Less is More

"You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think (unless you take away her iPhone)." - Dorothy Parker

If it's not abundantly clear at this point, I will spell it out for you: farmstead cheesemaking is labor intensive as BALLS. BALLS I TELL YOU. Granted, I've said before and I'll say again that I have managed to work for two of the most uncompromising cheese badasses around, but I suspect that the margin of difference at other operations is not all that extreme. When you're working with something as microbiologically complex as milk as a FOUNDATION, there are dozens if not hundreds of things that can go awry, and that's just from a food safety standpoint. Then you have to worry about whether the final product actually fucking tastes like you want it to taste, or, you know, GOOD. All of this requires a level of OCD-like attention to detail that, if not maintained, can have disastrous impacts. Unlike if you forget to touch the doorknob five times before you leave for work.Not that I'm speaking from experience.


In the realm of food,  it seems we've collectively been entrenched for at least a decade in this quasi- ridiculous pursuit of the authentic. Trying to get back to some place of purity and truth in the things we eat and the way they are made. That's not inherently a bad thing but to my mind it's chasing after a myth. We look to the past for inspiration, as though the simpler, slower things were intrinsically better. We've fetishized the farmy, deified the dirt from which our heirloom carrots are grown. Listen, by and large I believe this to be a good thing, leaving out discussions of privilege and access to food (which are stupendously important and which I am no where near qualified to talk about). If you have the time and money to seek out foods that are made or grown or raised ethically, you have a responsibility to do so. I, too, marvel at the humble beauty and satisfaction of growing and making my own food. My lunch every day consists of bread made by my boss, cheese made by us, and vegetables grown in the back yard. For the multitudes of people like myself who have lived the majority of their lives totally disconnected from the means of production from whence their food originates, this seems like some sort of magic.

Until I started making it, I viewed artisan cheese through a gauzy lens, intoxicated by the notion that the cheesemakers I admired spent their days serenely pouring milk into vats, sprinkling fairy dust over it and POOF turning it into delicious cheese, which freed up the rest of their days to go frolic in pastures with their animals. Now I'm all HAR-DEE-HAR-HAR about that shit.

What I've come to discover in my most recent gig is that the fewer the inputs, the less you doctor shit on the front end, the more work you create for yourself in terms of maintenance, at least if you care super deeply for what you are making. This may not come as a a total shock to those of you who are makers of things. While not completely analogous, it brings to mind my understanding of biodynamic farming/viticulture. In order to create and maintain a healthy environment without the use of chemicals (ie fewer inputs), you have to be highly HIGHLY attuned to every aspect of your living thing's growth, tweaking and adjusting and caring for it every step of the way, all the time. This is no set-it-and-forget-it type of jam. 

Now that we've begun experimenting with making our own indigenous cultures, we've peeled away one more layer of adulteration as it were, and created another step that needs to be hypermanaged. We already monitor the health and components of our milk pretty hardcore, testing it every day for antibiotics and sending it to the lab multiple times a month to monitor somatic cell count and other thangs. We also do a (state mandated) sample of our herd every single month, which keeps us up to date on the productivity of each doe as well as their milk composition. This is useful information for a variety of reasons. Because we are using raw milk as a starting point, that shit needs to be CLEAN AS CLEAN CAN BE before we add it to the vat. It doesn't just start in the milking parlor. It starts in the pasture. We move the girls twice a day this time of year, and have begun surveying them for parasites. We trim their hooves at least 6 times a year, which is not just about maintenance but is also an indicator of their overall health and nutrition (the way their hooves grow and develop are, perhaps unsurprisingly, directly connected to their diet.) We withhold milk from newly fresh does for 5 days to ensure that the milk we're collecting from them is clean and free of colostrum. And if there is even the slightest hint of an issue with a doe's health we withhold her milk as well, even if that means we have a smaller amount of milk to deal with in the end. 

Since we have begun using even fewer additives to make our cheese, it's even clearer how much of the flavor and texture development has to do with both the technique with which it is made (how much moisture we leave in the curd, how it is formed and shaped, etc.) and the manner in which it is brined and aged. It's astonishing to see how different the surface bacteria is not just between types of cheese but even between different batches of the same kind of cheese -- this is truly terroir at its most transparent. Now that it's getting warmer and more humid, we have to be extra on top of moving cheeses quickly from the brining room to the aging room so that B. linens don't develop on the cheeses that aren't supposed to have them. The characteristic mold that we grow on our Fuzzy Wheels and, to a lesser degree, on our Tommes, mucor, is a mold that most other cheesemakers attempt to eradicate, but we monitor and encourage its growth, all the while taking care that it doesn't wind up being over-active or migrating to the cheeses where it is not meant to live. (Which is why we sometimes give a cursory surface wash to our Crawfords to control what's growing on them. Earlier in the season we wound up over-washing some batches -- inasmuch as they wound up developing slightly differently than Crawfords ordinarily do. But it was a happy accident that wound up producing some ethereally delicious cheese unlike our typical Crawfords, almost verging on a Saint-Nectaire-ish style. All part of the magic and mystique of cheesemaking and affinage. And another reason why it's essential to be constantly sampling our own products.)

All of which is to say that the more "simply" you attempt to make a thing, the more complicated the process winds up being -- the more you leave things up to nature, the more you have to be flexible and adaptable to its whims. It really forces one to take a magnifying glass to every step of the procedure. 

The opposite seems to be true inside my own brainpiece. Ever since moving down this way, my life has become even more solitary (HOW), and I have responded to this development by doing everything in my power to drown out the silence with all manner of sensory stimulus. Nary a day goes by where I am without some sort of visual or auditory distraction. I am ALL UP on EVERY podcast and streaming television show that there is. I cannot so much as take a shower or a pee without some comforting background noise emanating from one of my Apple devices. And the result is that the previously fertile meadow of my mind has turned into a swampy, anaerobic sludge-pit. The MORE I consume, the LESS I create. It is a simple one-to-one ratio (#MATH). While I've been aware of this depressing formula for some time, it became even more keenly apparent to me yesterday whilst in the cheese dungeon cave, when my iPhone quit on me and I no longer had the dulcet tones of 2 Dope Queens to keep me company. All of a sudden THOTS started flowing like a busted levee, my eyeballs began to PERCEIVE and ANALYZE all the gorgeous mottled molds, the smells of each batch of cheese came crashing into my face holes and I basically sprang back to life from whatever social media zombie existence I'd been perpetuating previously. 

The city-dwelling readers amongst you might be all "ohhhhh the peaceful quiet of it all!" as you plot ways to murder your neighbor who blasts Skrillex on loop/cab driver who won't cease honking for a full 45 minutes/brass band celebrating some obscure saint's birthday with a cacophonous parade at 8 am on a Sunday. It's all well and good to prize your solitude when you are otherwise barraged with social and sensory intrusions, but it can be hard to protect and prioritize your brain's quiet time when the silence is all you know. 

I guess the moral of the story is that getting to -- or back to -- the "essential"  is a fuckton of work however you slice it. Crowding out the core of a thing, heaping shit on top of it, obscuring it, ignoring it for the sake of ease and comfort is not THE LOOK. But man is that shit hard.

And on that note, I'll be in airplane mode for the next several days. 

JK how the fuck else am I gonna be able to scour the internet for Chia Pudding recipes? 

BE REAL.