Say Cheese!

Well folks, today I had a sort of graduation day from cheesemaking school: I waxed my first hard cheese and put it on the shelf to age for at least a month. It is a simple Monterey Jack, but it represents lots of measuring and cooking milk, cutting curd, and putting cheeses into the press. So far I’ve managed to make an average of one two-pound cheese a day, and I’ve been doing it for about a week now.

Before moving on to hard cheeses, I made loads of fresh Chevre, seasoned with just sea salt, or salt and herbs, but my favorite has sun-dried tomatoes and chives in it. Yum! You know, the kind you pay $5 and up for 4 oz. at the store? My refrigerator was getting pretty well loaded with that, though, so I decided I had to move on. After all, you can only eat so much fresh cheese. Besides we use mostly aged cheese, especially cheddar and pepper jack. I want to try making Parmesan too, but I haven’t used my cream separator yet (Parmesan is made with skim milk). Sam has to mount the separator on a board for me. I would probably do it myself, but I’ve got carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands right now and can barely function, though it hasn’t stopped me from milking the goats (a no-no I was told).  Look out once the separator is working, however, because I will be able to make butter and ice cream too!

The only thing that hasn’t turned out well is yogurt, and I’ve tried just about everything. Goat milk typically makes thinner yogurt anyway, but mine has been more like buttermilk than yogurt. I haven’t tried pasteurizing, cooling, and then re-heating it yet, though I have tried holding the milk at 180⁰ F. for 20 minutes, and even adding dry milk powder to increase the solids. That has been a challenge, because we really like yogurt, and I had become accustomed to making my own Greek yogurt with store-bought pasteurized cow milk.

As with most everything else, I suppose you just have to keep at it. Persistence always wins in the end.

You Can't Have Just One

If you recall my last blog post, I had once again acquired a small herd of dairy goats. I believe sheep flock and goats herd (they don’t really—either of them, but that’s another story), just as there is a gaggle of geese and a murder of crows. Isn’t the English language wonderful?

Goats are like potato chips, as are sheep: You can’t have just one. They are social creatures, so they need company, and believe me, YOU don’t want to be stuck being herd queen. If you are, the other goat(s) will follow you literally everywhere, bleating along the way. You’ll find yourself hiding in the house, since that’s usually the only sacred place they can’t go—unless one gets sick and you end up having to nurse it around the clock.

Obviously I like goats, or I wouldn’t have gotten them again, but they can be really annoying sometimes. Most breeds of goats are fairly quiet, but Nubians—my favorites, are not. Most goats make a noise like a demure little eh-eh-eh, or perhaps a short Ba-a-a! to be more emphatic. Nubians typically make a BA-AH-AH!!! sound, as loud as they possibly can, over and over. I call it goat screaming. You get the picture. I’m only grateful that of the eleven I have, only three are bleaters, and then only part of the time. I thought Romy was going to drive me out of my mind the day I decided to dry her off. We heard goat screaming all day long, until I was at the end of my rope and absolutely did NOT care anymore. I imagine my neighbors across the canyon wondered what on earth I was doing to her! Fortunately, it only lasted all that day and part of the next. Blueberry (my favorite milker) will bleat unceasingly when it’s time to be milked, or if she wants me to do something, such as let her out of the pen. If she manages to let herself out in the morning, she will come and bleat underneath my bedroom window to be sure I know she wants me. NOW. The other one is Kingfisher, our Nubian buck, who carries on as though he’s going to die, whenever the girls go where he is unable to see them.

You also cannot keep them out of anywhere, unless it’s surrounded by a solid board wall or a 10-foot woven wire deer fence. And trust me when I say that they absolutely will eat anything and everything within reach, especially if it’s something you don’t want them to, such as your prize roses. I had to barricade the entrances onto the deck, because they were up there ALL the time, looking in my windows, getting into stuff, and (need I mention it?) leaving a little trail of goat pellets behind. I tried terrorizing them (running at them while yelling and waving my arms around), but that made no impression at all. Finally I nailed up some boards, because they just bulldozed their way past everything that was movable.

“The girls” (AKA the milking does) have finally gotten to be reasonably civilized about the milking routine. There is a small room in one of our outbuildings that I use as my milking parlor, with an adjoining room that makes a handy feed room, and the building itself is right next to the goat yard. Unfortunately, I have to “run the goatlet” to get into the milking room, and I usually have an armload of milking equipment with me. The four does I milk will be waiting for me, each one jostling the others trying to be first in the door. It’s fun. They DO know who’s supposed to be first, though, so Cherry generally makes it in the door by herself, while I set down my milk things and cram the rest of them back out the door. I’m usually yelling, “Get out!” too, as I do this, which makes for a ladylike picture. Sometimes a second doe will get past me and I’ll have to throw her out. The worst one is Lady, who is NO lady—my nickname for her is The Moose. She barges right in, and once started, it’s like trying to stop a freight train. The other doe that was supposed to come in will have beat her onto the milking stand, so she’ll look at me as if to say, “What happened?” Egad.

It’s not all fun and games though. Once the milking is completed, then I have to tend to the milk itself. I finally got smart and started putting everything through the dishwasher, rather than washing it by hand. Hand washing dishes is probably my least favorite chore anyway, but what made me stop hand washing was that the faucet on the sink completely failed and started spewing water all over. There was one heck of a leak under the sink, too, so Sam ended up having to replace the whole thing. That only took a couple of weeks, since we had to order the sink. Guess how many times you use your kitchen sink in a day?

We do drink the milk, but mostly I’ve gotten to learn how to make cheese, since there’s so much of it. I want to learn to make butter also, but that hasn’t happened yet. I had to order a cream separator from the Ukraine, since it appears nobody in the U.S. makes the small ones anymore. That was right before the current crisis there, so I wondered if I would get it, but it arrived even earlier than expected. I don’t have a butter churn yet. My plan was to use my Kitchenaid mixer, but I don’t know how well that will work. Basically, you just keep beating cream to get butter, but it might be difficult to remove the buttermilk using the mixer. I will have to give it a try.

You may be wondering why we bought so many goats anyway. Well, we have all these weeds and brush that need basically to be eaten by somebody. Goats do a far more efficient job than burning or poisoning the stuff, though you have to be careful. Some of what’s out there is toxic, so you have to remove that yourself. Sam had to pull up and burn a ton of spurge, since the horses couldn’t eat it either. Goats can convert a great deal of otherwise noxious plant material into something useful, such as milk and cheese. And I’m glad! It’s far better to have a nice blob of fresh Chevre and some crackers to snack on than all those teasels or Scotch thistle. And the goats love what they do!