Herds and Curds adventures in cheesemaking, cooking, and the building of a dream

 

A new year begins tomorrow! Time has flown by here on the farm this fall, filled with lots of progress and new exciting things. While that is no excuse for not posting for nearly three months, I hope you won’t hold it against me!

 

Sam and I have moved to another house on the property, and so have our goats! They needed more space since our herd grew by 50% at the beginning of December when four new does arrived. Everyone has been getting along well, after a few days of initial head butting and rank-establishing. The new does are actually old friends, acquisitions from the same farm as our original four- including Fiona’s mother and grandmother! So its one big happy family again. All those changes have meant that creamery construction went by the wayside while we moved ourselves and the animals, put up new fencing and made changes to the new barn. Now that everyone is settled (including ourselves), we are about to shake up everything by bringing in more new does!

Cheesemaking has come to a standstill for the winter as Saffire is nearly done producing milk. I still have a few tommes and wheels of blue cheese ripening in the cave, but the next time I make cheese it will be in the creamery!

Speaking of which, we will have plenty to do in that department! Things are shifting back into construction mode in the creamery after a few weeks of inaction while we moved, set up the new goat shed, and then took a little break to visit my parents in Maine for the holidays. Since my last post we have completed the sloping of the floor and are ready to insulate it and start laying tile as soon as we run the plumbing. Sam has been working tirelessly on the electric stuff, running lines to new outlets, moving light switches and the like. Now its back at it, finishing up the electric work and beginning to run the plumbing. Once everything is in the floor will go back on, then the tiling begins!

Our dairy inspector has been out once more since her first visit, we have been trying hard to keep her in the loop with all of our changes and new things to make sure we are on the same page with the regulations etc. So far she has been very helpful and willing to come out and check on our progress, and seems happy with how things are progressing. Next she’ll be coming back to check on our plumbing before we close up the walls and start tiling.

One other exciting development- our website is now live! Check it out: www.georgesmillcheese.com

So its been a busy few months here, and we are looking forward to a new year filled with lots of hard work and our first season selling cheese! Not to mention all the cute goat babies…

My goodness, it has been a long time since I have posted. I’m sure you have all given up on me by now! But altough I haven’t been blogging, I have not been idle. Things on the creamery front are moving right along, so lets get everyone up to speed.

Its fall here now, apparently. Today is chilly and wet, a sure sign that winter is headed our way, but we still have many lovely days ahead I’m sure. A dreary wet day is a good one for cleaning out old insulation and rat poop (key word is OLD- no live rats). Since I last posted we have made some serious progress on the creamery room, including pulling up the flooring and removing all the old, poop-infested, insulation! Its the first step in getting from this:

Into a dairy!

Now that all the old insulation is cleaned out from under that plywood floor, we will be creating a slope so that the floors will drain properly, putting the plywood back down and beginning the grand adventure of tiling. Which neither of us have done before. Oh, and building a wall, putting in the plumbing, and figuring out what sort of drain to use. The drain issue has turned out to be much more complicated than I expected!

In other news, a couple of weeks ago two nice ladies from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (also known as the dairy inspectors) came out to look at the barn and go over our plans with us. They were totally on board with what we are planning, and were very helpful with specific questions we had about drainage and equipment! It really felt like we were on out way after that meeting.

Meanwhile, on the farm side of things, the girls are starting to come into heat so my first breeding season is about to begin. I’m also making arrangements to purchase new does this winter to increase out herd to the 15 I’d like to have by opening day. Busy busy!

Oh, did I mention that Fiona figured out how to get on top of the hay shed? Never a dull moment here, I tell ya.

I love blue cheese. In fact, I love it so much that I spent all morning of this beautiful late summer day inside making it. So I figured I’d drag you all along with me.

Today is truely a beautiful Virginia day. It was cool this morning, so cool in fact that I had to wear a sweatshirt to go milk (something that hasn’t happened in about 4 months). And now, at 2pm, the sky is bluebird blue and full of puffy white clouds, the humidity is low and everything is golden.

But back to cheese.

Blue cheese is a tricky cheese to make. I’m still trying to find a recipe that works the way I want it to. Its much harder to experiment when you have to wait many weeks or months to try your creation- detailed notes are a must!

