ACS Conference 2012

In the first days of August I flew out to Raleigh North Carolina for the annual American Cheese Society Conference and Festival of Cheese.  Three days of classes, workshops, and tastings preceded an awards ceremony and festival in which all the cheese entered was out for display and sampling.  It is a great networking opportunity and way to get people together to exchange ideas and discuss common problems and solutions.

 I learned a lot from an alpine cheese making demonstration which I attended.  I realized some very basic things that I had overlooked regarding the effect of cutting curd and rate of cooking on final firmness.  The harder the curd is at the time of cutting, the softer the final product will be because the curd will have less time to expel whey when firming up.  So for a harder cheese your cut when still relatively soft, which is counter intuitive but logical.

We entered 4 cheeses and our Feta received a 3rd place award in the category of Sheep's Milk Feta.  It was great to be able to check out Raleigh which as a great beer/food scene going on.  I enjoyed representing the company and our cheese, learned a lot, and met a lot of great folks!!

New Shelves

In order to house our record production this year I designed some new shelves that can hold vertical wheels, a more space efficient method than horizontal wheels on standard shelves.  They are in the more dry half of the cave where we put cheese after a few months to finish aging.  This room is definitely crowded, but I ventilate it thoroughly and I feel the older cheeses don't suffer as much from lack of breathing room. I try to cycle them through the cave to compensate for localized differences in airflow and humidity.  Ideally you could have air piped in to PVC pipes running vertically down the middle of these racks with drill holes spaced periodically to provide more even airflow.

The wheels seen on these new shelves are our Daisy Tommes which are made from early season Sheeps milk. Turning cheese on these shelves is fast and easy, a 1/4 turn every 3 days.  It really pays to make sure all the wheels come out with even sides if you expect them to stand on end with falling over in a domino like cascade.  Tags are tacked to first and last cheese of every batch with make info and tasting notes.

My name is Bubba and I'm a Dog!!

Bubba is our guardian, he lives with the flock and has a very loud bark to scare off any predators. He is a Great Pyrenees which is an ancient breed the lineage of which can be traced back 10,000 years to the earliest domesticated dogs. Isolated in the Pyrenees mountains these dogs are used by basque herders who appreciate the dogs ability to live outside in harsh conditions. They have an warming insulating undercoat and a thick water resistant outer coat of white fur that allows them to weather the toughest climates and blend in with the flock. Great Pyrennes are nocturnal animals, sleeping most of the day but spending the night patrolling and barking at anything they might find threatening. They integrated themselves with a flock quiet readily and need no training to do their jobs, its deeply ingrained genetic memory.

The Lambs are not silent

With January comes lambs in waves of white fleece and thunderous bleating. Sheep will produce milk for 6 months following birthing, all the new life equals lots of milk, the essential liquid of life. After staying with their moms for three days drinking the colostrum which is the initial dose of milk with exceptionally high amounts of minerals and nutrients, the lambs are separated into pens and the mamas head for the milking line-up. The lambs will be hand fed from bottles until they learn to suckle off a bucket easing the task of feeding the pesky buggers with their voracious appetites.

Lambing is a very busy time of year but its all this new life that graces us with our milk, that sweet elixir that will eventually become a beautiful tasty wheel of cheese. Life is a fleeting thing and milk quickly sours and rots away but when a little human ingenuity intervenes the process of decomposition can be delayed, leading to the incredible diversity of artfully crafted cheeses. Making cheese is kind of like playing god, utilizing natural phenomena and microbiological manipulation to create the most exquisite of foods. Cheese is the meeting place of life and death.

Kind of went off on a tangent there but I think this gets close to the nut of the issue. This life of farmstead cheese making is a way to reconnect with natural cycles that most of us in this country have moved away from. Its a connection to the land, the seasons, the weather, animals, other humans, and the circle of life and death which really is the bedrock of reality. It is a hard life that doesn't really pay off in an economic sense but is fulfilling in a spiritual sense because it offers a whole integrated existence somewhat removed from the ordinary options of an eight hour day at work away from home. It is this that lead me to say that cheese is life.