Milklab is David Asher's educational endeavor. Milklab teaches its students about the nature of milk; and how it naturally transforms into its cheese. It is not a brick-and-mortar institution, but a traveling cheese school that offers cheese outreach at food-sovereignty-minded organizations around the world.
To offer workshops to the public, David partners with host dairy farmers, fermentors and cheesemakers that are doing the good work of reconnecting people to the food, the farmers and the land that sustain them.
But, milklab is not just a place of learning; it is a cutting edge but also an ancestral approach to making cheese. Contemporary cheesemaking as is most often practiced around the world is decidedly unnatural; David’s teachings provide a much needed alternative.
This new/old approach to cheesemaking is inspired by traditional practices, and based on the extraordinary ecologies of milk. David’s methods include cultivating natural starter cultures, growing the fungi that ripen cheeses, and working with animal rennet. This approach is liberating and empowering - it helps cheesemakers wean themselves off packaged powdered cultures, synthetic rennets and unnecessary chemical additives and sanitizers, and help cheeses develop their best possible flavor. David Asher helps cheesemakers take back their cheese.
David Asher’s Cheesemaking Philosophies
David promotes the use of animal-warm milk, from seasonally pastured, well-raised and healthy animals. We understand that some students will not have access to fresh milk, nevertheless, we encourage you to seek it out directly from the source. Fortunately, our methods work almost as well with pasteurized milk.
David practices a full-circle cheesemaking: we therefore keep all of the cultures that we need to make our cheese. We will not use packaged starter cultures from Danisco (a subsidiary of DuPont) or other companies because we do not believe that such corporate interference with our culture is well founded or even necessary. Milklab proves that the culture of cheese is in our hands.
David Asher promotes a traditional cheesemaking; We therefore use calf rennet in the making of our cheeses. Alternatives to calf rennet are misleadingly labeled as vegetarian, when, in reality, there is no such thing as a vegetarian cheese. If you have concerns with the use of calf rennet, we will do our best to address those concerns in class, but will not make changes to our cheeses. David Asher is against the use of products of genetic modification technology, and will not use GM rennet in class.