Comment by amluto
5 days ago
> in the interest of supplying "raw milk product" fanatics
You might be on to something. In the US, raw milk cheeses are not at all unusual. It's not even especially hard to buy raw milk, although (at least where I am) you generally need to go to a fancier grocery store or a farmer's market to find it.
But what is weird is that the farm in question literally calls itself "Raw Farm". There are many cheesemakers, both mass-market and high-end, that make both raw-milk and pasteurized-milk cheeses, but they don't generally go out of their way to brand their cheese as one or the other -- if you care, you can read the ingredient list. These companies' product is the cheese, not the rawness of the cheese -- if it tastes good, customers will buy more!
But Raw Farm seems to be a farm that makes a specific point of being, well, raw, and that's strange. Maybe it's a better idea to buy one's raw milk cheeses from an ordinary dairy :)
In the US, if you're actually seeking out raw milk cheese, watch out. If the milk is pasteurized but not legally pasteurized (inspected, licensed, documented) it must be sold as raw milk cheese. Even if you boiled it for an hour first.
Then there's also some raw milk cheese that is heat treated for less than the requirement for pasteurization, but still much hotter than required for the cheese process.
Depends entirely on the state. In Wisconsin, the "dairy capital of the world", its illegal except for incidental sales directly from the dairy farm.
Reason being they don't want outbreaks to be linked to Wisconsin's dairy industry.