How to make cheese

Yes, the day has finally arrived for the post about making goat cheese. I laid it out in a few logical steps with visual aids. If anything seems confusing, or you want a more in depth explanation of a certain part, leave a comment and I will respond.

We make two types of cheese at the farm:


Two types of cheese from Renee Orenstein on Vimeo.

Steps to make fresh cheese:

1. The milk is transported down to the fromagerie (the cheese building) and distributed into plastic bins with ferment powder and rennet.


What goes into the milk from Renee Orenstein on Vimeo.


Transferring the milk to the fromagerie from Renee Orenstein on Vimeo.

2. The milk has to sit for about a day so it has time to ferment and become cheese. The consistency becomes similar to fresh yogurt.

3. On day two, the water is drained from the containers as best as possible. Then we scoop the cheese into the molds with metal ladles. Depending on the orders for the day, we either make 3/4-liter, 1-liter, or 1.5-liter molds of cheese. Some of the cheese has olive tapenade or pesto in the middle.

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4. The water in the cheese drains through small holes in the plastic molds. After a few hours, it's time to flip the cheese. We turn the cheese upside down and place it back into the mold to allow more of the water to drain.

(fresh cheese with pesto and olive before flipping)

5. The next step is salting the cheese. Sprinkling some salt on top soaks up even more of the water.

6. The next day, we take the cheese out of the molds and place them on drying racks. Et voila! Fresh cheese.

Steps to make tome cheese: (sorry no videos for this one...)

1. The milk is transferred to the tome, a large metal basin (shown in video above), and is heated with a gas flame while stirring occasionally.

2. After reaching 39 degree Celsius, we scoop the cheese into a strainer and transfer it to a plastic mold lined with a cheese cloth. One day's worth of milk makes 6 molds of this cheese. It isn't as economical as making the fresh cheese, but some people prefer the taste and texture.

3. We then press the cheese into the mold using our hands to get the air bubbles out, cover it with a corner of the cheese cloth, and stack it on top of the other tome cheeses.
4. A few hours later, the cheese is flipped and placed back in the mold upside down, still in the cloth.

More about goats.

Here are some entertaining tidbits about life on the farm.

1. We have fleas. Enough said.

2. Today a goat got stuck in the fence. She thought she was skinny enough to get through, but her hips were too wide and she was too stupid to go back the way she came. We ended up having to saw her in half and make her into sausage. I'm kidding. We're vegetarians.

3. Tammy likes to poke the goats in the udders to get them to move.

4. On Thursday, we lost all of the milk from the morning (but it was NOT our fault). Someone hooked the hoses up wrong and instead of going into the tank, the milk went directly onto the floor of the fromagerie and down the drain. Bye bye cheese.

5. Instead of going into the barn, a goat climbed up onto the roof and we had to chase it off.

6. I have found all types of creatures in our room, which I have flung outside using the dustpan. They include: a snake, a giant beetle, a bee that was surprisingly just napping in our bathroom sink, a slug, and a snail that climbed into my shoe overnight. I have also probably killed 75 fleas.

7. The baby goats like to follow Tammy and me rather than the rest of the herd, which can pose a problem when we are bringing them to graze in the fields. There have been numerous times when we had to just bring a few of the naughty ones back to the barn for the night because they wouldn's stop following us. We give them their baby formula and don't headbutt them like the rest of the goats, so they like us way better. I'm sure if we stayed here a few more weeks, we would be awakened by the baaaah's of a baby goat in our bed.

8. Today, I swore a goat said my name.





Puppy Alert!

The man who lives next door trains collies to herd sheep, and today after work we went to watch. It was like puppy school, except there was a herd of sheep and all of the dogs were exceptionally smart. The lessons were more for the humans, and not so much for the dog. Here are some photos of the collies and some adorable puppies.

Cote D'Azur

We had the weekend off from milking so we decided to explore the area that we see from our hilltop.

