbly, savory cheese with a rustic flavor that was undoubtedly enjoyed by those Celtic yeomen before Caesar arrived.

Similarly, in villages across Europe and into Eurasia, cheeses have been made since the dawn of agriculture. Each village—even each farm—had its own environment where the cows, goats, or sheep grazed upon the local grasses and weeds. If this farm was situated on high, well-drained land, more of the tough, drought-resistant herbs like wild thyme and chamomile might be in the animals’ diet; if it was along a wet bottomland, the milk animals had more juicy, crunchy plants like wild fennel and sedges. As any farmer who has grazed cows on pasture infested with wild onion in the spring knows, the garlicky flavor of wild onion goes straight into the milk, and so, to some degree, the mix of forage creates a unique flavor in the cheese. In mountainous areas, herds were often pastured higher up in the summer and closer to home in the winter, with different forage—and thus different milk and different cheese—at each season.

Because life tended to be confined to the farm and surrounding villages, the indigenous microorganisms developed a special ecological mix that also characterized the cheese they colonized. Cheesemaking temperatures varied according to the climate and time of year. Different farms curdled the cheese differently—some with the extract of calf’s stomach called rennet, some with thistle flowers, or fumitory (
Fumaria officinalis
), some with little black snails, some with lemon juice, some with stinging nettles, and some just let nature take its course and waited for the milk to curdle by the agency of whatever bacteria happened to be around.

Some farmers ate their clotted cheese fresh at the cottage table—hence cottage cheese. Others set it aside to find it hardening up and becoming intense and sharp, like Tyn Grug, an organic cheese from Wales. Others found it growing deliciously moldy and pasty, Tomme de Savoie from the mountains of eastern France. Others found (obviously to their delight) that the cheese softened and intensified in flavor as it ripened, as with Brie or Époisses de Bourgogne. And legend has it that about two thousand years ago, a certain shepherd in southwest France stashed his lunch of bread and cheese in a cave while he went off to dally with a neighbor maid, subsequently forgot about the lunch, and came back some weeks later to find the cheese covered with a blue mold that imparted a rich, piquant flavor. The cave, of course, was located near Roquefort, France, and they’ve been making blue cheese there ever since. We know that the shepherd story goes back some two thousand years, because Pliny mentioned Roquefort cheese in the first century AD.

And so the cheeses of the Old World of the nineteenth century and earlier were an enormously diverse and interesting mélange that developed through the ages in discrete, isolated areas, and were mostly locally made and consumed. In America, handmade farmstead cheeses were ubiquitous in this nation of farmers, right through the nineteenth century. It’s hard to know at this remove whether many reached the distinction of the European cheeses that were brought to such great refinement by master cheesemakers who passed their knowledge along generation after generation. By the twentieth century, though, industrialization had pretty much gobbled up the making of cheese in America. We had our eponymous American cheese—a block of almost tasteless paste—and factory cheeses that took their names from popular European types: brick, cheddar, Muenster, Swiss, Parmesan, mozzarella, and a few others. Manufacturers used processing techniques and additives to aim for consistency, but they got uniformity, homogeneity, and monotony.

Worse, dairy farming in America became mechanized in many ways. Small family farms were forced out of business by the hundreds in the 1970s and 1980s as the economies of scale achieved by large agribusinesses rendered the small farm uncompetitive. Corporate agriculture, however, is not as healthy for the land, the animals, and the consumer as small, organic family farms. A small organic farmer—especially one whose family has invested several generations in the same piece of earth—knows the farm in an intimate way that no factory farmer can. He knows where the pheasant lays its eggs and avoids plowing there. The factory farmer not only plows there, but bulldozes out the hedgerows to increase the plantable acreage, destroying the incredible diversity of flora and fauna that develops in a hedgerow ecology. The family farmer knows where erosion occurs and plants trees there. He knows where the deer bed down, where the wild geese land, where the soil is too shallow for deep-rooted alfalfa. More important, a savvy organic farmer knows that the farm animals have natures that must be respected if they are to be healthy. The hen scratches in the horse bedding for fly eggs, keeping down the fly population as she improves the nutritional content of her eggs. In organic agriculture there’s no place for mistreatment of farm animals, from the largest horse to the smallest rabbit. Organic farms are ecosystems because they are composed of interlocking groups of living creatures that support one another and create overall health. They are not simply economic engines or factories.

The Discovery of Peasant Cheese

From about 1950 on, and especially since 1980, interest in old, peasant cheeses—the kind made on small farmsteads—has blossomed. And none too soon, since from Norway to Morocco, from Wales to India, globalization has worked to standardize products across national boundaries. Not only that, globalization has worked to threaten small-production artisan cheeses through sheer publicity and popularity. Fine cheeses, like fine wines, are more and more appreciated around the world by those who can afford them. The pressure is on to step up production to satisfy the world markets. This encourages the small cheesemaker to adopt factory techniques and move away from the old, slow, hand-done methods that made such great cheese in the first place. And “peasant” cheeses by their nature can be made only in limited quantities. There’s only so much of that good milk to be had. And only so many places where the ecology of the microbiota is such that great cheese results. Any attempt at mass production destroys the quality that makes the cheese worth seeking out in the first place. But as Isaac Newton taught us, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. The fact that more and more people around the world, and especially in America, are discovering these wondrous cheeses creates new markets for our own home-grown artisanal cheeses. The organic, back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s is finally paying off. Now organic breads and wines are easy to find. Cheese has taken longer to penetrate the organic marketplace, but it, too, is booming. The number of American artisan cheesemakers jumped to 85 in 1999, hit 147 in 2001, and is now many hundreds strong. The best part is that like their European counterparts, most small-production, artisan cheesemakers are organic in approach and intent, even if they aren’t always certified. They just do things the natural way.