Milk Trekker : December 2011

Who I am and what my mission is.

I spent ten years making cheese in the US before beginning to travel globally volunteering with cheesemakers and herders in 2019. I wish to document the intersection of traditional and modern techniques, and portray the global diversity of dairying, cheesemaking, and grazing practices. In doing this I want to show how the final cheese is the end product of a complex series of relationships and decisions made by humans, that are embedded in a a cultural, geographic, and climatic setting. I advocate for raw milk, a natural starter cultures, heritage breeds, regenerative or ecologically responsible grazing, and the right of all humans to ferment milk in their own homes, selling in local markets. In order to further my mission I am writing a book, and hope to build an online archive, a global database of cheese, dairy, and grazing knowledge. I would love to talk with anyone interested in hosting me anywhere in the world and hearing about how you do things.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Kurtwood Farms visit

On my Christmas vacation to Washington I visited Kurt Timmermeister, owner of Kurtwood farms and maker of Dinah's cheese, a small bloomy rind cheese reminiscent of Camembert. The farm is on rural Vashon Island, a ferry ride away from Seattle and my hometown on Kitsap pennisula. Kurt has a dozen our so cows, a rustic farmhouse, dairy, and cheese cave on 13 acres.

The cave was amazing, it was built of extensively reinforced concrete with a barrel vaulted ceiling then buried under 4 feet of soil. It maintains a temperature around 50 degrees and houses a Italian style grating cheese that Kurt is developing. There is also a building with a kitchen and large dining area where farmhouse dinners were held in the early days of the farm. I like his approach of making one cheese very well, and these little bloomies are certainly difficult cheeses to perfect. The cheese is splendid and it was very nice to see someone running a small scale farmstead operation in the Puget sound.

Photo credit Emily Warmedahl

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Monarch - Beer washed Cows milk cheese

Monarch Wheel at 2 weeks

We have just released a pair of new cows milk cheese that I spent September and October working on. The first is called Monarch and is a trappist style cheese which we are washing with a brown ale from Santa Cruz Mountain Brewery. This style is a semi-hard washed curd cheese, meaning that we pull some of the whey out and add hot water during the cook, reducing the rate of acidification and creating a softer cheese, Monterey Jack has a typical washed curd texture. These trappist cheeses originated in Bosnia but are made in Hungary and Germany as well, and the style we base Monarch on are those made in German Trapppist monasteries, which generally also make beer. This subset of the Trappist family is typified by washing with beer, and the growth of a b. linens smear, lending a pungency and softening of the paste through proteolysis.

Five Weeks

The milk for this cheese comes from the Schoch family, who have a ranch near by in Salinas. They bring us the milk still warm from the morning milking, It dosn't get more fresh than that. Monarch is made in wheels smaller than our sheeps milk cheeses, It will ripen after only 2-3 months that way. It is also softer than our other cheeses, and is washed regularly with first a brine to stimulate the growth of B. Linens, then with beer to add a distinct flavor and keep molds off.

9 weeks, ready for sale