Here is a brief summary:

Cannes: We were there during the film festival but there was not anything we could do reguarding it. Some of the streets were blocked off and all the hype was just about a small theater and a red carpet. The festival is really made for TV viewers. Other than that, there was one street with a lot of stores and that's pretty much it. And no, we didn't see Woody Allen...but if we did, I predict he would be recreating this scene from Sleeper:



Monaco: We paid 1 Euro for the bus ride and in 20 minutes, we were in another country! And a tiny one at that. The map below is basically the entire municipality. It's famous for the Monte Carlo Casino, the wealth, and the exquisite shape they keep the country in. We also went to the aquarium which we most likely enjoyed way too much. Check out the eel video.

Eels from Renee Orenstein on Vimeo.

Also, this is the oldest fish in the aquarium. He looks like he lost his dentures.



Nice: Even though there wasn't anything spectacular about the city, we loved it. It was calm, had a nice beach, and nice restaurants. Basically, Nice is nice. We walked around the shops and went to the Marc Chagall museum. If you aren't familiar with Chagall, you should look at his stuff. He's whimsical, historical, evocative, and plain old talented. He did a lot of biblical paintings as well as of his native country, Russia. The museum was particularly unique because Chagall helped design the layout of the museum, which is something not many artists do in their lifetime. We saw his art the way he wanted to show it. I'm posting a few of my favorites from the museum.

The creation of man


Moses recieving the Ten Commandments


Angels

How to milk goats

At the farm, we spend the majority of our time milking the goats. Once in the morning and once at night, we have to empty the udders of 70 mamas. Some have big udders and others have small ones, but either way, the milk has got to go.

We made an instructional video this morning to give you a visual aid (below). The key is to hook up the machine, drain the milk, feel the udder, make sure there is no milk left in there, and sometimes manually squeeze out what the machine doesn't get.

Sometimes, if there is milk in the udder but no milk is coming through the machine, it means there is a blockage. You have to manually squeeze out the end of the udder and a hardened piece of milk or puss will shoot out. Then the passage is cleared and the udder can be milked (it's basically like popping a giant pimple if that helps you create an image).

The more milk you get out, the more the goat will continue to produce.

Hope you enjoy the video!

How to Milk a Goat from Renee Orenstein on Vimeo.

On a farm in France...

Tammy and I are working at a goat cheese farm in France for two and a half weeks. It is literally on top of a mountain overlooking Cannes, Nice, Antibes, and the ocean. You can also see Corsica on a clear day.

Here is a rundown of our daily schedule. First we have to call the goats from their grazing pasture by yelling "li li li li li!!" and they come a-running. Of course the goats speak French so we have to coo them on by saying "allez, allez." When that doesn't work, some spankings come into play.

Next we make the formula for the baby goats and put it into a pot with a lot of little rubber nipples. They freak out and start sucking away. Two of the babies were born in April, so they are still tiny and cute. Today, one of the bigger babies jumped up on me and shmeared goat poop on my shirt...nice.

Then it's time to milk the mamas. There is a machine that we hook up to their utters, so we thankfully dont have to milk them all by hand. But the key is getting them into the area with the machines (goats aren't the brightest of animals). We let twelve in at a time through a wooden gate that lifts up and down. Sometimes more come in and we have to scare them back with a hose. We even closed the gate down on one of their necks and didn't notice for a good two minutes that she was wiggling around on the floor.

Once we successfully get a row of them inside, they start eating from little containers, which lock their necks into a gate. Then it's time for the milking. All the milk automatically goes into a big basin and is then transferred through pipes to the fromagerie (cheese making house).

Once we go through about 70 goats, we mop the floors, refil the containers for later, and head down to make cheese.

In the fromagerie, we change into white rubber boots and aprons...very sanitary. Then we take our cue from Franscois, the employee at the farm. She explains in French how many of each size cheese to make (I will go into more depth about the actual production of the cheese in another post).

Then we clean and go to lunch, which consists of mainly...you guessed it....CHEESE!!

