Cheesy Success!

It;s just about suppertime, so I have no time at the moment for a detailed explanation, but I have FINALLY created a reasonable facsimile of Quesillo, also known as Queso Oaxaqueno, a fresh mild string cheese which is wound into balls and used in quesadillas and as a topping for just about anything. Also it is my husband's favorite unavailable food from home, and I have been trying to make it for years now without notable success.

Consistency is the demon that torments all cheesemakers, of course, and one batch of decent quesillo does not guarantee success in future attempts. But nonetheless, I'm thrilled that I've done it once.

Serious Disappointment

Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2010 15:49:02 -0700
Subject: Good Food Awards Entry Notification


Dear Aimee,

Many thanks for your interest in participating in the Good Food Awards. In its inaugural year, the Good Food Awards will honor the people behind tasty, authentic, and responsibly produced foods. We regret to inform you that due to a miscommunication with our cheese committee chairs, the acceptance letter that you received about your eligibility for the Oct. 10 blind tasting was sent to you in error. Upon further review of your application, the committee has decided that your cheese will not be eligible for this year's competition. Despite your commendable production methods, we are not accepting entries from homestead operations that are not "sale ready".

Please accept our very sincere apologies for the mix-up. We are aware that there are many challenges to overcome in creating a commercially viable product that also meets the sustainability criteria set forth by the Good Food Awards. Nevertheless, we applaud your efforts, wish you the best of luck as you grow and overcome these challenges, and hope that you consider entering next year's competition.

If you have already paid the $10 transaction fee per submission, then we will refund the full amount to your paypal account. You will receive a confirmation email from paypal followed by a full reimbursement within a coupe of days. If you paid for your submissions with a check, we will return your voided check to you shortly.

Thank you again for your submission. Please contact us at info@goodfoodawards.org or call the office at (415) xxx-xxxx if you have any questions or concerns.

With great appreciation,

All of us at the Good Food Awards

My Reply:

Dear Xxxxx -

What a shame - I've already told all my friends.

I read your site carefully and did not see any requirement that entrants be commercial operations - you might want to rectify that in the future. Of course I understand that my product does not fit your criteria and cannot be included. Since I am not trying to create a legal business, simply to follow my personal passion, I doubt I will ever be eligible for inclusion. More's the pity - I doubt many of your panelists ever get the chance to taste a product such as mine. I am sure your cheese panel could have a lively debate on the subject of the law as it pertains to raw milk cheeses.

Should you ever decide to allow the inclusion of non-commercial products, please let me know. I would be delighted to provide samples of my "Smokin' Goat Chilpotle Cheddar" or my "Chevre Chevrere" for consideration any old time at all. There's no doubt in my mind that my cheese would stand on its own merits.

I hope your inaugural event is a great success. Your goal is laudable and I wish you all the best in advancing it. Enjoy yourselves as you taste the best that America's small producers have to offer.

Sincerely,

Aimee Day

Great, Now I'm Terrified

On a total whim, I entered one of my cheeses (the seedy dill and caraway) into the national Good Food Awards contest (Good Food Awards). This is a "first annual" event - just like my swap meet, ha ha ha - meant to honor producers of local, artisanal food in several categories, which include cheese, beer, pickles, preserves, and charcuterie.

Obviously, most if not all of the entrants are businesses. I knew that - after all, the big prize is not money or an all-expenses-paid vacation but the "Good Food Seal of Approval" to slap on your product. I was totally honest in my application: I said I am NOT a business, NOT a licensed dairy, and NOT allowed to sell my product at all. I said I make something under 100 pounds of cheese a year for home consumption. I said that my cheese was made from raw goat's milk, aged considerably less than 60 days, and most likely I would be breaking several state laws just by mailing it in. I said they taste at their own (legal) risk.

Frankly, I was totally shocked and surprised to hear that I was chosen as one of 400 entrants to submit their product for a blind taste test. I am to mail my cheese to California, sufficiently wrapped and packaged, to arrive by October 7th at the latest. This is a very very big deal - the event has been written up in the New York Times, the Village Voice, the San Fransisco Chronicle, etc etc. Among the tasters are Alice Waters and Ruth Reichl (who just happens to be my food hero, being the person who brought a soul and a social conscience to Gourmet Magazine.).

Here's the problem - they want five pounds of cheese. Since I never expected to actually send in any cheese, we ate most of the seedy cheese (damn, it's really really good). There's barely any left. I am making more tonight, but it will be

1) extremely green, and

2) only about 2 pounds.

