D.J. making cheese
(Brigette Adams Photo)
It’s been a long and educational week. On Monday, we bought our first load of cow milk, 532 gallons, from a local dairy. Then the fun began. Nothing ever works quite like it looks on paper!
Equipment failures and unanticipated challenges started before I’d even gotten the milk home. Four batches and over 400 pounds of cheese later, we now have a substantial list of equipment repairs, replacements, and reconfigurations that need to take place before we buy our next load of milk. We’re taking a week off from making cheese to work on the plant.
The good news is, we made Feta, Cheddar, Tome, and a batch of fresh cow cheese with herbs. The first three need to age at least 60 days– the Cheddar needs six months. The fresh cheese is made from pasteurized milk and will be for sale as soon as we can get it packaged up.
At the end of a 14-hour day of making cheese, it’s hard to imagine I really want to do this for a living. But we’re learning, and the next batch should go much more smoothly once we’ve made a few modifications.
[...] the vat for a batch of Jack, which we completed in five hours– a great improvement over the 14-hour batch we did a couple of weeks ago! The rest of the milk went into the storage tank. We’ll make [...]
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