Today I am making a blue cheese based on a recipe from Artisan Cheesemaking at Home (an excellent book and well worth the investment!) called coastal blue. I’ve altered the recipe a bit, but the idea is the same.

The previous incarnation of this that I made was very tasty, although not at all blue enough for my liking (those of you who had a sample of my cheese this weekend in NJ tasted this!). The paste of this wheel is soft, so it requires frequent spiking (opening holes for the blue mold to grow in), which I apparently failed to do last time around- a mistake I plan to rectify with this batch.

As always, cheese begins with milk. A little under two gallons of Saffire’s fresh goat milk to be specific.

And of course, you gotta have culture. After all you know what they say- support bacteria, its the only culture some people have…

I am trying out the liquid form of the blue Penicillium mold here (for a little rant on the wonders of mold check out my new blog on Culture Magazine’s website! http://www.culturecheesemag.com/content/ode-mold).

Rennet, the other key ingredient. In this case, added about an hour after the cultures to let them get a head start at acidifying the milk.

After cutting the curds for this cheese I do a pre-drain before I place them in the mold to help drain off some of the whey. Today that was accomplished using cheesecloth and my kitchen cabinets. Who knew those handles could be so multi functional!

And now we wait…the curds and slowing losing whey as they sit in the mold. I’ll turn them a few times in the next 10 or 12 hours or so, then salt the cheese and wait for it to turn blue!

Not a bad mornings work, even if it did mean missing the sunshine!

As we draw closer and closer to the time when I’ll actually be making cheese for real, I have been exploring my equipment options. While much of what I will need in the creamery can be purchased at restaurant auctions and supply stores, cheesemaking requires a few pretty specific pieces of equipment to be done properly- the most important of which is the vat pasteurizer. This will be where all the magic happens to turn liquid milk into delicious curds that will then become cheese!

Cheese vats are expensive. Although essentially just a big stainless steel tank, they have some specific features and are not exactly mass produced. In particular, small vats are hard to come by in this country since much of our cheesemaking for the past hundred years has been on the order of thousands of gallons at a time. A few people are beginning to make small equipment for the growing number of farmstead creameries, but used reasonably sized vats are few and far between. Luckily for me, I have some friends nearby who have a creamery and make excellent cheese (Spriggs Delight Farm in Sharpsburg- check them out if you are ever in our neck of the woods, or if you happen to be perusing some DC farmer’s markets), and who happen to have just upgraded to a bigger vat! So last week I went over and Jill, their cheesemaker, and I played around with the old vat so I could see if I liked it. Here’s what it looked like:

 

It holds 35 gallons of milk, which is a little smaller than I was initially planning on, but would be a great (reasonable priced) starter vat. I still need to discuss its design with the dairy inspector to make sure it would be ok in Virginia, but this may be my new cheese vat!

After a powerful, wild thunderstorm hit our area last weekend we got a peak at what life would have been like before electricity. People’s reactions were predictable: the complaints about the lack of air conditioning in the 100 degree heat and laments about our dependency on power were everywhere. Amid all that, and the admittedly sweltering heat, I found it a pretty interesting experience.

Having grown up in the northeast and spent my adult life in cooler climates where winter storms are prevalent it was a very new experience for me to deal with power loss in the heat. When your power goes out in the middle of a Maine winter you are not concerned about the milk in your fridge or the air conditioning- freezing pipes and people are the bigger issue. Summer heat provides a whole other set of problems, but for me (being the dairy dork that I am) the most interesting had to do with milk.

We were lucky enough to have a small generator loaned to us by Sam’s uncle which kept our fridges and freezers running, a few hours at a time, so I didn’t lose any of Sapphire’s milk. But the prospect certainly got me thinking about dairy in the 19th century and the way we consume milk today.

