Adventures in Flour: Wood Fired Oven Bread

Back in May, I spent a lovely 3 weeks out in Italy thoroughly enjoying myself with sea (a little cold I’ll admit but I can now inform you it was warmer than Wales in August), sun and not to put too fine a point on it, food.  It was the season for strawberries, cherries, broad beans, garlic greens, fresh peas, artichokes, asparagus and other lovely tasty goodies.
During our stay, and as it wasn’t too overbearingly hot at that time of year, I voiced the opinion that we needed to light the oven and get baking and so to our assistance came the lovely Cavuto sisters, Paola & Elodia, both of whom have wood ovens of their own in the back garden and for whom it’s nothing to just knock up 8 kilo loaves a week.
Bright and early, the ladies showed up bearing with them all the necessaries for bread production.  They get their own flour in enormous sacks from a local mill and are very picky about what to use.  It is, of course, white flour, as most bread in Italy is white, but tastier than the stuff generally available.  They brought with them a large bag of flour, a pasta pan full of rehydrated levain forming the ‘sponge’ stage of a sourdough, salt and some fresh yeast just to give the levain an extra lift.  The wooden board for breadmaking was brought out of the back room, given a good clean down and we were ready to go.
When I make bread at home, I’m usually making 1 kilo loaf maximum and frankly that can be mixed in a bowl to minimise the mess, although kneading does, of course, need to be done on the surface.  I also rarely have enough kitchen surface to make a great big mountain of flour, a huge well in the centre and then mix together.  However, if you’re making 3 big loaves like Paola showed us to do, then frankly you need space.  And if you’re going to spend the best part of an hour lighting a great big fire in your oven, you’d be daft to only make 1 loaf.  Three is the minimum that they consider worthwhile.
Into the well in the centre of our flour volcano went the levain starter and she began mixing it in by hand, from the centre, adding water as necessary.  For each kilo of flour she added a tablespoon of salt but water was simply added by the feel of the dough as was a glug or two of olive oil.  I still measure things a little obsessively when making bread so I watched with awe.  Once mixed, the dough was kneaded until elastic (again by feel where I tend to time myself still) and again it was all done by hand, with dexterity and speed and energy.  You’ll see from the photos and video clip that neither of these ladies possesses the loose upper arm we call ‘the bingo wing’.  This is why.  It is quite a workout.
The dough set aside in a warm place (didn’t need to worry too much about this as it was a warm day – oh so different to breadmaking back in the UK), we went outside to light the fire in the oven.  The ladies looked critically over the wood store and picked out logs they considered appropriate.  You want a lot of kindling and then thin logs, probably only about 4-5cm in diameter.  Locally, vine or olive prunings are considered the best kindling.  Paola & Elodia favour the olive prunings as they tend to be sprayed less than vines.  In their own non label way, they are both quite organic in their approach.  Unfortunately we had vine prunings but they passed muster and we lit the fire, feeding it with thin logs as it got going and aiming to get the temperature up to 300C.
Back in the kitchen, it was time to divide the dough out into proving baskets and to set a little aside for pizza.  The risen dough was knocked back, this time using semola flour to dust the surface.  It’s coarser in grain than the 00 flour we had used for the bread and this helps develop the crust.  We divided off enough for a couple of trays of pizza and then cut the remainder into 4 loaves which were shaped between tea towels and left to prove.  Meanwhile the pizza was spread out onto the oiled trays and given its toppings: bottled tomato passata that the ladies had made themselves from their own tomatoes the summer before, finely chopped courgette picked that morning from Paola’s garden and dressed with olive oil, salt and pepper and simply oil and salt.  All 3 were then topped with ripped up mozzarella and it was time to bring them outside and check on the oven temperature.
When it had been pronounced good to go, the ashes were all scooped out of the oven and the base of it cleaned over with a wet cloth.  Whilst this was happening, I quizzed Elodia on the nature of pizza dough.  Do you just use bread dough or is there something special you do to make pizza?  She confirmed that if you just want to do a pizza bake, then you make a moister dough and use half and half of the 00 flour and the semola.  However why, if you are baking bread, would you miss the chance to bake off some of it as a pizza just for the fun of it?  Why indeed.
Oven ready, the pizza went in and it cooked in minutes.  Meanwhile a relay team went back to the kitchen to ferry out the proven loaves and line them up outside the oven.  Pizzas emerged smelling and looking wonderful.  It was all we could do not to fall on them right away and devour them.  The loaves were transferred to the peel and deftly shunted into the oven by my father (I really haven’t quite got the knack of this entirely although I did manage one of them – I claim it’s height or my lack thereof).  We were given our instructions by the Cavuto ladies, the oven was at about 240-250C but the nature of wood ovens means that its temperature would drop gradually during the cooking.  We were to leave the bread cooking for half an hour and under no circumstances open the door to look at it during that time.  After half an hour we could check through the little viewing window and from 45 minutes onwards, open the window and check if they were ready.  An hour later, we proudly lifted them from the oven and put them aside to cool.  The verdict?  Best bread of the entire holiday.
Back home in Marple it has proved a bit of an inspiration to get baking again.  For a couple of bakes, I decided to use the yeast from the cupboard that we’d bought to make hot cross buns at Easter and that frankly needs using before it stops being active.  Then in the past fortnight, I decided to make my own levain following the instructions in the River Cottage bread book which is my bread bible.  A couple of days ago it made it into its first bake.  I won’t lie, the process of using a domestic oven is nowhere near as rewarding as the wood oven and the bread undoubtedly bakes better in the wood oven but a combination of ramping the temperature up as high as it will go and judicious lowering of it later seems to yield decent results.  And what it doesn’t have in wood-fired-ness, it makes up for in its mix of flours: spelt, rye, wholemeal and white.

