2 July 2004 - How does milk become all of those different things?

Bright and early we met in the creamery to go over the rules. We put on white coats, wore foot covers and, best of all, put on our hair nets. Since I have always had a beard since I was four (very macho) I got to wear a beard net as well. Now this was as stylish as I have ever been. We went through the different pieces of equipment and discussed where you spend the major percentage of your time in a cheese making operation...cleaning. Everything must be kept meticulously clean to avoid contaminating the milk, whey or cheese with "bad" bacteria. The use of hot water and chlorine bleach is constant. Some of the rules of cheese making in the UK are a bit different then in the US. Back home any cheese that is not going to be aged for at least 60 days must be made from pasteurised (note the "s" instead of a "z", very European) milk. We got to choose which cheese we wanted to make and I went for Double Gloucester which I would age for a few months so I could make what is called a "raw" milk cheese. To start we had the opportunity to help make crowdie, which is a traditional Scottish cheese generally used as an ingredient and yogurt which they sell retail and to chefs. Since these are both "fresh" products they would have to be made with pasteurized milk which was run through their HTST (High Temperature, Short Time) pasteuriser. This unit brings the milk up to 161 degrees Fahrenheit by blasting it through a radiator type device with hot water on one side and holds it there for 15 seconds. In our operation we are planning to use a gentler method called "vat" pasteurization. With the vat method we slowly bring the milk to 145 degrees F and hold it for 30 minutes while continuously and gently stirring it. There are several reasons that I want to use this method which we will go over later. The crowdie is an interesting product. The curd is wrapped in cheese cloth and allowed to drain over a bucket for many hours before it is scraped off of the cloth and packaged. Yogurt is made with faith as you inoculate it with a culture and then put into a warmed incubation room to grow. They actually make it in the shipping containers and just assumed that it worked and that we had thick yogurt when we were done. I was not so confident and had to look. Oh ye of little faith. It seemed amazing to me, there was yogurt where once there had been warm milk. With the preliminaries out of the way, the basic procedures reviewed, a little practice on other products and a short discussion on Fahrenheit vs Celsius temperature scales we are ready to move on to our main project. Most of the recipes that we were using had been marked in both Fahrenheit and Celsius or Centigrade which is what is now used in most of the world except the US. We think that 32 degrees is freezing for (fresh) water and 212 degrees is boiling as we use the Fahrenheit scale always abbreviated with a capital "F". The Celsius scale ("C") is much simpler using zero as freezing and 100 degrees as boiling. Someday we'll catch up. Making a hard cheese is the main reason I am here although the other products are very interesting and I want to continue to learn about them and a myriad of other products for our creamery.

Now let's take a look at the main event, real cheese.

1 July 2004 - Say Cheese...

Arriving at West Highland Dairy to make cheese was a monumental day for me. I was a long way from the computer monitors and keyboards, chips and programs that had dominated most of my life up until now. This was something totally different. I had done quite a lot of research about cheese making prior to making this trek. I visited cheese plants in Wisconsin to witness the process, read a pile of books and had even watched movies, DVDs and TV shows about it. But when I got there I was amazed at how small and neat an operation can actually be. A place for everything and everything in its place. No giant "swimming pool size" vats. No shouting, loud music or the crashing of stainless steel shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction. No pumps screeching, milk and whey flying or clattering air compressors competing with the hiss of steam .

It was calm, the windows were open and a light breeze blew through off of the loch creating a kind of meditative atmosphere. It was the Zen of cheese making and you could sense a feeling of tranquility and calm in the air. Kathy and David make cheese to fill the orders that they received from their clients on their Internet site and maintain a small retail shop on one end of the creamery. Many cheeses, yogurt and ice cream were always on offer to locals and tourists that would stop by all day long.