The fresh cheese is good - some people prefer it quite fresh, but it isn't really representative of the product, which I think is best at about two months old (well, ok, yes - that's as old as it's ever gotten, because we eat it that fast. So I guess in fact, my judgement is that it gets better and better as it ages.). Fresh, the cheese is slightly sour and has a bouncy, squeaky feeling between the teeth. It's good, but it's not what I decided to submit.

The other problem is more difficult. I can send in immature cheese but I can't send in five pounds of it if I only have two. I'm thinking that I am simply going to make up the difference in other cheeses (like Smokin' Goat Chilpotle Cheddar) and include a note explaining why.

Here's a first draft:

Hi!

I am most incredibly flattered and excited to have been asked to send y'all some of my cheese. As you know, this is not a commercial product, but a sample of the cheese I make for myself and my family. That being the case, I regretfully inform you that I do not have a full five pounds of Seedy Cheese. Please accept this "Smokin' Goat Chilpotle" in lieu of half the Seedy Cheese. I hope you will enjoy it equally.

This year, I have only three does, and every bit of cheese I made (as well as yogurt and cajeta) is made from their milk. Iris, Django, and Flopsy together provide us with about 350 gallons of milk a year (while still feeding their own kids), from which I make somewhere between 50 and 100 pounds of cheese.

My goats browse freely on my five acres, eating whatever they like. They like blackberries, thistles, fruit trees, and dandelions! In the winter, they eat local hay. I take care of them entirely: I breed them, I deliver the kids, I trim their hooves and give them medicine when they are sick. I milk them myself, and I even trained my dog to help me herd them around the property. It has been my lifelong dream to have goats and learn to make cheese, and now it is the opportunity of a lifetime to offer some of it to you.

I offer you this not because I think it is the best cheese around - it isn't. My cheese is delicious, if I say so myself, but I have a lot to learn and a long way to go before I reach the level of the professional cheesemaker. I offer you this cheese because it is something lamentably rare, something that ought to be more common - a true farmstead product; the product of a single place, a single season, and a single person. This cheese is an example of what can be achieved by an ordinary city girl who has followed her dream for only a few years. This cheese is the product of one woman determined to feed her family on the best food she can produce. I am pretty damn proud of it, even though it will most likely fall short of the very high standard you have solicited. Please enjoy with my compliments, and I hope you like it as much as I do.

Aimee

p.s. please please don't eat it if you are pregnant.

The Quesillo Chronicles

My cheesemaking experience now stretches back almost three years. I have had some notable successes, and several notable failures. At last, I can now reliably produce chevre, queso fresco, and cheddar - which isn't bad considering the poverty of my equipment. One of my cheeses is even achieving some local fame - some of my friends ask for it by name. That would be my "Smokin' Goat Chilpotle Cheddar," a delicious, spicy, lightly aged cheese with chilpotle pepper flakes in it.

But to be honest, my cheesemaking is pretty much hit or miss. My recipe books say things like "hold the milk at 86 degrees for 18 hours." I don't know what kind of equipment they think I have, but I'm pretty sure they are imagining something more sophisticated than a stainless steel pot, a flexible cutting mat, and the oven-light. The rest of my equipment consists of a colander, some muslin, and a tall stack of heavy books. I do the best I can with what I've got and I'm willing to tolerate a fairly high degree of variability.

my cheesemaking equipment

This philosophy has so far resulted in a lot of delicious cheese, but it has not been very successful at producing specific, recognizable varieties of cheese beyond "soft" and "hard." Case in point: Quesillo.

Quesillo is a delicious, fresh, stretched-curd cheese (like mozzarella) indigenous to Oaxaca - in fact, if you are lucky enough to find it here in the states it will probably be labeled "queso oaxaqueno." It is most like string cheese in that it pulls apart into long shreds and melts beautifully. It is sold in long ropes wound into balls. My husband has been asking me to make it for him since the first time I made cheese.

Stretched-curd cheeses are difficult. There is a way to "cheat" with a microwave, but I don't own a microwave and anyway am far too much of a purist/snob to do it that way. Basically, stretched-curd cheeses are made the same way as other cheese up to the first draining, then they are plunged into very hot water or whey and massaged and kneaded until they become very smooth and elastic. Then they are pulled by hand into long ropes.

Sounds easy but it isn't. Since I have had a major milk-glut, I decided to begin experimenting. At any given time I have several gallons of milk and five or six pounds of cheese in the fridge - there's really no reason to be frugal. You gotta break a few eggs, right?

My first three attempts were total abject failures. Usually, any cheese can be salvaged, you just judge the texture and taste and then decide what to call it and how to use it. I tried for creamy and spreadable and got crumbly instead? That's okay, just call it "salad crumbles" and proudly say "I meant to do that." It's goat cheese; it all tastes good.

