If cheese is one of your favorite foods but your town lacks a decent cheesemonger, there are online shops and subscriptions to find the best comté and camembert. 

Another option is to make it yourself. Sounds impossible, right? Home cheesemaking is a hobby that can be fun and delicious, but making a hunk of cheddar or supple fresh mozzarella that’s as good as a commercially produced version has a steep learning curve. Enter the Fromaggio, a smart home cheesemaking machine created to help you achieve your DIY cheese dreams. 

I’ve been working in cheese in some form — buying it, selling it, marketing it, teaching classes on it, writing about it — for 17 years. When an ad for the Fromaggio popped up on my Instagram Stories feed, I was intrigued. 

Anyone can learn to make cheese at home, but it takes quite a bit of time, energy and education to do well. Along with quality milk, there are special ingredients to track down, like cultures, rennet and even special salt. But the gear you need for many home cheesemaking projects is pretty basic: a big pot, a strainer, a slotted spoon and a long, sharp knife. 

How did this smart device stack up against the usual low-tech DIY cheesemaking gear? I took it for a spin to find out. 

The Fromaggio at a glance

This smart home cheesemaking machine is the result of Fromaggio founder Glen Feder’s time living in Paris, where he developed a taste for artisan wheels that can be scarce, pricey or both to find in the US. The company launched via Kickstarter in 2019 with more than 1,000 backers, but pandemic-related delays and the usual startup challenges meant the device didn’t start shipping until 2024. 

The Fromaggio looks a bit like a souped-up blender, with a sturdy base that houses both the motor and the LCD touchscreen interface. (It somewhat resembles Thermomix, the European kitchen multitasker.) Its components are designed to perform the basic steps of cheesemaking: heating the milk, stirring in the cultures and rennet, cutting the curd and draining. 

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Like a blender, the three-liter stainless steel heating pot has a motor in the bottom that attaches to plastic paddles designed to mix ingredients and, later in the process, cut the curd into pieces. A fine-mesh draining pan holds the curd while it releases the whey. Other accessories include a silicone spatula, a sharp mixing blade for finely cutting curds when making cheeses like parmesan, and a cleaning brush. The whole shebang, except for the base, is dishwasher safe.

How this home cheesemaking machine works

In my experience, the two main challenges to starting a home cheesemaking habit are a lack of knowledge and difficulty maintaining the temperatures needed for many recipes with the average kitchen’s equipment. 

Part of the way Fromaggio makes cheesemaking more accessible is through its recipes, which take users step-by-step through the process of making different types of cheese. You can access preprogrammed recipes via the Fromaggio app or the machine’s touchscreen interface and follow the prompts, or you can program your own recipe and send it to the device via Fromaggio’s smartphone app. 

Even the most advanced home cheesemaking machine will need a human for some tasks. During operation, the machine beeps when it needs you to add cultures or flip draining curds; if you don’t want to be tied to your kitchen, you can set the smartphone app to notify you when it’s time to step in. 

You can make several soft cheeses and yogurt in the Fromaggio

Fromaggio includes several dozen recipes for yogurt and fresh or brined cheeses like mozzarella, feta, queso fresco, cream cheese and chèvre. The app also includes recipes for aged cheese styles like cheddar, Camembert, provolone and parmesan, though you’ll need some kind of climate-controlled aging setup beyond your standard household fridge to age out those wheels. 

Secondly, the Fromaggio solves the problem of providing consistent heat at different temperatures, a must throughout the cheesemaking process. After the initial heating of the milk, there are multiple points where the milk just needs to sit at a specific temperature for a time while cultures or rennet work their magic, which can be difficult or impossible to do consistently at home without special equipment. The Fromaggio not only solves this problem, but it also takes the guesswork out of maintaining the proper temperature to execute its recipes. 

What I liked about the Fromaggio

Overall, the Fromaggio does what it claims to do: It takes you from zero to home cheesemaker, right out of the box. Setting up the machine and navigating the touchscreen interface were pretty straightforward. The LCD display is clear and mostly easy to navigate, and the machine looks impressive sitting on your countertop. I chose a recipe, added milk and hit “start.” 

Honestly, the idea of a home cheesemaking machine is no more esoteric than an ice cream maker sau bread machine, and using the Fromaggio makes me wonder why it took so long for someone to market this idea. It’s fun to see the little paddle stirring the milk and then cutting the curd. It’s also great to be able to do other things without having to tend to a stovetop or constantly check temperatures during periods of downtime. Making cheese at home can be an all-day — or multiple-day — process, but the Fromaggio lets you, to some extent, set it and forget it. 

