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| Big mistake. Big. HUGE. |
I sincerely do not know how I came to be a person who can routinely be not only upright but working in a fairly physically and mentally demanding capacity for upwards of 10 hours a day. At my core I am the laziest piece of shit you will ever meet, but I have fooled myself into this life for better or worse, and that is just how things are now.
Most of my days at the farm begin in the cheese room, which is not super taxing physically at first, but is fraught with all sorts of details that can be mentally exhausting, especially for me, since I am still not Totally Confident that I'm doing things the right way or in the right order. From there it is a slow build in terms of activity -- there is the gentle stirring of the curd, which necessitates being bent at an awkward angle over a hot vat of milk for anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour. Then there is the forming of the cheese, which requires meticulous spatial, visual and tactile acumen, and then the clean-up, which for me is an pretty hardcore hour-long endeavor amidst steam and hot water, what with crouching down to clean the walls and floor, balancing perilously on a bucket to wipe down the pipeline and scrubbing basically every surface vigorously.
The day is a slow build, with a break for lunch followed by variously arduous outdoor tasks (these days having mostly to do with building or breaking down paddocks) and then chores and milking, an uninterrupted span of just about 5 hours of intense focus.
The work is steady for the most part, which doesn't allow my body to be all "hey stop I'm fucking tired and this hurts!"So on a day like Wednesday, which started out eerily chill and finished off fucking nuts, my psyche was verging on revolt.
More or less, my compatriot Helen and I have worked things out so that I spend Mondays and Tuesdays making cheese and she tackles Wednesdays and Fridays. Thursdays are a heavy cheese cave day, between packing orders for shipping and doing the BIG FLIP and wash (now that we're making a very small, made to order amount of washed wheels, we have to mix up the morge and wash hundreds of little rounds three times a week, which takes a fucking eternity). Wednesday I got the Mixed Drums in brine and brought the forms up to wash whilst Boss and H were finishing up the make. Perhaps because there seemed to be nothing else for me to do, Boss sent me on some errands that involved dropping off milk samples/wrestling with my demons as to whether or not 10 am was too early for a cree-mee and hollering at my very favorite store, Agway, to procure layer pellets and mason jars WITH WHICH TO BEGIN GROWING OUR OWN CULTURES.
Yes, you read that right. I am straight up fucking AMPED for this shit. As an unabashed natural wine zealot and closet hippie, it stands to reason that as soon as I discovered "natural cheesemaking," I got hella intrigued. Now make no mistake. I am not a homesteader with braided armpit hair. I don't make my own kombucha. Hell, I haven't even done much experimenting with home cheesemaking. Like most of my interests/endeavors, I dip tentative toes into rather than whole-hogging it (which makes things easier for me to extricate myself when, like, a moth flutters by to distract me). A few months ago, Michael let me know about a workshop run by arguably THE natural cheesemaking advocate of the northern hemisphere, a bro named David Asher, who obviously sports an artfully waxed 'stache and wears some sort of newsie cap, but we won't hold that against him. I was signed up to take a class with him and interview him for an as yet unwritten article, but then the Plague befell me and I was incapacitated for several weeks and missed the chance. No matter, we bought bro's book and perused it for its main theses, many of which Michael already knew, having experimented with making native cultures with only minor success in the past.
Evidently some combination of newly minted enthusiasm and a desire to create more work for himself inspired boss to have another go at (goat) it, so we commenced with the preparations. What you may not know is that even the tiny little baby farmsead artisan cheesemakers that you love and cherish and fetishize use, by and large, industrially produced cultures. This is not inherently a bad thing. Like GMOs, it's all a matter of where you fall on the continuum of epicurean dogma. But that is the truth of it. There are up sides and down sides to these cultures -- the main upside being that, all other things being HIGHLY variable in farmstead cheesemaking, this is one area where you can mostly calibrate your outcomes and arrive at a consistent end product. Cultures are used for a variety of things, from the basic kick-starting of fermentation in cheesemaking to the finely tuned development of flavors. When I first discovered this in an intro to cheesemaking workshop that I took years ago at UVM, I admit I was a little taken aback -- finding out that the cheeses didn't just magically turn into the brassica-laden or mushroom-y or subtley pee-tinged flavor conveyances they were through pastoral voodoo and terroir-driven alchemy was like seeing the Wizard behind his curtain. Finding out that cheesemakers, these milky magicians, were simply sprinkling lab-made powders into their vats to achieve "buttery" flavors or w/e took a little of the shine off.
That said, I don't completely feel that way today. I see it as analogous to a chef using spices and seasonings for his dishes, albeit slightly more technical. Laini was constantly experimenting with any number of cultures, tweaking and adapting her cheese recipes like some madcap cook. At Twig, we use very few and rely mostly on the milk and the molds to create flavor, which is neither a better nor worse approach, just different.
ANYbarfs, after my appointed rounds, I returned to the farm right in time for lunch, followed by 45 minutes of watching a training video on how to test goats for anemia, which is symptomatic of a parasite called the Barber Pole Worm (see above). The graphics of this video alone are goddamned priceless and the lecturer is my new hero (holler Dr. Anne Zajac) but as mentioned, sitting still for more than five minutes fooled my body into thinking it was chill timez, when in fact it was NO SUCH MOTHERFUCKING THING.
We pressed pause on what is sure to be THE Oscar darling of this season so that we could set up the paddock for the evening, the milking parlor and the barn and feed all of the babies, the largest of whom recently moved into their summer condo (aka the out of doors). It was then that we discovered the last two kids had been born to one Crispy mama, so we proceeded to carry them inside while also attempting to fill up water troughs and lure the girls into the yard/barn/parlor, yowling wards in tow.
Milking was further complicated by the fact that in addition to withholding milk from Tickle, who's been having some issues with blocked teats, and Crispy, who was newly fresh, I was charged with collecting milk from the four girls we'd determined we would attempt to grow our cultures with. We isolated them by identifying the does with the lowest somatic cell count, both currently and historically. (SCC is a way to gauge milk quality -- the higher the count, the more concentrated the population of white blood cells, which is an indicator of some sort of pathogen or disease.) We landed on Scooter, Sarah, Ombra and Abby. So for each of those girls, I milked into the fresh pail and poured milk carefully into a sterilized mason jar. Because I had to really think about what I was doing and be HELLA fucking meticulous, the whole thing tacked on roughly 30-40 minutes to my milking time. So after finishing up the milking, dumping the milk into the bulk tank, taking the girls out to pasture and then putting the milk set aside for clabbering in the cheese house, covered by a cheese cloth, I finally set to work doing the clean-up (another hour-long endeavor) and didn't leave the farm til almost 8pm. Whomp whomp. Good thing I have literally no life outside of work.
All said, it was a sly motherfucker of a day that started out chill as balls and wound up being a back-loaded 12 hour monster. But man oh man, on days like this, it's really fucking worth it. It's shit like this that makes me so goddamned stoked to be doing what I'm doing. Add to that, working for someone who is thoughtful and intelligent and willing to take (calculated, educated) risks to enhance his own understanding of things and to keep improving his practices and his products, and who is inclusive in this process, is just endlessly inspiring.
Thursday we tested the pH of all four milks, and the were still fairly close to neutral, which means we're working with incredibly clean milk, so go us. Ideally, we want the stuff to acidify to somewhere in the 4 range, and with luck, it'll get there by Monday so that we use half of it to make our Tommes and the other half to seed sanitized milk that we'll then refrigerate and use as a mother. HIPPIE SHIT I TELL YOU. But also, maybe, the beginning of something great.
TBD, duders. TBD.
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