Well not this time. My attempts at quesillo were completely unsalvageable. Only the dog enjoyed the results. I was frustrated and confused. I thought I was following the recipe. Annoyed, I decided to let it go for a while and go back to something I knew and make some more cheddar. Oddly enough, it was this batch that turned into quesillo. I left the burner on low instead of turning it off and ended up with a very thick, tough curd. When I tried to cut it, it didn't cut cleanly, so I drained it on one solid piece.

Something about the way the drained curd looked made me decide to try one more time... so I heated up the whey to a temperature lower than boiling but hotter than "ouch" and plopped the curd back into it to poach.

I stirred the curd with a wooden spoon for fifteen or twenty minutes, and it began to get stretchy and droop off the spoon like Dali's clocks. Then I got out a clean bowl and placed the curd in it and scooped hot whey over it and began to knead it like dough. Yes, it was very very hot and my hands were poaching too. I got out another bowl and filled it with ice water so I could dip my hands in it when they started to feel like the skin was about to peel off. I kneaded for oh I'm going to say thirty minutes, frequently returning the curd to the hot whey for another bath.

After a while, I saw that when I picked up the curd out of the hot whey it began to stretch more and more. That's when I started to pull it like taffy, folding it over on itself and pulling, folding and pulling, and dipping it in the hot whey whenever it started to lose elasticity. I broke it up into smaller clumps and pulled each one into a long string and then laid it out on the cutting board to salt it. When it was salted, I rolled it up into balls, just like the balls sold in the 20 de Septiembre market in Oaxaca.

Well, almost like that. My skills are not refined enough to produce really thin strands or really round balls, but it WAS recognizably quesillo and it WAS good.

My next batch, however, was another throwaway. I'm trying again tonight. Consistency is the hard part - it always is. It was when I was playing pool and playing chess and it was when I was painting and it certainly is the hard part of parenting and it probably always will be the hard part of all my endeavors. On the other hand, as my favorite English teacher in high school, Mr. McAllister reminded us, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Help, I'm Drowning!

.... In milk, that is. Ever since the baby goats left, I have been milking three goats morning and evening. Each goat gives me about a half gallon (averaged) at each milking, so that means I am collecting about three gallons of milk a day.

Which is a totally ridiculous amount of milk! I took a picture of the inside of my fridge, but my computer is having issues and so I can't post it right now. Basically, the entire fridge is a sea of half gallon jars full of milk. Well, there are also several quarts of cajeta, five pounds of various types of cheese, a half gallon of yogurt, and a gallon of lard. Plus eight or nine dozen eggs.

The lard and eggs have nothing to do with goat milk, but they are farm products in the fridge, so I mention them.

I need to make cheese and/or cajeta every day just to reduce the cubic volume somewhat. I brought my sister a gallon of milk when I went to her house today. "Take it!" I felt like shouting. "For God's sake, just take it away!" Then as I break down in sobs, I moan in a tiny little voice "it never stops... it just keeps coming...."

My hands are going through their annual transformation- getting all bulked up from the constant milking. So far, no troubles with carpal tunnel syndrome, but I'm sure the day is not far off.

I advertised Flopsy on Craigslist, but I was honest about her having had mastitis and nobody wants her. I really really would like to have one fewer goats to milk, but I can't just send her to the auction. It would be wrong. Homero wants to eat her but I absolutely forbade it. That's just disgusting. So, for my scruples, I have to keep milking her.

And oh my God, it's less than an hour until I have to go out and milk them all AGAIN.

Aimee's Excellent Snacks

first cheese of the year - chevre.

I didn't really cook at all today - we all just snacked a little here and there all day long. For the first time this year, the preponderance of said snacks were all products of the farm.

Early snack - frozen blueberries with creamy goat-yogurt and honey (honey is not yet a farm-product, but it is from one of my neighbor's farms. Next year, I hope, we will be using our own honey.). To make this snack extra-decadent, I like to drizzle a little tiny bit of thick cream on top, from a local raw-milk dairy. This cream is unbelievable - if you've never had fresh raw cream, you won't believe your mouth. It has no resemblance whatsoever to grocery store cream. I just don't know how to describe it, so I'll leave it at that.

