You mention in the book that although there are hundreds of different cheeses, there are only a handful of basic recipes. How do we get so many varieties?
There are about a dozen steps in the basic process of turning milk into cheese. All cheeses go through some combination of those steps, but any tiny variation in any one of them will create a different texture and flavor. The first step in cheese making is called acidification — the process of converting the sugar in milk into acid. You do that by putting starter bacteria in your milk. There are hundreds of different bacteria that work at different speeds to produce different cheeses. You could have 500 or 1,000 variations on just that one step. There’s something very exciting and mysterious about it that’s almost like magic.

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