In the Cow Stable: Five days of Cheesemaking

June 18 - 22 2025

During a particularly hot period in summer of 2025 I had the opportunity to participate in a cheesemaking workshop in an old stable (pictured right) in Gastein valley in Austria. Together with microbes, natural cheesemaker David Asher shared knowledge about artisanal cheesemaking with us in an old cow stable with refreshingly cold stone walls. Without any prior knowledge of the crafts of cheesemaking or fermentation, I embarked on a 5-day journey together with other participants: other cheesemakers, farmers, researchers, and others with a love for cheese.

On the first day David introduced us to different microbial collectives (which are important starter cultures for cheesemaking) that he has been travelling with: clabber, which he described as thick and mouldy in a loving way; Kefir, which he presented as very precious and with a lot of respect because the cultures co-evolved with humans and milk for several thousand years and have been passed on from one caretaker to another; Amasi, which ferments inside a gourd, which he introduced as an opening with mind-altering capacities; and lastly a thermophilic starter culture he works with for yoghurt making.

I quickly became aware of how political cheesemaking is: which starter cultures are you allowed to use, which hygiene requirements do you have to follow that might be contrary to traditional cheesemaking, and which milk are you allowed to use (i.e. raw or pasteurised)? Who gets to decide this? For example, the Austrian food-safety law gives state authorities the power to restrict or prohibit the marketing of raw milk for direct human consumption and to regulate its use in cheesemaking in the name of hygiene and public health.

We fed the starter cultures with raw milk that was still kuhwarm (cow-warm) and tasted them.

Good cheesemaking not only requires taking care of the microbial cultures we work with. As David put it: ‘if you neglect them, they will die. If you care for them, they will grow enormously.’ It also requires attending to them, getting to know them and their rhythms to adapt cheesemaking to them. As David says, ‘I make cheese according to the pattern of the Geo’ (Geotrichum candidum).

On day two, we learned how to care for and love fungus. Geo, is one of them and can be described as an earthy, white, fuzzy fungus, or ‘like an uninvited party guest’, as David says. But before we started the class, we checked-in with the starter cultures we had fed yesterday. They needed time to adapt to the new environment and the new milk in Gastein. They all looked, smelled, and tasted well, so we fed them new cow-warm raw milk. The microbes we (humans) work with in cheesemaking only grow if we give them the right opportunities, as David reminds us, ‘they respond to love’. One main part of that love is cyclical backslopping which can be described as yesterday’s culture.

The atmosphere in the old stable started to slowly change; I could smell the working microbes. Together with the clabber culture, we participated in lactic cheesemaking: crottin and curd.

Lactic cheesemaking: crottin and curd

After we checked-in with the starter cultures again, tasted and fed them, David introduced us further into the art of cheesemaking on day three. For him, ‘the cheese is an extension of yourself. It matters how you feel during cheesemaking, how you treat it.’

Together with clabber, rennet (tablets), and fresh raw cow-warm milk we made mozzarella. The milk thickened slowly and became one stretchy mass, responding to heat and movement.

David then introduced us to the microbe, the mould Penicillium candidum, which is a friend, maybe even a lover of geo. He spoke of them as working together and reminded us that ‘it’s never just one microbe, it’s always a community’. Penicillium candidum would later outcompete geo, as it takes over the surface of camembert over time. It became an important actor later that day, when we made camembert.

Another precious thing in cheesemaking is timing. Not necessarily timing as a number, more like something you could feel yourself into by closely attending to the cheese, in this case camembert. If you salt it too early, it is left unprotected because it didn’t ferment enough. If you do it too late, it will turn into lactic cheese and Geo can grow on it. David showed us the teabag test (pouring hot water over a small piece of cheese, it’s ready when it stretches). ‘The cheese is telling you when it’s ready, you don’t need a pH reader if you can read it.’, he said. If camembert ripens longer than 60 days, the fungal cultures decline. David describes this moment ‘as the death of cheese, like a taste of afterlife’.

On the third day we also talked about the use of rennet. There are different types of rennet that can be used in cheesemaking: animal, plant, or microbial rennet. Animal rennet is derived from the fourth stomach of a young ruminating animal. The animal has to be killed to obtain it. David describes it as a ‘necessary sacrifice’ and adds that ‘dairy exists because you get more food out of your animal, it is ecological to do it.’ He explains that ‘if we take the calf out of the equation, we get more food out of the same land.’ A participant then mentioned that there are also cultures that use milk and make cheese without slaughtering the claves, e.g. in Mongolia or India. The use of animal rennet also spread through colonialism, shaping which practices became dominant and which remained marginal.

In the conversation calves appeared mostly as something to be taken out of the equation. I hesitated there and started to slowly tense up. I noticed how little space there was to think of them otherwise. What would it mean to attend not only to milk, yield, or land use, but also to animals as beings with emotional lives, entangled in cycles of birth, care, and death on farms? Could other relations emerge through multispecies responsiveness? What might a different way of relating to animals, land, and food look like, one that isn’t primarily structured by extraction, but foregrounding ongoing relations of care, dependence, and response-ability and the ambiguities that come with it?

Goat kid’s and calf’s rennet, cutting open the goat kid’s rennet, goat kid’s rennet steeping in whey for tomorrow’s cheesemaking

On day four, as on the other days, we also started by checking in with the starter cultures. As David warns, ‘if you forget to feed it, it takes revenge’. Today we made Bleu d’Auvergne. We could work with whey as a starter culture. It is easy to work with, according to David, but different. It had to be read through taste, which is more sour.

We pierced the cheese to trick the fungus so that it thinks that it is growing outside the cheese when it is actually growing inside the holes. The fungus was Penicillium roqueforti, which David described as ‘electric blue veins’. It’s a fungus that is often an uninvited guest and capable of driving cheesemakers mad. David described its spores as remarkably stable, ‘just sitting around, waiting to jump on cheese’.

On our last day, we turned to alpine cheesemaking, which has some ‘really attractive styles’ according to David. After we checked-in with the starter cultures, we added mesophilic and thermophilic starter cultures, as well as rennet, to cow-warm raw milk, to make Tomme. Then, we cut the curd into corn-sized pieces and stirred quite a lot. As David puts it, ‘you can’t be gentle with this style of cheese’ but still ‘you have to treat it right’. These cheesemaking practices co-evolved with life on farms and Almen (high alpine summer pastures), where time moves differently and work piles up quickly.

After three days, the Tomme would be moved into the cheese cave. It would be ready to eat after 90 - 180 days. Cheese mites typically appear on well-aged cheeses and add to the umami flavour. For David, they are a sign of success because they only grow on long ripened cheese. They are another example of the liveliness of cheese.

Cheesemaking, David once described, is ‘like the hand of God; we are building life with it’. I would add that we are also killing with it.

Tomme cheesemaking

During the days in the old cow stable, I could feel how my body changed in response to my work with the microbes. Since we were washing everything in whey - the forms, the clothes, our hands - I could feel how my skin started to become softer, as if it was being fed as well. My clothes started to smell differently. The microbes in my gut started to behave differently.

These changes made me think of the cows whose milk we were working with. They were somehow present through the milk, yet otherwise largely absent.

Collective cheesemaking and tasting

Curious to find out more about cheesemaking?

Here are the links to David Asher's two books:

• "MILK INTO CHEESE - The Foundations of Natural Cheesemaking Using Traditional Concepts, Tools, and Techniques"
• "THE ART OF NATURAL CHEESEMAKING - Using Traditional, Non-Industrial Methods and Raw Ingredients to Make the World’s Best Cheeses"