Slow Cheese Bra 2019

 After spending most of the year in Mongolia and Tibet, I decided to come to Italy to attend the festival the Slow Food puts on every 2 years.  It is by far the most important international cheese event, the world cheese awards is nonsense.  The theme this year was “Natural is possible” and it highlighted cheeses made with natural starter cultures.  These are usually made by clobbering raw milk or using whey from a batch to ferment the next days cheese.  Italy probably has the largest amount of cheeses made with natural starters.

 My palate took a quantum leap, trying so many different cheeses, such wild flavors, so much I had never experienced before.  I had tasted a few cheeses from this natural category, but now I could plainly taste the potential.  Now I often can taste the generic commercial starter in cheeses, even raw ones, and they seem mediocre

 

Tibet - further exploration of yak dairying

 While spending seven months first working and living and then traveling in Mongolia,  I ended up focusing on yak dairying and cheese making and discovered with joy that I could act as an amateur anthropologist cheesemaking endearing traditions. Mongolians practice Tibetan Buddhism Which became the state religion of the Mongol Empire and then was repressed in Mongolia during the Soviet era.  I realized that to understand the roots of Mongolian culture and semi nomadic pastoral lifestyle practiced there I needed to go Tibet.

  I got in touch with an organization called Kadhak Organics that is working to provide jobs for women and support local yak herders by making skin care products out of yak butter.  I offered my services as a cheese maker and they invited me to come to teach cheesemaking and work towards developing a line of raw milk natural started culture yak milk cheeses.

I stayed with my amazing host family who welcomed me with a warm enthusiasm that blew me away. We would go and buy milk from local yak herders fresh from the evening milking,  and hem add kefir grains to a liter of milk to use as a starter the next day.  We Experimented with the lactic cheeses, mozzarella, caciocavallo, and aged tommes. 

My interest in cheesemaking and dairying had now grown into a study of land use practices, and how culture shapes views towards landscapes.  Specifically, I was seeing how common land use contrasted with the public/private concepts of the Western world.  My journey with cheese had now grown into amateur ethnographic research, and my life as Milk Trekker was born. 

Cheese curd drying in the high altitude sun 

The valley of the yaks, where Tibetan herders spend the summer in tents and cabins with their herds

Staying with Yak herders in Zavkhan, Mongolia

In July I was graced with the opportunity to spend 11 days with a Yak herding family at their summer camp along the Zavkhan River in western Mongolia.  I stayed in the Ger, helped with milkings, rounding up the animals, herding on horseback, and milk processing.

Dairying is done here without fences, the animals roaming up side valleys to graze all day then being rounded up at night and brought to a space near the Gers.  The babies are tethered, and the moms hobbled and milked out by hand after the babies have suckled to stimulate milk let down.  The mothers are released but they bed down close to the young and can be milked again in the morning.

The spotted brown and white animal here is a cow/ yak hybrid, and there are many grades of these here and in the Himalaya.  Yaks are bos grunniens and can interbreed with other members of the yak genus such as cattle, water Buffalo, and bison. The 1st generation hybrids produce sterile male offspring and fertile female, allowing the half/half to be further breed into a 75% yak or 75% cattle.  Some of these were important in the past as draft animals.  Yaks milk is high in fat and protein, and has a high amount of minerals with a eggy taste.  

Me wearing the traditional deel, a long robelike jacket, for milking.

A typical Ger, with steel and flesh horses.

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Milk in various pots and states ready for cheesemaking

Visiting Herders and Observing Traditional Mongolian Cheese Making

Summer snaps on  in Mongolia as freezing temperatures and wind of April and May swap out with warm weather and rain.  A dry drab landscape transforms into lush grassland almost overnight in Mid-June.  Livestock animals are everywhere.  As you drive into the countryside you see hundreds of sheep, goats, horses, and cows, and the occasional cluster of Yaks in highlands and Bactrian Camels in southern desert regions.

While driving along with my coworkers one day we pulled up unannounced at the Ger of some people we had never met before.  After their dogs calmed down they invited us in and to my immense pleasure they were in the midst of processing milk.  They were boiling that days milk to be made into Urum the next day.  hot milk is frothed then left to sit and separate overnight, the Cream combining with the foam into a skin.  Then the skimmed milk they had used the day before was made into Byslag, a fresh cheese formed into a rough square in cheesecloth and pressed between boards with a rock on top.  The whey is then made into Eezgii which is ricotta that has small bits of dried meat added and is cooked until the whey evaporates, then dehydrated.

This was the experience I wanted to have in Mongolia, and I was shocked by how easy it was to obtain.  We tasted the best tarag (yogurt) I have had, extremely tart with a drinkable texture.  The Urum was similar to clotted cream, and delicious.  The byslag was pretty bland as it is unsalted.  The cheese making traditions in this country are very utilitarian, they are methods of preserving the bounty of summer grass in forms that will get people through the cold harsh winter.  What is unique and inspiring here is the complete lack of industrial practices and products.  No DVI starter cultures, no rennet, no bulk tanks or sanitizer.  There is an old way of doing things that is preserved here and it is a very unique place to study cheese and dairy in that regard.

Making cheese in Mongolia

I took a Cheese Making Job in Mongolia and moved there in February of 2019.  It was cold and dry when I landed in Ulaan Baatar and got a ride out to the White Mountain Cheese Plant where I would be living in a traditional Mongolian dwelling called a Ger, more commonly known by the Russian name yurt.  I was working for a small company called the Mongolian Artisan Cheesemakers Union that is attempting to build a network of small plants around the country to use the large quantities of milk produced every summer when the vast grasslands are used as pasture for goats, sheep, cows, camels, yaks, and horses.  The country has incredible traditional fermented dairy products that I got to taste, and an ancient way of life has been preserved here, although things are changing rapidly.  Formerly collectively managed grasslands are being degraded as people take on larger herds of cashmere goats, and climate change is affecting the country severely.  

I jumped right in to managing this small cheese plant and production of pasteurized bloomy and washed rinds, blues, natural rinds, and fresh cheeses.  I had the most freedom I ever had to develop recipes, experiment with cultures, and make try out cheeses I have never made before such as Halloumi, Oaxacan, and  Caciocavallo.  More and more I appreciate basic utilitarian creamy fresh melting/snacking cheeses.  As much as I love making and aging the moldy hunks, I will use more of these fresh cheeses on a daily basis.   

It was definetly an amazing experience and my first cheese making gig outside the US.  I now have vision of traveling to explore and document traditional dairy fermentation while teaching cheese making and seeing if I can be of assistance groups trying to maintain traditional herding lifestyles.  I want to put the skills and knowledge I have to use for something more, to do work that has a economic and environmental justice aspect to it.