Cheesehouse Blog

Since I have no internet at home, I have to use the wireless at the farm to update the blog. I’ll get home and do the bulk of my writing and then batch upload the entries all at once. This works until I can’t find the original blog file on my laptop. Ugh. I’m guessing early-onset Alzheimer’s. Anyways, I found the rest of my posts from April and so you the reader may want to go back a bit to catch up on the riveting drama that is my life as a cheesemaker. Enjoy.

The cows leave the barn for the first time this season.

The cows were finally let out of the barn today for the first time since the beginning of winter. I happened to walk to work today so I snapped some shots of them frolicking in the field just outside the barn. They’re really funny when they fist head out. Curious by nature, they check everything out like a hound dog but they get bored easily. Two hours later they were ready to head back inside, but for a little while they seems really excited to be outside stretching their legs again.

Their first day grazing of the season.

I love heading over to Chittenden County on my days off. I get to visit with my brother’s family and often we’ll head up to his in-law’s farm where he’s got a pilot hop yard planted. Willow Hill Farm is just down the road from the farm so sometimes I’ll stop in there to pick up some of Willow’s yummy sheep cheese. Today I stopped in to see if she’d let me come work with her for a day or even just watch what she does with the sheeps’ milk. She is one of the busiest people I’ve ever met as she and Dave do all the farm work and cheesemaking themselves. It’s enough work that most people just couldn’t manage that much in one day…seven days a week. They were nice enough to spend about an hour with me talking cheese and farm life. They also have blueberry bushes that they let people come and pick from in season. They’re giant berries and about as sweet as a blueberry can get. I can’t wait to pick a bushel or so and put them up for the winter both frozen and as preserves. Maybe even some syrup. They just finished lambing season, so there are lots of cute little lambs bouncing around in the fields making their little lamb noises.

Lambs in the Pasture

Afterwards, I went up to the farm to see Becky (my sister-in-law’s mom). By the time I’d gotten there, Bonhomme was there too so we had a beer and talked about the next sugaring season. They have a huge sugarbush and this past year put in 10,000 taps which netted them around 3500 gallons of organic maple syrup. That’s a whole lot of pancakes! He was ready for a nap and so I went up to the hop yard to check on the plants. All of the surviving plants from last year were already upwards of 18 inches high, but the new rhizomes we planted this year hadn’t poked through the ground yet. I think it’s going to be a really good fall for brewing. We’re talking about doing a wet hop brew with hops picked the same day as the brew. That should be good fun.

The Cellars are huge. Really, really huge. Sometimes, individual cheeses will get lost in the shuffle. Miya was given the task of seeking out lost cheeses and collecting them for tasting. She found a wheel of Bayley from 12/29 that had cracked in transit from the cheesehouse and was put into cold storage immediately. Then it was apparently forgotten about. What a happy accident! Miya cut it open and tasted it. While it definitely lacked the usual Bayley Hazen Blue characteristics, it was what Roquefort wished it could be given a natural rind. It was super creamy and mellow and quite sweet. It was almost snow white with deep blue pockets of mold in it.  It lacked the tang of the usual Bayley, but was entirely enjoyable in its own way. I snagged a piece for myself to take home and enjoy.

Some days I leave work with huge amounts of cheese. Today was one of those days. On Wednesdays we turn the Bliss that’s in the cold store and today was no different. I was washing my hands after spiking the new batch of Bayley when I heard Lesley hollering from across the cellar asking if I wanted any Bliss. I had to stop and think if I’d heard her correctly. “Do I want Bliss?” That’s like asking if the Pope is Catholic. They were ending the Giant Bliss experiment which (to me) seemed like a success. These were 2lb wheels like a couple wheels of Brie that had been stacked on top of one another. At least three inches thick and about seven inches around. I took two. The rind was a little ammoniated, but inside was pure Bliss. Lots creamy, gooey yummies with an equal amount of chalky center. When I got home, I removed the rind, put the good stuff in a mixing bowl and whipped the two parts together. Now what to do with it? I ran out to the front stoop at the base of which there were some wild chives that Frank and Fede had dug up on the golf course, washed and cut them, and folded them into the Bliss center until it looked like a chive compound butter. The chives had enormous flavor and blended brilliantly with the Bliss. Now if I just had a really good NYC bagel to spred it on and some good Kosher lox.

I guess right before I started here, someone dropped a batch of Winnimere on the floor making it unsalable. It was not however, left to waste. The section of floor was clean enough though, that it was still safe to eat once it had ripened. Each employee got to choose their own wash to make their own custom Winnimere with a beer or wine of their choice. Today it was decided that the cheese was ripe and ready. There were several extra wheels, so I was given one as well. I’m saving it to take to my brother’s next weekend. I’ve only ever had Winnimere in a much younger form when it’s still sort of like the texture of bad process cheese. It still tastes good, but apparently not even close to how gooey and yummy (so I’ve been told) it is when it’s ripe. I have to remember to pick up some good bread to have it with. Also went home with a sample of the Von Trapp’s new cheese. Like the Winnimere, it’s a washed rine cheese. This one is really stinky, but it’s super creamy inside. I wonder how it will compare with the Winnimere.