The feeding/milking process happens again in the evening. We clean, send the goats out to graze, and have some more cheese for dinner.

So that is the gist of my life for the next few weeks. It's a good thing I like cheese.

Paris - C'est tres chic.

Although we have already departed, I need to blog about Paris. We spent 5 nights there and that definitely was not enough time. For the first time on our trip, we were truly in a European city. It was classy, fancy, expensive, and snazzy. The French know what they want, and how they want it.

We couchsurfed with a girl named Katy and her 3 flatmates. They cooked us quiche, took us out, and gave us advice. They were all really sweet and spoke English pretty well...more than I speak French, that's for sure.

We saw the sights - Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Musee D'Orsey, Notre Dame, Sacre Couer, Monmartre - and discovered the city by foot. Of course it was raining and freezing the entire time, but that didn't take away from the allure of Par-eeeee.

In France, it's all about the bread-n-spread. We saw an exhibition where French men wearing red scarves were making baguettes and pastries. Every restaurant has a cheese plate on the menu. It's great.

Things I really liked: the islands between the Seine, the French National Library (there's a jungle in the middle), the Bastille area for nightime, cheese, French, Van Gogh, Degas, Monet, Renoir, cheese.

Au revior.

Barcelona

We arrived in Barcelona on Thursday night and made our way to the hostel, which is a crazy old converted building in the old part of the city. It has 20-foot ceilings, crown molding, and a giant wooden door with an old school key. So that night we went out to get some food, and the city looked creepy as hell. Everyone was dressed in drab colored ripped clothing, with multiple piercings, dread locks, and crazy eyes. We were a little bit creeped out, but all was well the next day.

When the sun was out and we are in any other area besides Barri Gotic, the city is really welcoming. We went to visit the Parc Guell where Antonio Gaudi had built two houses. We also saw his La Sagrada Familia, Casa Batllo, and La Pedrera. The guy must have been existing on another plane to build those structures. It looked like he drew inspiration from a gingerbread house for the building in Parc Guell.

We have also been doing a lot of museum hopping. We went to the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture, the Picasso Museum, and Disseny Center for design. Today there are a few more on the docket in Parc Montjuic.

We also went to Barceloneta, which is the area by the marina that has little fish eateries along the water. It started to pour so we ducked into one and ordered some croquettas.

The first two nights, we saw two movies in the Barcelona Asian Film Festival. The first was called "The Mountain Thief" which was about this town in the Phillipines that survived on picking out cans and plastic from the garbage dump there and the hardships they go through every day. The other film was a comedy about Beijing and the modernization of the city.

Basically the city is really cool. There are little boutiques everywhere you turn and every restaurant is extremely well decorated. If you don't like chain restaurants or department stores, you would love it here. The people are young and artsy and innovative. Compared to Seville, Barcelona seems to want to be more European rather than embracing their historical Spanish roots. I guess Catalonia has always been quite independent from the rest of Spain so it makes sense.

Also, the food here has been great. There are a ton of veggies restaurants and non-veg places serve more than just meat!! Finally.

About Time for a Rhyme.

Tomorrow is our last day at the horse farm in Spain, so I thought it would be nice to put my final thoughts about the place into a lovely rhyme. Enjoy.

(best if recited with a bounce, preferably to the aroma of fresh manure)

Wakin up early.
Gotta go to the farm.
Suit up in dirty clothes.
Won´t do me no harm.

Step-two to the barn.
Horses goin crazy.
Want their morning feed:
hay, water, and grain-zies.

After they eat
they cool their jets.
Time to muck the stalls,
takes two hours at best.

Poop monsters poop monsters
how you haunt my dreams.
You poop so much
I want to scream.

Out with the yuck
and in with the fresh.
Can´t get no satisfaction
cuz tomorrow´ll be a mess.

Breathe in breathe out
brush off the hay.
Wash hands, change clothes,
stank´s here to stay.


I hope this poem expressed my love(and by love I mean hate) for this farm and shoveling horse poop.