CHEESE: Emmental

Cheese #4 - right after Halloumi, Mozzarella, and Parmesan. I made some emmental, and it's aging in the basement.

This is one of those heat loving cheeses with some air bubbles thrown in. That means in addition to the thermophilic culture that I used for parmesan, I also used another bacteria to live through the process and eventually make the telltale swiss holes. Still not sure if it worked, but in six months we should have a pretty good idea.

The main issue with this cheese (and any aged cheeses) is the aging. Temperature and humidity have to be pretty spot on in order for the good microbes to grow and the bad ones to stay in the air. Still not sure if I've done that, but we'll see.

Cheese Farm

Ah this was fun.

I had always wanted to visit an Irish Cheese Farm, so I got some names from the local Cheesemonger in Kinsale, sent out a few emails, and setup a time to visit Fermoy Farms in . . . Fermoy, a small town about an hour north of Kinsale.

Fermoy is run by Frank and Gudrun Shinnick. Frank's family has farmed the land for generations, but now they have mostly cows that they milk for their raw cheeses - apparently there is no money in sheep (probably not in cheese either).

Tons of information, I was there for pretty much the whole day - so I basically saw how they made cheese from beginning to end. They actually do a Swiss type cheese - so that's a pressed, cooked cheese similar to Gruyeres. And since the milk is raw, they have to be super careful on hygiene and controls.

I could go on and on about raw milk, which I'm sure freaks some people out that someone who actually risks eating it. But I have this theory that raw milk products - cheese or otherwise - are safer than pasturized products. The reason is that raw milk producers KNOW they have to be careful, and if they screw up, it's pretty obvious that something is wrong. Whereas with pasturization you get this attitude that I've seen at other farms or factories that says, "Eh, we pasturized, so we don't have to worry about keeping everything clean."

I'll give you an example . . . to cut down on the risk of infection, Fermoy will actually wash the cows before milking so that any dirt or crap (literally) doesn't get into the milk. It takes an extra 10-15 minutes to their twice daily milking routine each time, but it shows up when the milk is tested by the milk truck that comes to pick up the milk every other day. I think they were allowed on one particular test for bacteria 100,000 parts per some unit of measure with the average from most milk producers being 40K-60K - Fermoy consistently scores 100.

You figure pasturization ain't gonna kill everything anyway (you would have to boil the milk under pressure for an extended period of time to do that) - so I'd rather start at 100, than the alternative of 50,000 and hope to get the number down to 10,000.

Anyway, like I said, tons of information - the storage of the cheese itself was cool. We tried tons of cheeses from the area and talked non-stop about all things cheese - including the US market and how it has changed.

Cheese, cheese, and more cheese

I love the hosting guests thing - especially when I get french cheese.

I'm not complaining - the Irish cheeses are really nice, but a little Pont l'Eveque or Mont D'Or is hard to compete with.

Guy and Lyndon brought this Pont l'Eveque along with a REALLY nasty Epoisse that blew threw the triple plastic wrapping of its container to just get everyone on that flight to Dublin all in a tissy.

Wow, it's still sitting in my refrigerator in a double Tupperware container, and we still handle the thing with care. I think when we leave, they are going to have to buy a new refrigerator - it's that bad.

It's like Buh-dah

Actually it's just butter - had a Martha Stewart / Home on the Farm moment and made butter this weekend. Honestly, not sure what Frontier women did before the heavy duty KitchenAid mixer.

Like most things food related, making butter is about as simple as feeding Winston and Obie in the morning. I'll post the recipe later, but basically you take heavy whipping cream, and beat the crap out of it. You don't really need to watch it, but if you do . . . over the passing 15 minutes, you'll see it change from cream to whipped cream to curdled cream to the final mixture of half butter and half buttermilk.

You don't need to even time it, because when it's done, it makes this huge ka-chunka ka-chunka sound that can scare dogs and be heard from across a house. After draining out the buttermilk in a sieve, I did go ahead and knead with a dough hook and a little water to make it easier to work with and remove the excess buttermilk - but that was about it. You can salt it for more taste and preservation, but I'm trying the baseline right now.

Since the source of the cream was my local grocery store, I think the next time I do it, I'm going to go upscale and get it straight from a local cow. With 6 cups of cream, I ended up with about 3 cups of buttermilk and 3 cups of butter. I'll try a couple of recipes with it, but last night's buttermilk biscuits were pretty good.

There is hope

While reading The Cheese Plate by Max McCalman the other day (Patrick had seen a recommendation for it), I saw this picture on Chapter 3 (or maybe Chapter 4).

After assuming (like most of the cheeses in the book so far) this was a French goat cheese, you can imagine my surprise when the caption told me that it was actually an extremely good artisan American cheese. In fact, it's made in Indiana at a goat farm where I had bought a different cheese just five days earlier at the city market (a nice little goat cheese wrapped in chesnut leaves). Check them out.

Encouraged that maybe the cheese scene in the US wasn't as bad as I first thought, I checked out the Internet with renewed vigor. Seems like there is a little cheese revolution going on in this country with some really excellent examples. The shipping was killer, but stay tuned next week to see the latest order of my new children.