Fridays are tough. Today was a different tough. It had almost nothing to do with work. I got out of the cheesehouse and was headed up to Orleans to hit the bank. I’d never been up that far yet so I had to google it on the iPhone. Google sucks. Their directions sent me and the Benz up a Class 4 road which is meant for 4WD only. I was too far into the snow to back up as the tires just spun on the sheet of ice underneat the two feet of rotton snow I’d gotten caught in. I’m kind of stubborn so I figured I could just gun it and blaze forward. Nope. Wasn’t gonna happen. Then I put on my snow boots and started hiking back up the road to the nearest sign of civilization. Luckily it was the first house on the right. That’s when I met Shawn. He was nice enough and offered to try and pull the car out with his Ford Escape. Nope. Wasn’t gonna happen. The Benz is nearly two tons of Stuttgart steel and the Ford was, well…a Ford. And it weighed much less than the SEL. That’s when I remembered I worked on a farm…where they have *tractors*! So Shawn gave me a lift back to Jasper Hill. I thanked him for the lift and told him I’d bring him some cheese very soon. Went into the barn where Brant was getting ready to milk the cows. I told him what I’d done and he could barely keep it together from laughing so hard. I knew it’d be a while till I was done catching grief from my mistake. Oh well. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Once he was done, we hoped on the tractor and rode the 3 miles to where I’d beached the car. At one point I was certain we were gonna stuck the tractor too. They’d already taken the chains off the rear tires and we were on a sheet of ice. Brant finally pushed the bucket down into the road and used it to push the tractor backwards. He finally got the two ton beast to pop loose and was able to drag it back up the hill to drivable ground. I wish I’d gotten pictures. They’d have been hilarious.

Tasting the cheese at various stages of ripening is a key element to being both a cheesemaker and an affineur. We taste Bliss from every batch at some point. Today however, we went over to Vault 7 in the Cellars to taste Bayley with Jen who is our liason with our customers. We’d finished up the morning stuff early, so we decdided to taste some cheese as a group. The group consisted of myself, Lesley, Roberta, our interns Blair and Miya, and Jen. We started with the oldest Bayley which was from early February and worked our way up.  It was interesting how each batch was just a bit different from the next; and not just from being different ages. I guess that’s partly what makes it artisanal. No two batches are ever exactly alike. Granted, they all have VERY similar characteristics, but after sampling a dozen or so batches of Bayley in one shot, the differences were more pronounced. And I’m not sure many of them would be noticed by most people. I know I have a pretty finely tuned pallette from being a chef and oenophile, so I may be more sensitive to the subtleties than most. I don’t think it’s anything inherent genetically, but more from having tasted a massive spectrum of flavors over my career.  I’m not even sure it would be fair to definitively say that one batch was “better” than any other as they all still had several weeks to ripen. At the very least, we learned what unripe Bayley tasted like and got out of the cheesehouse for a bit.

L to R: Roberta, Lesley, Blair, Jen

Fridays are tough. They start at 6am and are like this mad scramble to get all the other cheeses turned and get setup for the Bliss ladle ASAP. What usually happens is that the curd is ready, or near ready to be ladled into the moulds upon arrival at the cheesehouse. When the Bliss curd’s pH hits 4.5, it’s ready to go into the moulds. Once in a while the curd will be ready when you walk in and youhave to bust ass to get setup and ladling in a reasonable amount of time. It’s like having 30 minutes to setup your station before a huge Saturday night in the restaurant and having to start service immediately. I always had this sense that I’d forgotten something on nights like that. It’s distracting and unnerving and makes for a less than stellar day.

Yesterday was not like that. The curd was close but not quite ready, and by the time Lesley came in at 7, she was able to help me finish getting setup so I could get ladling. This set me up for what ended up being a stellar day and night. Once I was done in the cheesehouse, I raced home and showered to get ready to head to Richmond to meet up with my brother and sister-in-law. We’d gotten tickets to see Tift Merritt play at Higher Ground in Burlington. She’s a singer/songwriter and I’ve known her for nearly 20 years. We met at the Black Dog Cafe in Raleigh, NC where I had my first kitchen job. I was 22 and she was just 17 or 18 at the time. I had such a crush on her too. She’s absolutely gorgeous and about as sweet as one can be. On Sundays, my friends and I would finish our brunch shift at the Black Dog and then head to Sadlack’s on Hillsborough Street across from NC State for beers. As Tift wasn’t old enough to drink, (she *still* doesn’t look old enough) we’d sit outside and she’d play her guitar and play and sing for us. Nine years later I heard her first song on the radio and I was blown away.  It was another 7 years until I finally got to catch her Norfolk show, but it was worth the wait. So now six months later, I got to see her again up here in Vermont. The venue was perfect for her. Really intimate and informal. At one point Tift decided to go completely acoustic and come down into the center of the crowd. She told us to gather ’round her and we did. She played without any amplification. It was just like being back at Sadlack’s on Sunday afternoon. I can’t wait until she’s back this summer. Hopefully she and her new husband Zeke will make it up to the farm to see the cheese operation.

Tift onstage at Higher Ground 4/10/09

Crazy drama this week in the barn. In today’s episode Brant came running into the cheesehouse looking for Nate who was talking with me and Fede. “Cow flopped over!”, he says. I had no idea what to expect, but we all scrambled out to the barn to check it out. At the far end stall, there was a cow laying down in the manure conveyor. Guess she’d stepped off the platform accidentally and lost her balance. At least the conveyor wasn’t running at the time. She was stuck though. Really stuck. And pregnant. It was obvious I was going to be of no help, so I just stood back and watched. I don’t like manure. It’s gross. Doesn’t seem to bother the barn guys though. While trying to reposition her rear legs, she let loose and covered Nate’s hands. At least I didn’t gag this time. That would have been thoroughly embarrassing. I was at a complete loss as to how they were going to get this cow back on her feet considering the position she was in. Brant ran to get Andy and eventually they got this device that is like a clamp that goes around her hip bones. That clamp gets connected to a come-along winch that’s attached to one of the large beams overhead. Then they just winch her rear end off the ground and everything else follows. Neat stuff. You’ll never see that in a restaurant. I need to start keeping my camera on me at all times so I can get pics of all the good stuff that happens around here.