> "The Hallstatt miners seem to have intentionally applied food fermentation
technologies with microorganisms which are still nowadays used in the food
industry," Maixner says.
These news will no doubt be seized upon by the fermentation community and the
paleodiet community, by beer and Roquefort producers and a whole other bunch of
people who will be happy to argue that their preferred diets or products have
ancient roots but all the scientists did was find traces of Penicilium
roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae in ancient human feces. That alone is
not enough to know that they were used in fermentation by the people who, er,
made the feces, or that they were even consumed on purpose.
These two organisms are ubiquitous in the environment. Speaking entirely from
personal experience, P. roqueforti is impossible to keep off aging cheese,
whether it's wanted or not. It thrives on humid substrates like cheese and it
actually loves high amounts of salt (Roquefort cheese has 4% salt, a high
amount, exactly to help P. roqueforti grow). On top of that, there are many
different strains of P. roqueforti and not all of them have a plasant taste, in
fact most don't. A couple taste like blue cheese (often named as P. album and P.
glaucum), but most taste like wet wood or dirt. Basically any blue mold you find
growing on food is likely some kind of P. roqueforti but if you've ever
absent-mindedly bit on a moldy apple and felt your mouth fill with the taste of
soil, rather than fruit- that's P. roqueforti.
I'm not so sure about S. cerevisiae, since I don't brew, but I suspect the same
things go. It's much more likely that the traces of P. roqueforti and S.
cerevisiae ended up on the ancient miners' feces either after the er fact, from
the environment, or were on the miners' lunch and ingested by them by accident,
just because people back then didn't have very good ways to preserve their food
in such a pristine condition as we can do it today.
Which is another thing to keep in mind. Modern sensibilities mean that any food
that looks different than usual is likely to be considered spoiled and thrown
away. In days past this was not the case. If your cheese grew mold, you brushed
the mold off and ate the cheese. That's probably how all the moldy European
cheeses were first created. So again, ancient miners eating food (and we don't
even know it was cheese to begin with) with P.roqueforti on it doesn't mean they
were eating Roquefort cheese, or even cheese deliberately cultured with mold.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae is domesticated brewing yeast. While yeast is ubiquitous in the environment it will generally be other saccharomyces, brettanomyces, and so on. Saccharomyces pastorianus would have been interesting, as it' used for modern lagers but is believed to have evolved much more recently.
S. cerevisiae is believed to have originally been isolated from grape skins, but no one is sure. But it's mostly found in and around breweries and in people's homes today and not in the wild. If it's in old human waste, they were drinking something fermented.
Thanks for correcting me. I'll have a look at the paper. I'm no brewer so my knowledge of brewing yeasts is non-exsistent. Although I had some problems with my early attempts at cheesemaking that developped unpleasant chemical smells (plasticine, acetone, hand cream etc) and I've always thought (but couldn't really confirm) those were caused by either Acetobacteria or by alcohol-producing yeasts, because those chemical smells are, apparently, the hallmark of alcoholic fermentation (gone wrong, I guess).
That acetone flavor is ethyl acetate, which can come from some wild yeast, stressed domesticated yeast, and some bacteria. Commercial yeast doesn't eat lactose tough, so I'd assume a different micro organism. Have you improved sanitation in your process since?
> Have you improved sanitation in your process since?
Yes, very much indeed. Although the wild yeasts came from the starter culture I used at the time: milk kefir. Long story :)
Kefir cultures include lactose fermenting yeasts, in particular Cluyveromyces marxianus. It could be the culprit. Anyway something in my culture was producing alcohol because I could see bubbles in bottles of whey and I even had a small explosion once. Ahhh, the joys of washing goat-smelling whey from the walls of the kitchen...
Edit: In my experience almost everyone in home cheesemaking says they have impecable sanitation and that can't be the source of problems like early blowing etc. I like to buck the trend and admit that I try my best, but it's never possible to have 100% sanitation in a home kitchen and even less so when making cheese which is a protracted process with many opportunities for contamination. At least, since I've switched to using lyophillised cultures I've had only one cheese exhibit late blowing. And most of my hard cheeses have squeaky clean natural rinds without a spot of yeasts or moulds. That's probably a good sign.
Interesting, k. marxianus could be producing fusel alcohols which have sort fo a nail polish remover flavor/smell.
> because I could see bubbles in bottles of whey and I even had a small explosion once. Ahhh, the joys of washing goat-smelling whey from the walls of the kitchen...
bottle bombs are scary. I switched all of my beer making to kegging, because of how much of a hassle bottles can be.
Milk seems like a great host for lots of organisms, I don't envy the work cheese makers have to put it to get the right kinds of microorganisms established first. Beer is easy, b/c s. cerevisiae out competes everything in a high glucose environment.
Although is seems like kefir cultures contain s. cerevisiae sometimes. There must be some yeast/bacteria that converts lactose to another sugar in there as well.
> bottle bombs are scary. I switched all of my beer making to kegging, because of how much of a hassle bottles can be.
