Cheese test!

Today I cut open the first cheese I made on January 15:

It is very mild yet, sort of... Gouda-ish. Very yummy. 

I've sealed it back up and will let it age a few more weeks.

There is a lot of cheese stacking up... Yay!

Yes, I am ironing my cheese

Barter

Today I went on a road trip to Rocky Mountain house, and this is wht I came home with!

I left behind a cooler full of beef, which we had in surplus … the lady who posted this milking machine said it was in her barn when she moved in, and the barn needs to come down (oh, yes, it most definitely does) but the equipment ought to be put to good use if someone could get it cleaned up.

I went for the milker – which is a Surge bucket milker (top picture), complete with the claw, the pulsator, surcingle, and (most importantly) the vacuum pump (bottom left). I had been looking into setting one up – a friend had a bucket I could have, but I needed to buy a pump and the shells and claw (and possibly the pulsator), which was going to be about $300, near as I could figure. So I started looking for a full-meal-deal kind of thing, and found this!

The head catches (bottom right) were in the barn and the lady said if I could use them please take them … so we got them unhooked and here they are! A can of Tremclad will deal with the rust and then I’ll install one of them in Sasha’s milking stanchion. They work by trapping the cow by the neck, bascially: it opens (the one on the right is open) and the cow puts her head through to get to the food you’ve set on the other side, then you latch it shut and she can’t back out because her head is wider than her neck – but the opening is plenty wide enough to keep her head through comfortably.

Sasha is pretty good without the catch, but it’s going to be very useful for training milk cows. It’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to buy, but having it is sure nice!

The milker cleaned up very nicely … I need to get air and milk hoses, and new insertions for the teat cups but that should be about it. The vacuum pump is really dirty (and too heavy for me to lift out of the car by myself, so I need to wait for The Boy to get home so we can unload it) and needs a bit of work and probably a new belt, but the lady said it had worked the last time she powered it up so we shall see.

I’m off to do some research!

The First Cheese: Caerphilly

I decided that one of the cheeses was ready for eating. It’s a Caerphilly, which is meant to be eaten fairly young, so I trimmed the rind and took a bite.

YUM!

It’s buttery and tangy all at the same time.

My son tasted it and said, “Yeah, that actually resembles cheese.”

I’m very pleased!

Of course I’m completely out of rennet, so I haven’t been able to make cheese for some time now. I kept waiting for the package to arrive in the mail … then finally realized it hadn’t come because I hadn’t actually *ordered* it, I’d just *thought about* ordering it.

So I’ve got rennet (and a few other cheese making goodies) on the way to me in the mail, and tomorrow I go on a bit of a road trip for another dairy making adventure … which I’ll tell ya about when I get back!

Ready

Ready to make butter tomorrow!

I need a bigger milk can.

4.25 litres. 

My milk can holds 2. 

Clearly I was not sufficiently optimistic!

Another day ...

... another three litres of milk.

And a litre of cream. (that's about 2-3 days worth of cream)

For anyone tracking Dexter milk production stats: we are 3 weeks into lactation, share milking with no separation of cow and calf as yet. Sasha gets about 4 lbs of mixed alfalfa cubes/pellets/beet pulp in the bowl as bribe/supplement during milking - no grain (ever), and obviously all the grass she can eat. I reliably get 3-4 litres of milk each day still: I had two marginally lower days, it was raining and yukky and I milked a little earlier than I normally do, which may have been the explanation, but even a lower day was a minimum 2 litres. The calf has realized he can nurse off all four quarters (though he usually leaves the left front, for which I do not blame him, that one is so huge I can't get my hand all the way around until she's nearly milked right out), so I expect I'll be separating them at least for a few hours in the afternoon in a week or so. I prefer to milk in the early evening, as I am most emphatically NOT a morning person, so separating them overnight is not on my list of things to do. 

Half a pound of butter and a cheese cave

Today I made just a half pound block of butter – I wanted to use up the cream I had, even though it wasn’t going to make a full block.

It is so rich and delicious, I just love it. I had to toast a waffle just so I could use the leftover butter from the spatula!

The other awesome dairy news today is that we now have a cheese cave! My friends had a little bar fridge taking up space in the garage, and graciously delivered it here today. With the addition of the external thermostat device (which we used to use on our chest freezer fridge), there is now a thermostatically controlled cabinet in which to age cheese at about 12 C and 80-95% humidity. There’s a little thermometer/hygrometer sitting inside so I can monitor the temperature and humidity, and four jelly jars full of water in the door seem to be keeping the humidity where it needs to be. I’ll have to watch over the next few days and see what happens, but this is very exciting! Cheese needs time to age and develop good flavour, but it needs warmer temperatures and higher humidity than a regular fridge provides, and much cooler than the ambient temperature anywhere in our house, so this is just perfect.