Lunchtime snack - radishes with homemade chevre. I thinned the radishes today and brought in all the little ones to munch on. Also today I made the first "real" cheese of the year. I have made paneer a couple of times, but that doesn't involve rennet and culture, so it isn't quite the same. Today's chevre is very nice, smooth and spreadable and just a little bit tangy. The French eat radishes with butter, and that's a good way to eat them, but not as good as with fresh homemade chevre.

the mint patch - spearmint

Evening snack - tabouli with fresh mint. The mint has come back with a vengeance. Now I have three kinds of mint; spearmint, peppermint, and grapefruit mint. As mint tends to do, it is pretty much taking over the herb garden. I don't care - I love mint. I use about three cups of finely minced mint to one cup of tabouli, and a few tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of two fat lemons, and plenty of fresh ground black pepper. I'd throw in any veggies I had on hand, if I had any. Beets are nice, it makes the tabouli shocking pink.

Really feels like spring when we can start eating like this.

Here is a picture of Homero's shop, as of the day before yesterday. It's even bigger now. For perspective, that's a pretty honkin' big truck parked in front of it. Eventually - hopefully by sometime next week - the shop will be 35 feet wide and 60 feet long, and 17 feet tall (which it already is.). The guys are working fourteen hour days, and I am cooking up a storm three times a day to keep them fed.  

My brother-in-law, Fransisco, came out from Atlanta to help, and he brought his girlfriend with him. Her name is Iris (Like my goat, but I didn't tell her that) and she's from Honduras.  I'm really enjoying spending time with her and learning about Honduran food. That girl can break down a chicken, let me tell you. She took it from alive and clucking to in the stew pot in about fifteen minutes flat. And it was good, too.  Maybe later I'll write up a recipe for Honduran chicken stew.                       

Tomorrow morning early, I'm headed to Arizona to visit my dad, with all three kids in tow. Homero will be in charge of the farm for a week. There's not much to it this time of year: throw a little hay at everybody in the mornings, feed the chickens, and keep the water buckets topped up. Shouldn't take him away from his shop too much. 

But he must milk Iris. I'll leave the baby goats on the moms, and he won't separate them at night, so that will help, but Iris' buckling is so big now, he's really not nursing very much. If Homero doesn't milk iris in the afternoons, her production will go way down. He is not a very good milker, so I'll just have to hope for the best. I've been making cheese like a mad cheesemakin' demon, so I'll have cheese to take with me to Arizona and cheese when I come home. 

It was silly of me to get so much produce two days before I left. I had to pickle late at night yesterday, but I got all the cucumbers processed. Bread and butter, all of them, because I didn't have any fresh dill. I'm leaving poor Iris with a mountain of zucchini to eat. I told her she should use up as much produce as she can while I'm gone. 

Most likely I won't post while I'm away. See y'all in a week.

Evil Doe

I must get rid of Xana. There is nothing good about that goat, nothing. Well, okay, she's big and healthy. But she's a big, healthy pain in the butt. Xana is the destroyer of fences, and now she has taught the nubian twins to destroy fences, too. Believe me, there are plenty of things I would rather do than fix fences in the freezing cold. Which is what I was doing today. And catching escaped goats, which is no fun, either. They are really so much faster and more nimble than I. They hardly ever fall down in the mud. 

Plus, Xana gives no obvious signs of being in heat. She should have come back into heat about 10 days ago, and who knows? Maybe she did. I didn't notice. Theoretically, goats are supposed to scream and flip their tails around when they go into heat, but so far this year, I haven't noticed anybody acting that way. How am I going to get them bred? I going to have to buy a billy, or lease one for the season, I guess.

These goats are not currently worth the aggravation. It's so dark in the mornings - and cold -that I haven't bothered to separate the babies or milk the mamas. I don't want to try to milk goats in the dark with numb, frozen fingers. Sounds like a recipe for disaster. I'm running out of my last gallon of milk and my last pound of cheese, so we'll soon find out which of my vices is stronger: Laziness or miserliness.

More Cheesemaking Notes

I love the clean pyramid of fresh cheese that comes out of my cone shaped colander. When I make chevre, I don't weight the curds, so I get a big, airy pyramid like this one. When I'm making queso fresco, I press the curds as hard as I can and I get a much smaller, denser cone.

But the cheese isn't salted at this point, so I have to use a fork to mash it all up and stir in the salt. I haven't really measured the salt, I just taste test as I go along, but I'd say I use perhaps a teaspoon or a teaspoon and a half of salt to a pyramid of cheese. (How much does a pyramid weigh? I don't know, it varies. This one was pretty big, probably about a pound.) My guess is that I use less salt than the recommended amount because I am very sensitive to salt and don't like anything too salty. This is an ongoing source of friction between Homero and myself.

I separated some of the chevre for flavoring. This batch is getting parsley, chives, red pepper flakes, and fresh ground black pepper. 

Breakfast. Bread Man's homemade whole wheat bread thickly spread with herbed chevre and a quad-shot of espresso over ice. Breakfast of Champions.