Irons in the fire

It’s been a quiet old time since leaving Holker in many ways but as the title says, with projects in the offing.  The first one is hopefully about to become practice rather than theory quite soon.Old Hall Farm is a multi-disciplinary smallholding near the village of Bouth in Cumbria, not far from Cark, Cartmel and my old stomping grounds indeed.  It is owned by Alex and Charlotte Sharphouse who in their spare time (the farm isn’t yet their day job) have bought the place, are doing it up and setting up a very old fashioned way of farming.  They plough their fields by working shirehorse, grow their own feed for their jersey cows, have a few rare breed chickens (producing delicious eggs by the way) and thresh their grain by steam powered machinery.  In other words they are farming as it was done over 100 years ago.  Their plan is to open the farm for open days during summers to let people see the old fashioned way of farming and take part up to a point but they also want to have a range of foods, made on the farm that they can sell through a farm shop and to some local places.  They currently have some market garden veg and eggs and in due time hope to be selling cheese. This is where I come in, to try out a few recipes with their jersey milk and once we’ve got a good recipe and got the storage conditions worked out so it matures well, pass on all my knowledge to Alex and Charlotte themselves or their full time cheesemaker.

So far, the first cheese we’re going to try is a soft, mould-ripened Camembert / Coulommiers type.  To that end there has been a lot of perusing of the online catalogue of Andre Coquard for equipment.  Now for making a few trial batches of cheese it might seem a bit over the top to be ordering in equipment from France, but having researched this, I have to say I’m convinced it was the right move.  Not only does it mean you’re buying things that are designed for the purpose of making a Camembert type of cheese (which let’s face it can only help), they also turned out to be substantially cheaper than the UK vendors, so much so that it’s even worth paying for a more expensive delivery charge to get everything over from France.

So order in and paid for, goods due to be delivered this week – perhaps even tomorrow, who knows, next week I might even be up there making the first batch of cheese.  Is it too early to stop crossing my fingers I wonder?

The return of Julie Cheyney! All welcome St Jude

I will post my own cheesey work again soon (irons in the fire, irons in the fire) but for now, have a read about my friend Julie’s return to cheesemaking on a great blog that I’ve just found thanks to the phenomenon that is social networking.The Cheese Chap: Like Tunworth? Try St.Jude:

