Eight Acres

We have lots of milk again, since Molly calved, but we never had much time for cheese-making, so here are a few tips that you might find useful when you need to make cheese in a hurry. Make one big cheese rather than several smaller ones We realised that most of the time involved in cheese making is all the heating and stirring.  We decided to make the largest possible cheese, using our 10 L and 7 L pots at the same time.  When the curd was ready in both pots, I scooped it into our largest mold to make one giant cheese, then there was only one cheese to look after until it was ready to wax. Save time fishing the spoon out of the pot by securing it to the handle with a twisty tie You don't want to know how often this has been a problem! Sterilise your pot just before you start, so you know its clean and you have a warm pot to heat the milk in I sterilise the pot by putting a little water in the bottom, sitting it on the largest burner with the lid ...

Up until recently we vacuumed sealed all our cheeses.  This seemed like a terrible waste of the plastic bags, as you can't really use them again, and as our vacuum sealer lives at the back of a kitchen cupboard, it was also a real pain.  I had a chunk of cheese wax, but I was too scared to use it.  Then when Molly had her first calf, I was making so much cheese, I decided to just give waxing a go.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is very quick and easy to do. This site has some good step by step instructions.  The method I use is to pain the wax on the cheese with a cheap paintbrush.  I would like to dip the cheese, but I didn't want to dedicate one of our big pots to wax, so its just in a little pot.  The part that I always found confusing was the step between taking the cheese out of the cheese mold and waxing and storing the cheese, so, after a lot of trial and error, here's what I do: Press the cheese overnight, in the morn...

Over the past few weeks I've interviewed small farmers who milk cows, goats and even a sheep , and now, in the last interview of the series, I have an interview with urban-farmer Gavin from the blogs The Greening of Gavin and of course, The Little Green Cheese , in which he documents his cheese-making tips and successes.  Gavin may not keep his own milking animal, but he certainly knows what to do with the milk and has plenty of good advice for those wanting to get started with homestead dairy. Gavin: Thanks Liz for the opportunity once again to be part of one of your interview series. They are always great fun to write.  ( Gavin also participated in getting started with growing your own and getting started with keeping chickens ) Gavin ready to teach cheese-making Farmer Liz: Tell us about how you started making cheese. Gavin: There is a long story to this. I grew up on a small dairy farm in South Australia. There was an abundance of milk, but we never made ch...

When our cows first calve , we have to milk them daily and end up with so much milk, we nearly have to make a cheese daily to keep up !  The occasional cheese can be matured in the back of a normal fridge.  Sure the temperature is a bit low for proper maturation, but there's no point turning on another fridge just for one or two cheeses.  But when we start to have 10 or 20 cheeses, we need the cheese fridge so we have somewhere to put them all! Fortunately for us, we had a spare bar fridge, that wasn't being used for anything and wasn't really worth selling.  We set that up with a thermostat and can easily adjust the temperature to suit cheese maturation.  Ideally cheese should mature at around 8-12degC, which is warmer than a normal fridge temperature of 5degC.  We just plug the fridge into the thermostat, and the thermostat into the socket.  The temperature sensor goes in the fridge and we set the temperature on the dial to about 10degC. ...

Its funny how having a cow changes your perspective on life.  For most people, getting good quality milk is the limiting factor for their cheese-making activities, because its expensive and can be hard to find.  Not me, I don't have any shortage of beautiful fresh raw creamy jersey milk, but I don't have time to make a cheese every day!  the reason for all this milk..... When a dairy cow first has her calf, she makes more milk than the calf can drink.  This isn't a problem for beef cattle, but we've bred dairy cows to produce excess, and if the cow isn't milked out completely she is at risk of mastitis.  The cow's milk production actually increases and peaks in the first few weeks after her calf is born and then (thank goodness!) begins to decrease.  As the calf grows, it can drink more and more of the milk, until eventually it can drink all the cow's milk and then we don't need to milk every day.  At that stage, we have to separate the calf from ...

Now that we have lots of milk again, its time to make cheese!  At first Bella gave us about 12 L a day, but now Romeo is taking as much as he wants, we get about 2 L for Benny and a little extra for ourselves.  If we want more, we have to lock up Romeo overnight, more about share milking another day, I want to explain a bit about cheese, so just pretend I'm still getting lots of milk!  I use about 1 L a day to make either yoghurt or cream cheese, and we have a kefir smoothie every morning, but when we have more than 6 L in the fridge ..... its time to make cheese! (It you're losing track of our latest cow and calf situation, see my most recent update ). Before we got Bella we didn’t know anything about making cheese, so we bought a few cheese making books and went to a cheese making course .  We were pretty confident about making the cheese, but maturing and storing the cheese was more of a challenge, with some early attempts ending up covered in ...

Last week I started to review the introduction to Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig.  This week I'll start on the first real chapter of recipes, called Mastering the Basics, which includes cultured dairy, sprouts, stocks, sauces and salad dressings. Cultured Dairy The strange part here is that we got Bella , our house cow, before I read this book and before I knew anything about the whole raw milk debate .  We drank raw milk sometimes when we visited our friends on a dairy farm, but we never really valued it as we should have.  My husband really wanted a cow because he liked the dairy lifestyle, and I couldn't see a problem with it, as I described previously , it will make it easier for us to get steers for beef instead of having to buy them locally.  Our friends told us they'd found the perfect cow for us, small, tame, already with a calf and used to being milked in the dairy, so even though we weren't totally ready , we brought home Bella...

Making cheese is not as hard as it sounds.  Let me explain a few of the concepts and you'll see what I mean. To make cheese you need to separate the milk into curds and whey.  Curds are a coagulation of the long chain casein proteins in the milk, the whey is the liquid (also containing protein) that remains uncoagulated.  Coagulation is the same thing that happens to egg when its cooked, its just the solidification process.  The separation is achieved either by adding rennet (an enzyme that was originally extracted from kid or calf stomach, but is now usually produced by GM bacteria), or by increasing the acidity of the milk (either with a weak acid, such as lemon juice or vinegar, or by allowing lactic acid bacteria to produce lactic acid in the milk). I probably just made that sound complicated, but now for the practical advice.  The easiest way to make cheese is to just add the cheese culture (i.e. lactic acid bacteria) to some milk and put it in a warm ...

Now that we have Bella  our house cow, we have the option of drinking raw whole milk instead of pasturised, homoginised supermarket milk.  In Australia it is  illegal to  sell  raw milk , but its not illegal to drink raw milk from your own house cow. As explained  here , there are good reasons not to drink raw milk from commercial dairies.  These dairies are producing milk that is intended to be pasturised, there is usually lots of manure on the floor and lots of cows to milk, because the milk is going to be pasturised, so there's no need to take as much care as you would with your own house cow.  Some dairies are set up to produce raw milk, and these may take more care with the production of milk, so that its safe to drink in raw form, but in general I would be wary of commercial raw milk. “If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those ...