The latest cheese is soaking in brine right now, almost time to pull it out and let it dry off then into the cave it goes! I just opened the cave door to check things and oh, my, the smell is heavenly! It is all buttery cheesey goodness in there. Yum.

Two months then we can have our first cheese tasting. July 23, mark it on the calendar!

Dairy.

We have milk.

Oh, do we have milk.

Sasha is giving me about 4 litres a day now – at two weeks into her lactation. Zoinks! And the calf is definitely getting all he wants … he doesn’t even touch two of the quarters. The calf measuring tape is on the way in the mail, when it gets here I’ll start tracking his growth and see how he is doing. There’s a way to figure out approximately how much milk he is getting based on his growth rates, so that’ll give a clue about Sasha’s overall production. Still, four litres per day from a Dexter cow on share milking? That’s impressive.

Sasha is a little irritable in the milking stanchion – she’s kicking, which is frustrating (and potentially risky – though she is in the stall and can’t give me a good solid boot with the hoof, she can give me a nasty swipe that will leave bruises). I’m going to have to pick up hobbles for her, I think – I used to tie her back legs, but she was even more antsy with the ropes … now I tie one foot (the near one, so she can’t swipe me with it) and that usually works, but I can tell the rope bugs her there, too. Hopefully a set of proper soft hobbles will keep her still without bugging her. I saw them at the feed store, I’ll pick them up next time I’m in.

I found a really great jar at Bed, Bath and Beyond for milk in the fridge: it holds 2 gallons (8 litres) and has a tap on the bottom so I can draw off the milk. This leaves the cream up at the top, so the milk that comes out doesn’t have that layer of cream. I don’t mind it, but some of the other people in this house are more used to 1% milk and don’t like the creamy stuff so much. The other big advantage is simplicity: I don’t have to carefully skim from jars now with a spoon and a gravy baster – just drain off the milk, then pour the cream into another jar and I’m done. I have two litres of cream sitting out on the counter to clabber overnight for butter making tomorrow.

I found a Dazey butter churn on Kijiji for $20 … it was a little weary and needs the wooden paddle rebuilt, but for the price, why not? I cleaned it up with the Dremel and a whappity brush thing, so the rust is all gone. Now to ponder the paddle part. Tomorrow’s milk will be made the old shake-it-in-a-jar way!

So that’s our dairy animal update for today … I think I’ll go have a glass of milk!

Butter

The cream was overflowing the fridge, so I decided it was time to make butter.

I tried using the blender, as I’d read about online, but the butter didn’t form up as well as with the shaker jar and the noise was irritating, so I went back to the old strategy of just shaking the cream. I use one of The Reluctant Farmer’s protein shake jars – I take out the little spiral siphon thing that comes with it and instead drop in a small plastic ball from the toy room (well washed, believe me) because the butter sticks to all the little arms of the shaker’s insert and is too hard to get off, whereas I can just scrape the surface of the plastic ball with the spatula. Yes, I know you can get paddle churns, and I’d love one, but they are pretty expensive and the shaker jar was free.

I left the cream on the counter overnight to sour a smidgen, as the butter has a richer taste with slightly aged cream. Then, in batches, I shook it in the jar and poured off the buttermilk, scraped the butter into a bowl that went into the fridge while I did the next batch, and repeated. When I had all the cream made into butter, I added ice cubes to the bowl and smushed the butter back and forth with the spatula, working the buttermilk out, rinsing with water until it was clear. Sprinkled the whole thing with salt, worked it a bit more, then packed the butter into my grandfather’s antique butter press.

Clearly I didn’t pack it quite tight enough, as there’s a bit of a hole on the finished block, but this is really, really cool. I’ve never made enough butter before to fill the press – that’s nearly a pound of butter right there! From about a week’s worth of cream. Oh yes, I am a happy person. I will be making a lot of butter over the next few months I think! Butter stores well in the freezer, so it’s a good way to preserve the bounty of Sasha’s peak lactation.

The leftover buttermilk is going into the next batch of cheese – I am experimenting with that, as Carla Emery says you can use the buttermilk in cheesemaking, so hey, it’s worth a try! I’m also culturing with yogourt this time, just to see what happens … almost time to go add the rennet. Hopefully I do a better job cooking the curds on this cheese, my last one was a bit too moist when I was finished, I think.

Off to stir the milk!

Post script: My dad and my aunt have clarified the history of that butter mold. My great grandfather ran a creamery in Harrow, Ontario ... It burned down at one point but the churns and molds were at the house, not the creamery and so were spared. I found a record of the creamery in the archives ... from 1913. 

That makes this piece of butter making equipment a century old. 

I am carrying on a family tradition. How cool is that, eh?