There were three of us in my class. The other two were women from England that lived on farms and were considering setting up their own cheese making operations to increase the income on milk that they produced on the farm. Calling it a class might make it sound far more formal then it was as we would be making cheese along with Kathy who was also making cheese for the business. Since she has been professionally teaching cheese making at universities for many years in England and is often a guest instructor at several farmstead cheesemaking organizations from New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts it was very well organized without the structure competing with the enjoyment. You came to realize that cheesemaking is defined by very scientific rules such as the "schedule of acidification" measured by calculating the titratable acidity of the whey that we constantly checked. And yet you didn't want to lose the artistic side of the process, the "feel" of the cheese or the "smell" or "look" that you can only learn through experience with the guidance of an actual practicing cheesemaker that is pointing the way. We each had our choice of what we wanted to make as our main project and we got to help with yogurt and crowdie which is a local soft cheese. I decided to try Double Gloucester as I would want to make a variety of hard pressed English type cheeses in our creamery should I decide to continue this project.

Now to make some cheese.

28 June 2004 - Tha mi a falbh dhan Ghaidhealthchd...

How's your Gaelic. I thought before I decide to try to make cheese commercially on my own, I might be well advised to actually make cheese, commercially, with an instructor, in a commercial environment. Since I didn't intend to build a "plant" per se, but rather have a small "creamery" and make cheese on a very small scale using artisan techniques, I would need to find that kind of environment to see if I would like this endeavor. As I said, I assumed I would have many choices here in Wisconsin, the land of cheese, but no. In fact there was nowhere in the state or any neighboring state or in the country for that matter that was offering cheese making classes. Enter the internet. A search on "cheese making classes" showed a few in house classes available and an occasional class on making Brie at home, which I later took, but only one on cow's milk cheese in a very small commercial environment at West Highland Dairy. This class was taught by Kathy Biss, the author of "Practical Cheese Making", a book I had purchased when first considering this adventure so I was familiar with the name. It’s relatively easy to get to their place. You first take a car to the bus to take you to the plane, and then jump on another plane, then take a bus to a train, to another train, to another train, to another train, and then an easy 7 mile walk and you're there, West Highland Dairy, Achmore, near Kyle of Lochalsh, Scotland, UK. Kathy and David used to milk sheep for their cheese making before the foot & mouth epidemic a few years back. Now they make cow's milk cheeses from milk they buy from a farm on the road to Inverness. Their customers are local hotels and cheese shops and an occasional farmers market. They make a plethora (I love that word) of products including hard pressed cheeses and crowdie which is a local soft cheese usually used as an ingredient. Yogurt and ice cream are also made as well as my personal favorite Cranachan a traditional Scottish dessert made with oatmeal, crowdie or heavy cream, honey and local scotch whisky or Drambuie which is made on the Isle of Skye, a few miles to the west. Making a lot of products on a small scale and delivering them, directly to the customer is exactly what I was looking for.

Hopefully the next few days learning to make cheese would be inspiring, educational and, most importantly, fun.

June 2004 In the beginning there were Artisans

This is the beginning of Highfield Farm Creamery's blog site. We started this journey in June of 2004 with the thought that hand making real artisan cheese might be interesting. Having spent my entire working life reviving the hardware and software of computers all over the world I may have been a bit naive when concocting this plan. But sometimes it takes a new perspective to make a different kind of product. Living in Wisconsin, the land of cheese, one would think that learning to make cheese would be easy. I assumed I could just go down the street to cheese school. But no. Looking on the Internet I found the only place that offered cheese making classes in a commercial setting, West Highland Dairy, was just a bit further then down the street. While I was foolishly assuming things I also assumed that setting up a small creamery would be a relatively easy task. You know the old saying about assuming, at least I hope you do 'cause I don't remember it.

So there you are, we're off on this adventure which is still plodding along toward the goal of hand making cheese that is actually artisan. To my mind that means we would start with milk that comes from cows grazing on grass not fermented corn or a peculiar mixture of "stuff" designed to produce the maximum amount of milk at the lowest cost. The cows would not be shot up with drugs, left in stantions all day or crowded into a little building with no exercise except to walk three paces to eat that special food. I see a very small number of cows actually walking out in the sunshine, breathing fresh air and doing what cows do. The grass they're eating is not pelted with pesticides, herbicides or artifical fertilizers. Its just grass. The cheesemaking process is done by hand by real people and automation is kept to the legal minimum. We don't do marketing or advertising we inform and educate our customers who are also our friends. All the buzz words have been removed. I know it sounds pretty outlandish and I have had plenty of "experienced " people and agencies that have told me it can't be done.

Let's see if they're right.