I was trying to make whey mead a.k.a. "blaand" as I imagine a cheesemaker would do it using cultures one would expect to find in milk or dairy like C. marxianus, rather than how a brewer would do it with C. cerevisiae. I got... something, not particularly pleasant to drink.
> Milk seems like a great host for lots of organisms, I don't envy the work cheese makers have to put it to get the right kinds of microorganisms established first. Beer is easy, b/c s. cerevisiae out competes everything in a high glucose environment.
Yes, you gotta be very careful with milk. There's a bit of a fashion in home cheesemaking for raw milk (inherited from artisanal cheesemaking, which in turn inherited it from European cheesemaking traditions). But I always pasteurise. If I had a proper dairy plant and could easily test the milk I use for pathogens and spoilage orgranisms, then OK, but I'm making cheese in a kitchen! Everything I can do to make the process safer and more predictable in outcome is worth it.
> Although is seems like kefir cultures contain s. cerevisiae sometimes. There must be some yeast/bacteria that converts lactose to another sugar in there as well.
Kefir is a wild culture so there's all sorts of organisms in there. I'm not sure anyone really knows them all. I've read a few papers that analyse the bacteria and yeasts in kefir "grains" from different parts of the world. It's a very varied bunch. It basically has the kind of variety of organisms that you can expect in raw milk, plus a whole bunch of yeasts and that makes it very hard to control as a cheesemaking culture. Part of why I gave up on using it as a starter. It's great for making yogurt though because the higher heat needed in yogurt making effectively filters out mesophilic organisms and leaves only the thermophiles used to make yogurt.
I love cheese. I love that in this world there are people who makes the cheese I love. Thank you for posting this. Do you have any good recommended starting points to make cheese in the home? I'm interested to learn more about this fascinating past time.
Start with a good book for the home cheesemaker. I recommend Giannaclis Caldwell's "Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking". There's a lot of information to digest in there so take your time.
Whatever you do, stay away from the "quick mozzarella" recipes and videos on the internet that claim you can make cheese in 30 minutes. They lie.
If you know what you are doing, you can probably make something like Quark pretty quickly.
Though with all the draining etc, I don't think you'll be done in half an hour as a beginner.
Btw, milk kefir is an easy one to get started with. You just need to get the kefir grains from someone (or the Internet). It produces something sort-of like yoghurt.
Yeah, queso oaxaca is difficult. Better start with something simpler, like a paneer or a queso... fresco, I think? The kind that doesn't need rennet. Once you get the hang of it, you can move on to something harder.
I love cheese too. I don't currently make it (yet), but out of the same interest as you, I had searched on YouTube earlier. There are some videos there about home cheese-making. One guy I came across, in particular, maybe Australian, has what seemed like good knowledge, and a series of videos there.
Update: Searched again. His name is Gavin Webber. Just saw that he has launched an ebook.
HTH.
Gavin Webber is a celebrity in the home cheesemaking world!
I love his videos, although there are a few times I caught him saying things I know to be wrong. But he's a great resource to get you started. And he's a lovely man :)
These news will no doubt be seized upon by the fermentation community and the paleodiet community, by beer and Roquefort producers and a whole other bunch of people who will be happy to argue that their preferred diets or products have ancient roots but all the scientists did was find traces of Penicilium roqueforti and Saccharomyces cerevisiae in ancient human feces. That alone is not enough to know that they were used in fermentation by the people who, er, made the feces, or that they were even consumed on purpose.
These two organisms are ubiquitous in the environment. Speaking entirely from personal experience, P. roqueforti is impossible to keep off aging cheese, whether it's wanted or not. It thrives on humid substrates like cheese and it actually loves high amounts of salt (Roquefort cheese has 4% salt, a high amount, exactly to help P. roqueforti grow). On top of that, there are many different strains of P. roqueforti and not all of them have a plasant taste, in fact most don't. A couple taste like blue cheese (often named as P. album and P. glaucum), but most taste like wet wood or dirt. Basically any blue mold you find growing on food is likely some kind of P. roqueforti but if you've ever absent-mindedly bit on a moldy apple and felt your mouth fill with the taste of soil, rather than fruit- that's P. roqueforti.
I'm not so sure about S. cerevisiae, since I don't brew, but I suspect the same things go. It's much more likely that the traces of P. roqueforti and S. cerevisiae ended up on the ancient miners' feces either after the er fact, from the environment, or were on the miners' lunch and ingested by them by accident, just because people back then didn't have very good ways to preserve their food in such a pristine condition as we can do it today.
Which is another thing to keep in mind. Modern sensibilities mean that any food that looks different than usual is likely to be considered spoiled and thrown away. In days past this was not the case. If your cheese grew mold, you brushed the mold off and ate the cheese. That's probably how all the moldy European cheeses were first created. So again, ancient miners eating food (and we don't even know it was cheese to begin with) with P.roqueforti on it doesn't mean they were eating Roquefort cheese, or even cheese deliberately cultured with mold.