Springtime at Holker, Lambs, Sheeps Milk & St James

My return to Cumbria after a nice lengthy Christmas break has only been in a part time capacity.  While I was in Italy in October and then helping at Neal’s Yard Dairy over Christmas, full time cheesemaking duties were taken over by Peter Mathew who is a local foodie and used to work in the Holker Hall food shop.  He continues 5 days a week to make cheese and for a month I took on 3 days a week, covering Peter’s days off and a cross over day to calibrate and check we were all on the same page cheesemaking-wise.
Calibration was quite a useful day because there’s nothing like working together to realise you both do things very differently.  For instance, the Brother David recipe calls for stirring but whether you stir by hand or with the steel paddle affects the texture of the curd at the end – is it cubes or more of a scrambled egg consistency and how does that affect the cheese?  Well the argument for cubes is that you lose less fats into the whey but that can mean that you have those fats impeding drainage.  On the flip side though, those fats can lend an extra unctuosity to the paste as it matures.   However if you do stir with the paddle, it can break down any large cubes better so that there’s less variation between size of cubes and thus it should drain better.  Really however at the end of the day, as it’s only a 500g cheese and due to the relative fat content of the sheeps milk versus the cows milk (9-10% in sheeps vs 3.9-4% in cows), drainage is much less of an issue than with St James and while there have been issues to resolve with bitterness on the rinds, there have however not been issues with the cheese breaking down correctly.   The extent of our drainage calibration has been a measure to remove more whey from the vat.  After cutting the St James curd, it’s quite easy to ladle whey off the top because there is no horizontal cut.  The ladling that happens after removing the whey is the horizontal cut in fact.  Brother David curd however is cut horizontally as well as vertically before the stir so when you try and ladle off some whey, the curd cubes just float up too and get caught up.  The trick had been to lay a couple of drainage cloths over the cut curd to act as a sieve of sorts and then the whey can be ladled off.  This was something Martin and I both did after our visit from Jemima Cordle.  However it got lost in translation from him to Peter – different interpretations of ‘Are you pre-draining with cloths?’  That’s the beauty of calibration.
Meanwhile outside the dairy, the lambs were being born.  Starting before I even went back to Holker in mid January, the first of the new mum sheep were lambing.   While the numbers were small, only one or two per day these were the difficult first timers with almost as many stillborn as live lambs; a difficult start to the season for Nicola.  However this time passed and the experienced mothers started to be ready to lamb.  This time the challenges were that more of them lambed together and it became full on hard work of a different kind.  Nature isn’t convenient and as Nicola sighed one day, the sheep always seemed to lamb at midnight (when she did her final check on them) meaning she’d be there until 2 or at 5am as she was trying to start milking.  Sleep is for wimps or at the very least it’s not for dairy farmers.
As far as the sheeps milk goes however this year was different to last year.  In the autumn of 2010 the sheep were dried off by mid October as the milk levels had by that point reached so low a point that it wasn’t worth carrying on making cheese.  In the winter and spring when the lambs were born, there was the choice to leave them to suckle with their mothers or take them off early and put them onto a lamb milk replacer.
Last year in order to get to the point where there was enough milk altogether, the lambs were left on their mothers (they either need to be taken off after the colostrum or left on for 30 days) so the first cheeses were made in early March.  This year however, due to having kept the milking parlour running through the winter because the cows were still producing milk, the choice was different.  If the parlour is running anyway and you don’t have to clean down, heat and get it going, then the number of milking sheep makes a difference.  Just as last autumn it was worthwhile continuing to milk the last valiant few as long as they kept going, it’s now worth starting at a smaller quantity of milk once the experienced mother sheep are ready and so the first few batches of St James were made early February with the milk quantities rocketing up even within my last week in the dairy!
St James curd in moulds from last season with some lactic Jersey experiments to the right (more on that later)
It was good to welcome St James back into the fold.  I’d missed using the sheeps milk and the challenge of playing with rennet quantities to achieve a similar firmness of set while using very different mediums made my 3 cheesemaking days extra interesting and fun.  It was hectic though.  Working two vats in place of one means that those gaps in the make (setting time, time between cloth pulls) which had previously been used for cleaning or rind washing, just disappeared as washing up, ladling and cloth pulling all began to take twice as long.  As I left, we were making 10 St James a day, which can only increase.  I hope to be back in Cumbria again soon (of that more later) and when or if I am, I hope I can spare a bit of time to help out with all that extra rind washing as well as my new cheesemaking work.
In the meantime, I have a souvenir of Holker Farm with me, Percy of Holker, Golden Labrador puppy from Nicola Robinson, Labrador breeder to the Specialist Cheese Industry.  His aunt belongs to Neal’s Yard’s David Lockwood and another relative is now residing in France at the home of the famous Ivan Larcher.
Gratuituous cute puppy picture – from Nicola Robinson, Labradors by appointment to the Specialist Cheese Industry.

