High Cheese Season 2020 (Making Do)

            A middle stage in the making of cheddar 

In last week’s post on preserving, I forgot to include cheese. Cheese is kind of the whole point of this farm - a desire to milk goats and learn how to make cheese was one of the driving forces in moving up here in the first place. After ten or so years, I have developed three or four cheese recipes that serve me well. As in many endeavors, it is pretty easy to achieve a basic level of competence, and then quite difficult to move on to a level of expertise that allows for consistent, high quality results every time. 

Being who I am, I have more or less decided that I’m happy with my level. I very seldom have an abject failure - all the cheese I make tastes good and is usable for one application or another. But I often have to decide what that application is AFTER I see how the cheese turns out. 

Today I am making chevre and cheddar. Chevre is easy - you just culture the fresh milk and wait 24 hours, then drain it through a clean pillowcase and salt it to taste. Once in a while, especially in very warm weather, the chevre will develop some off, goaty flavors that nobody is fond of. When that happens, I incorporate the cheese into a highly flavored recipe where the goaty flavors will be outcompeted,  like spicy eggplant Parmesan. 

Cheddar is more difficult. It requires several steps, and my recipes include instructions that are patently impossible to follow in a home kitchen, such as “hold the milk at exactly 99 degrees for four hours.” Much of the “cheddar” I’ve made is actually just “plain semi-hard cheese.” The most common defect is that it stays crumbly instead of melding into a single, smooth textured mass. But hey, goat cheese crumbles are a delicious addition to many dishes. Luckily, my Mexican husband is totally used to a dish of cheese crumbles on the table as a condiment, with a spoon, for sprinkling onto everything from refried beans to scrambled eggs to green salad. 

Making do with what you have is a philosophy, one that I’m fond of. I’m not going to waste any time lamenting over a “failure” to produce perfect cheddar when what I’ve actually produced is a pretty delicious piece of cheese. Instead, I’m going to incorporate that cheese into the larger, creative task of taking stock of what I have on hand and weaving disparate ingredients into something new and satisfying. 

This morning, I opened a vacuum sealed package of cheese from early this spring, expecting to find a nice, mild, melting cheddar. Instead it was a sharp flavored crumbly cheese. But it still worked well to make squash blossom goat cheese quesadillas for breakfast. I got no complaints.