Today, when most of us think of milk we think of drinking it cold, and tasting fresh, sweet liquid- maybe with a couple of chocolate chip cookies- but this was not how dairy products were consumed for most of human history. Prior to the urban- and suburbanization of our population and the takeover of our agricultural system by big business, most families either had a cow, or got milk from a neighbor, and refrigeration as we know it was non-existent. It may have consisted of a spring house, like the one we have on the farm here, or other crude means of temperature control. Homemade cheeses were a staple, and dairy beverages consisted mainly of buttermilk (the kind you get when you make butter, not the cultured buttermilk we are accustomed to today) and sour milk. That sounds strange to us, but what we think of as sour milk- that revolting taste of milk gone very, very bad in the back of your fridge- would not have existed then. Raw milk does not go “bad” in the same way pasteurized milk does, and of course pasteurization was unheard of until the late 1800′s. Raw milk sours because lactic bacteria that live naturally in milk, if given the chance (say by not keeping your milk below 40 degrees) turn lactose into lactic acid, causing the pH of the liquid to drop. It would have tasted like a less sour version of what we consider buttermilk today. In contrast, pasteurized milk which is sterile does not become more acidic with time- instead it is colonized by nasty things living in your refrigerator which give it that lovely rancidity.

In addition to thinking about the way we consume dairy products, I was very aware of the issue of water and sanitation before electricity. Not being on “town water”, no power means no running water out here in the country. As a result I spent a good deal of time hauling water from our spring-fed watering trough in the barnyard. Although the house here had gravity fed running water fairly early, it certainly came from a spring and as such had none of the modern conveniences like a filter or mandatory well testing. I am very careful about sanitation with my milking equipment, but before the days of chlorine sanitizer (and pasteurization for that matter), soap and water would probably have been the best means of keeping the milking pail free of pathogens. The same would hold true for vegetables and meats- many of which would hang in the basement curing all summer and winter. Doesn’t that make you wonder what we’re doing wrong if today, with all our modern sanitation and technology, food related illness is on the rise (although very rarely from milk or cheese I might add!)?

All in all our four days without power were hardly the hardship most people made it out to be, and provided some very interesting insights into our severe dependence of modern conveniences and the modern way of thinking about refrigeration and sanitation. Of course, fascinating as it was, I was as glad as anyone when the lights came back on!

 

The season of plenty is upon us here in the mid-atlantic. With the onset of the hot, sunny summer what was once open hardwood forest and dry grassy fields has become a veritable jungle. Hay has been cut (see the goat antics page for the girl’s first encounter with a round bale) and the garden is booming. Tomatoes are just beginning to ripen, and we have officially entered the elbow-deep-in-squash period. Luckily, I planted my zukes a bit late, and so have been able to enjoy the overflow from our neighbor’s first harvest. Tis the season of zucchini bread (preferably baked at night, a lesson in scheduling I cannot seem to master), salads, and tomatoes warm on the vine.

It isn’t only cultivated crops that are going bananas. The myriad of berries growing wild along fencelines and in the woods has kept my fingers blue and red for a couple of weeks now. First came the dewberries, dark and raspberry-like, followed by wineberries. These bright red invaders from Asia are more tart than raspberries and make wonderful jam. A recent foraging trip by the pond also resulted in some lily pods and milkweed flowers to be sauteed in butter! There’s just nothing like picking food you don’t have to weed.

Although for tomatoes and berries and most other plants it seems we have reached the prime growing time, for others it the season is coming to a close. A few days ago I harvested the garlic planted in our garden last fall. Its leaves were browning and beginning to fall, a sign that it should be dug up. Now it hangs in the spring house curing and waiting to be braided and enjoyed!

Massive growth is everywhere, and the goats have been enthusiastically munching anything in sight when we head out for a walk, having eaten most of the tastiest morsels in their own paddock. But they may be more reluctant to leave now! While Sam’s parents took the girls down into the woods for an evening stroll we moved their fence to encircle the other building on the hill- a storage shed which has becoming inundated with the outrageous summer growth of flowers and berry bushes. Can you believe that two months ago you could easily access the sides of this shed? I’m continually in awe of the sheer lushness of this place, so different from Maine and New Brunswick where every tomato is coddled, every inch of growth a victory. Even Washington state, although green all year from the rain, cannot compete with the explosion of summer growth we have witnessed in the past months.

We’ll see what the girl’s can do with this jungle! This will serve as the before picture- June 27th, 2012. How long will it take them to munch it down? Any bets?

Who couldn’t use a few cute pictures of goats on a Wednesday?