Harvesting our olives at Contrada Lazzaretto & the Frantoio

About a week after joining the Farinas and Palladinis for their olive harvest, it was finally time to pick the olives on the trees in our back garden, mix them in with those of Carlo & Rita (she of amazing sott’olio pickles).  A friend, Americo Colantuono, lent us the mats and a couple of combs and came over to get us started.  Although we didn’t have motorised combs, it was relatively quick work to pick the olives on the furthest tree with an experienced pro giving us a hand.  We moved on to the remaining trees ourselves and while doing so discovered the importance of pruning.
These trees had been neglected for quite a few years and pruned perhaps a couple of years ago.  Before that, they’d been left for quite a few years as we weren’t harvesting them and none of our neighbours was interested in doing so either.  As a result, although they’d been spurred on to more fruiting by the bit of pruning they’d had, they weren’t exactly trained.  Anyone who has picked fruit will know what I mean; by pruning you make sure there are a few branches that are bursting with fruit so the job of picking is straightforward and efficient.  If you don’t prune an apple tree, given that the fruit are relatively big, it’s not so bad trying to hop around the tree and pick them individually.  For something like cherries, or indeed olives, it makes a much bigger difference as you pick one or two olives per branch and the novelty of picking olives in the autumn sunshine, starts to pall.  Using the combs becomes barely worthwhile because you’re pulling down as much in twigs and leaves as you are olives so it makes more sense to pick them by hand which is pretty slow work.  This brought out different approaches in the family group; my father became just a tad obsessive (perhaps not a huge surprise to those of you that know him), staying up the ladder and picking individual olives way past sunset when it was so dark you could barely distinguish olive from leaf.  I got bored of hand picking and started some early pruning to cut out the excessive branches from the middle and open it up.
Properly pruned olives with the centre open and the fruit at the edges
Rocco Palladini had explained to us about pruning when we joined them for the day – his family’s trees are pruned into a wine glass shape with space in the centre for the light to get into the tree and keep it alive and vibrant and with a few branches that descend waterfall style from the edges which can be combed easily and yield bounteous amounts of olives.  The added bonus of opening up the middle as well is that there is somewhere to rest your ladder for those of you without the motorised combs.  However, by slightly after nightfall, the harvest was done, several washing basins filled with olives and the bigger twigs were picked out so that they could be driven to Carlo & Rita’s to be included with their olives and sorted then pressed.
Sorting turned out to be done in a very simple manner, the olives were consolidated into a trailer, lifted out and put onto a grid sloping down an incline.

By the nature of their different weights, the olives fall down where the leaves can either fall through the grid or be brushed out and to the side and blow away.  Again this is a family activity, all hands to the pump and carried out with company and chatter.  Sorted (all but a few remaining leaves that is) and finally put into sacks, it’s time to go to the Frantoio.

The Frantoio itself is down a little side street in Tollo.  Most of the year, you would never know it was there and would just think it was an agricultural building of sorts.  When it’s open though, it’s a fascinating glimpse into a way of producing oil that has changed very very little since the time of the Romans, I suspect.  The olives are offloaded and weighed and then crushed into a paste by rotating stone millwheels.  These are powered by a motor now but in the past would have been horse or more likely donkey or oxen powered.  In fact in the cellars of our house there is still the olive press that the farmers who lived there used to use, which was driven either by an ox or donkey.  More recently they converted it to a wine press but that’s another story.
Returning to the Frantoio; the paste is spread between mats which are stacked up onto trolleys with a column in the middle to keep them in place.  Every 4 or so mats there is a metal disc that stabilises the whole stack.  Once full, the stacks are taken to the hydraulic press and pressure is put onto them from the bottom up and a mixture of olive oil and olive juice streams out and is collected in a pit below.
The oil, of course, floats to the top of this and in some cases this is lifted from the top of the liquid without putting it through any centrifugal separator and sold as the ‘flower of the oil’.  In this case, however, the oil and some of the liquid was sucked up and put through the centrifuge, emerging as a trickle of emerald green oil.  It seems quite magical when you watch it, to see these purple or black olives go in and this bright, fresh green oil emerge at the other end.
So how much did we get in oil from our trees?  Well since you ask, a rather majestic 13 litres.  Score.

