Divas of dairy

I used to consider this a highly impractical gift but recently I’ve gotten to talk with some local farmstead cheesemakers who would probably welcome such a present: eight farmhands practiced in the rhythm of milking by hand, with the firm yet gentle touch that renders even stubborn animals cooperative for at least a few minutes.

It takes a special kind of farmer to commit to dairying as opposed to say, wheat farming. Dairy animals need milked every 12 hours, nutritious meals, fresh air and regular care and attention, day in and day out, no exceptions. Any woman who has raised a child can see the parallels between mothering and dairy farming, and any nursing mother who has been separated from her baby at feeding time can sympathize with the need for a regular milking schedule.

Through the ages in many cultures including our own, farm women were responsible generally for milking, making butter and cheese, and preserving food, which they did alongside money-making enterprises such as raising chickens that were compatible with taking care of young children. This is why “milk maid” sounds normal to our ears and “milk master” completely weird.

The female dairying tradition was almost entirely abandoned as cheesemaking and food production become more mechanized, industrial, and male-dominated. No one complained; women who until then had no other choices were glad to escape the drudgery of endless farm work. But in the last 20 years, many women have embraced dairying again, doing business and at the same time reviving an almost lost way of life.

Clare Paris, with her family’s help, raises sheep and goats at Larkhaven Farm, six miles northwest of Tonasket, Wash. She’s not against cows, she says, but found in the beginning that “the infrastructure for goats and sheep was easier, especially when you’re a hard-scrabble farm and building everything with discarded pallets.” Smaller animals are also, in general, easier for women to handle than cows.

Larkhaven Farmstead Cheeses produces cheeses from both goat and sheep milk in their Grade-A dairy. All their milk goes into cheese, except a little sheep’s milk which Paris loves in her coffee as it is a rich, high-fat milk.

“We have Whitestone Feta, which is made from both sheep and goat milk. It is a raw-milk, aged feta with a more complicated flavor than fresh fetas. We also make Manchego Curado, a Spanish-style hard sheep cheese, and Cayuse Mountain Goat and Cayuse Pepper Goat, both hard, aged goat cheeses,” Paris explains. “Next summer we’ll also have a mold-ripened, semisoft, Corsican-style basket tomme called Rosa Rugosa.”

Paris didn’t grow up as a farmgirl but made the move more than 15 years ago, when her children were small, to a house among the ponderosa pines in the Okanagan valley.

“Having children was very radicalizing for me. And I was more and more motivated to improve their food sources as I read about problems in our mainstream, centralized food system,” Paris said. “I began trying to grow and or make all our food, and this became a very satisfying way to live. There is something so beautiful about sitting down to a table covered with good things to eat that were all produced at home or by dear friends.”

Dairy products were part of Paris’ goal for home food production so with the help of some neighbors she acquired some Saanen goats that she raised into “fine milkers.” Then, she began making all her own yogurt and cheese. She was largely self-taught but eventually took a cheesemaking course from Washington State University. She also learned from cheesemaker Sally Jackson in Oroville, Wash., and Vermont consultant Peter Dixon. Now she shares her experience with others by teaching occasional workshops.

“Over the years, as I continued to make cheese for the family and give it as gifts, people would say to me, ‘Oh! You make cheese? Do you sell it?’ ” Paris recalls. Eventually, her family decided to make the considerable investment into the equipment and facilities necessary for a Grade-A dairy and licensed cheese kitchen.

“You can’t even legally test your market until you’ve done that. We had to go on faith that, since our friends and family liked our cheese, maybe we had something worth investing in,” Paris said.

Larkhaven cheeses are sold direct from the farm, and also to restaurants and food co-ops in Seattle, Spokane, Vancouver, Wash., and Portland. Paris would love to have buying clubs form in various regions so that individuals can buy in bulk at wholesale prices.

“I’m sort of a zealot about my cheese,” Paris said. “Selling is obviously the goal, and I love to get people to take a taste because once they taste they generally buy. But for me, it’s more like converting someone to a whole new range of possibilities.”

Paris had plenty of skills to fall back on, if the cheese hadn’t worked out, but happily, it did. Since beginning commercial production a couple years ago, their production is increasing every year and they expect to reach full capacity by 2010.

“I’ve been, and enjoyed being, a lot of things, such as a welder, an insurance agent and a newspaper reporter,” she said. “But raising food and employing different traditional and modern methods of preserving and preparing and serving foods have felt like the most real and most connected thing in my life. Things like pulling the deep mulch off of fresh carrots in the middle of winter, bringing in the first egg of spring, or taking off the pot lid to check the cheese curd after renneting never lose their thrill for me. I especially have felt a connection to women through the ages while milking goats and sheep, like part of a vast continuum.