For my first batch, I decided to try Fromaggio’s recipe for halloumi, a cheese whose unique make process and pH make it grillable without melting. I happened to be working on a goat farm at the time, so I sourced some of their milk for the recipe. I went about my day, listening for the beep when it was time to add an ingredient, which Fromaggio sells in convenient packets preportioned for their recipes, drain the curds or shape wheels. 

Fromaggio’s recipe is for a dry-brined halloumi, made by salting the surface of the finished wheels and then allowing it to penetrate over a number of hours. In the future, I’d make this with a wet brine instead, as I found the dry-brined wheels I made to be a little dry after frying. But hey, they were still quite tasty. 

What I didn’t like about the Fromaggio

Smartphone connectivity and the recipe interface

The former was a fluke of my circumstances. I was on a rural Wi-Fi connection that the Fromaggio didn’t even pick up as an option to connect with — something to do with Wi-Fi speeds. (Feder later told me this has only been a problem at hotels in the past, so I suspect it wouldn’t be an issue in the average home.)

This meant I couldn’t connect my smartphone to the device or get mobile notifications during cheese makes, but I was still able to browse and start recipes via the touchscreen. However, the interface could be a little buggy. 

When I attempted to stretch a batch of cultured mozzarella, one of the more challenging fresh cheese recipes Fromaggio includes, I tried to repeat a heating step during stretching. I ended up having to cycle through a few dozen steps to get back to that point in the recipe, without getting the machine to do what I wanted it to do, which was perform the heating step again. 

Another challenge is yield

The heating vessel only holds three liters of milk — not even a full gallon — meaning that you’re left with only a pound or two of cheese at the end of what’s still an hours-long process. Feder gets this feedback a lot, and he’s working on a model with double the capacity to give home cheesemakers more bang for each cheesemaking session. 

I also wondered about keeping things clean; much of cheesemaking, at home or in a commercial creamery, is cleaning and sanitizing. After making cheese, Feder recommends running all the components except the base through your dishwasher and then running the machine’s cleaning cycle, which heats water and dish soap to pasteurization temperature. However, the UX for the cleaning cycle is a little unclear, and it was difficult to tell if I had started the cycle (which doesn’t start counting down time until it hits temperature) or not. 

There is no sanitizing step in the cleaning process

I consulted with Prateek Sharma, associate professor of food science at Utah State University and a member of the Institute of Food Technologists‘ Dairy Foods Division, who told me that, although the standard in commercial cheesemaking includes sanitizer as well as heat, a heating step alone could sufficiently reduce a food safety risk. When I asked Feder about this, he told me that a new version of the Fromaggio’s manual, in addition to a new quick-start guide, will recommend using a no-rinse sanitizer.

Finally, if you do plan to level up your home cheesemaking hobby with aged cheeses, you’ll need some next-level gear in addition to the Fromaggio. Hard cheeses like cheddar and parmesan require serious pressure to expel sufficient moisture for them to age, which requires a press. Fromaggio sells a reasonably priced, home-scale stainless steel model to accompany the machine. 

What the company doesn’t sell (yet, anyway) is a device for aging cheeses at the very specific temperatures and humidity levels they require. Recipes for aged cheeses simply end with the instruction to age them at a certain temperature and humidity for a certain amount of time, which, if you’re a total novice and don’t read the entire recipe before starting, may come as an unpleasant surprise. 

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Typically, a wine fridge or mini fridge fitted with a device to modify and monitor temperature and humidity is required for aging cheese at home. So until you’re ready to take that leap, it’s best to use the Fromaggio to make fresh cheeses like mozzarella, burrata and feta. 

Final verdict on the Fromaggio

The Fromaggio was undoubtedly fun to play with, and with more time and experimentation with different recipes, I probably could have dialed in the processes a little more closely. I think it does what it claims, which is that it enables you to go from zero to cheesemaker right out of the box, and provides a simpler, more streamlined option for home cheesemaking than the old-school method. 

Plus, there’s nothing like it on the market. The alternative is DIYing with pots, pans and milk thermometers. Can you learn to make cheese without surrendering the counter space and the $745 that the Fromaggio costs? Absolutely. But if you want to go all-in on your new hobby and make the cheesemaking process a little simpler and less time-intensive, the Fromaggio can jumpstart that process for you. 

Overall, however, the main drawback of the Fromaggio is that, as convenient as its self-contained construction and automatic steps may be, you don’t learn as much about cheesemaking as you could by taking a class, reading a detailed guidebook, or experimenting with standard kitchen equipment. 

In my years of teaching about and selling artisan cheese, I’ve found that people have a huge enthusiasm for it, and that those who want to make it themselves are fascinated by the seemingly magical process by which milk is transformed. Making cheese is a tactile experience, and while the Fromaggio does involve some hands-on steps, it also creates a little distance between what’s happening inside the heating pot and the amateur cheesemaker.