“I hope that doesn’t sound lofty. I don’t feel lofty, just earnest.”

Susanne Wimberley and her brother, Mike, are just getting started in the dairy business, launching Wheyward Goat Cheese Co. this spring at HooDoo Valley Farm near Priest River, Idaho, a 20-acre property recently purchased by their parents. They plan to start out small, with five to 10 goats, and slowly grow over the next few years.

Wimberley, like Paris, didn’t start out on a farm, but came to the rural life as a young adult.

“After I graduated from college I got a job on an organic educational farm and nature center owned by the National Audubon Society,” Wimberley recalled. “They had all different kinds of farm animals to teach the kids, and my favorite thing to do at the farm was milk the goats. In the spring, when the twin kids were born, I was hooked on goats for life.”

Wimberley moved on to be an apprentice with Diane Green at Greentree Naturals in Sandpoint, “so I would know how to grow my own food.” Green helped Wimberley get an apprenticeship with cheesemakers Lora Lea and Rick Misterley of Quillisascut Cheese Co. in Rice, Wash., and Lora Lea became Wimberley’s mentor.

“The support that these farmers have given to me and the knowledge that they have shared with me has been priceless,” Wimberley said. Wimberley has also taken the WSU cheesemaking course. She hopes to make a raw-milk feta, raw-milk hard cheese and raw-milk mold-ripened cheese.

“I may also buy a pasteurizer so that I can sell fresh goat cheese as well,” Wimberley said. Currently, raw milk (unpasteurized) cheeses must be aged 60 days to be legal for sale in the United States.

With all the other career choices available to a young woman, why become a farmer, and why work with goats?

“Lots of people in my generation want to farm. I could talk about the ‘why’ of it forever,” Wimberley said. “I love living in the country, the smell of the farm, the personalities of the goats, the physical labor, working outdoors, milking by hand and the magic of turning milk into cheese. There is always enough going on, that you never know what each new day will bring.”

Making cheese by hand

Renee-Jo Colin, a cheesemaker in the Auvergne region of France, milks about 20 goats by hand twice a day from February through October. She filters the fresh, warm, unpasteurized milk into a sterile bucket and adds an enzyme (rennet is one common cheesemaking enzyme), places the bucket in a room kept at a steady warmish temperature, and lets it sit for 12 hours.

The milk firms up, and starts to separate into a large, soft curd and clear liquid whey. Colin smells it carefully to detect whether or not it’s a good batch, then gently ladles the curd, trying not to break it up too much, into little cylinder-shaped molds full of holes, like small colanders. The whey continues draining out of the cheese and will be enjoyed by the family pig later. At this point the cheese is in a room that is cool and airy but not cold, and it will stay here until it’s sold at the local market or to customers who come to the farm.

After another 12 hours, Colin flips the cheese in each mold over, salts it lightly, and lets it sit another 12 hours in the mold, after which she puts the disc of fresh goat’s cheese on a rack and salts the other side.

Each cheese disc is turned every single day, no matter how long it ages. Colin sells her cheese at all stages: fresh, a few days old, weeks old, months old. It just gets harder and more piquant the longer it ages.

All cheesemaking, no matter in which country it’s made or on what scale, is basically variations on this basic process, and it’s the variations that result in so many lovely cheeses to choose from.

Enjoying handmade cheeses

Both Clare Paris and Lora Lea Misterly, who have been making cheese for many years, came up with the same answer to my question about recipes in which they use their cheese.

To paraphrase: “Recipes? What recipes? We just eat it!”

Of course their cheeses can replace similar store-bought cheeses in many recipes, and the dish will probably be the better for it. Paris uses her feta on pizza and in casseroles and to replace the ricotta in her spinach lasagna recipe, and her manchego in place of cheddar.

But simply eating it is the nicest way to enjoy hand-made cheeses. They are, as Misterly explains, “a reflection of this landscape. Farmstead cheese should have some rustic edges that build character and flavor, that should tell your senses a story about this place, this time, the producer.”

With plain bread or crackers and a piece of fruit it’s the perfect lunch or picnic; in France, the cheese platter is passed around after dinner with more bread as a kind of dessert. I discovered that eating very fresh goat cheese after dinner is as satisfying as ice cream, especially when drizzled with a little honey, jam, or raspberry sauce.

“Cheese and a good hearth-style bread is easy and delicious,” Misterly says. “Why mess it up with cooking? In the summer, top it off with a slice of warm-from-the-garden tomato. Or how about a ploughman’s lunch of crusty bread, hearty cheese, crunchy lacto-fermented dill pickles, and a pint of stout? Now I am hungry!”