Olive Harvesting with the Farinas and Palladinis

Back in October, I took 3 weeks out from my cheesemaking schedule and headed south for (slightly) warmer climes and a holiday in Italy.  Holidays for me do not mean getting away from food and producing food, far from it.  It’s just that in Italy there are other things to see, learn and do.
There’s the amazing Rita who makes easily the best sott’olio pickles I have ever tasted.  In the summer, she dispenses recipes for her aubergines under oil, roasted peppers and sweet and sour figs.  In the winter she makes a mixed vegetable pickle (cauliflower, carrot, fennel, celery and little pickling onions).  All of these add a lift to very simply cooked poached meats or bollito misto and make a winter meal that bit richer and more vibrant.  Every year we aim to learn another one of her culinary gems.
But Rita doesn’t just cook like a goddess.  She and her husband Carlo also have some land on which they grow vegetables and have a grove of olive trees.  Every year in November, it’s time to harvest the olives, take them to the Frantoio and collect their next year’s supply of oil.  Carlo is the man who helps us look after our garden too and thanks to him, our ancient and neglected olive trees have been pruned and brought back into some sort of productive order.  Last year it was actually worth our while picking them and Carlo and Rita offered to combine whatever we could get with their olives and give us a portion of the oil commensurate with the weight of olives we’d sent them.
We weren’t the only people olive picking, as you can imagine.  The frantoios locally which are closed the rest of the year, work 24 hours a day at this time.  You book in your allotted time slot, pick your olives and head off with them, returning with 20 litre jerry cans of oil.  A few days before we were due to pick our olives, another group of friends invited us to come along and see their olive picking.  Well olive picking isn’t a spectator sport, you get stuck in, and so we did sorting the leaves and branches from the trailer load of olives as Ennio, Elodia, Paola and Rocco and their cousin picked the olives from the trees.
Elodia harvesting with the motorised combs (see below)
To harvest the olives, you need nets to spread on the ground and big comb like things which you effectively comb the branches with bringing olives and tiny bits of branch and leaf with them onto the nets.  If you have a lot of trees and are serious about it, you have a couple of motorised combs which are on long sticks and which vibrate as you comb, bringing more olives to the ground.  This being Italy, a day’s hard work becomes a family affair.  The kids come out and help or just hang out in the autumn sunshine, taking off for a walk when they feel like it, coming back to help again when they fancy it, and of course there is lunch.
Lunch is served on the car bonnet
I had already heard about the infamous olive harvest lunches that the Farinas and Palladinis have.  My sister Jane and her partner Jon had joined them a couple of years ago to help pick olives and left at the end of the day unable to eat for another 24 hours they’d been so well fed.  On our visit we were treated to a tomato and pepper based beef stew that Paola had prepared, home-made bread from her wood-fired oven, emerald green new season oil from a grove they had harvested earlier, tomatoes, tuna, pecorino and (the bit the kids were particularly looking forward to) sausages cooked on a fire of olive prunings and dead branches.
Sausages
All of this bounty was washed down with prosecco and beer.  Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the cakes were unveiled.  Cakes are a big part of Italian Sunday lunching.  The local Pasticceria will be rammed on a Sunday morning with people picking up tray after tray of rum babas, fruit tarts, choux buns filled with crema, chocolate custard or coffee flavoured custard.  As everyone gets together after church for a family meal, it’s customary to bring cakes to the house of whoever is hosting where we might bring a bottle of wine and the hosts in anticipation won’t have made pudding, just a bowl of fruit to round off the meal before the cakes and espresso are served.  So out in the olive grove, we too ate cakes, drank shots of espresso and then returned to work, in the afternoon sun, surrounded by the fresh green smell of the olive leaves and fruit, hanging off a big trailer full of olives, sorting out the little bits of branch from the fruit.
The harvest ready for sorting
As the light started to go, the day’s work was finished for us while the Palladinis and Farinas took their haul of olives back home to do further sorting in preparation for the frantoio.  As we drove home, other families were finishing up with their olive picking too.  All of them out in family force, children and all, turning what is essentially farm labour into a fun day out for the kids.  They know how to live, those Italians.

The Mystery of the Non-setting Sheeps Curd

After a summer and early autumn feeling like I got to grips with making some pretty good cheeses, the late season milk has thrown me a curve ball.  A lot is talked about seasonality in rather hazy, romantic terms of the terroir and what grasses or herbs or clover is available during the summer versus hay or silage in the winter.  Or even slightly more scientifically in terms of levels of fats and proteins in late season milk.  Very little, in my experience, is talked about in terms of temperature.We have recently had a head spinning turnaround from milk that set quickly and firmly (which we put down to high solids) to milk that just isn’t setting.  Fats and proteins aren’t dramatically different from the fast setting curd milk, there may be a little less calcium in the milk due to the grass quality not being what it was but basically that doesn’t seem to be the key issue.  Temperature.

For starters, the milk that had been arriving in the dairy at 27C or more in fact earlier in the year is now about 18C or 19C.  There are less sheep milking as more of them are served and those that are milking give less and less milk.  The body temperature of each sheep and the temperature of milk coming from each sheep hasn’t changed, but other factors mean the milk is much colder.  The sheep are milked before the cows.  The pipework is cold in the mornings now as it’s autumn and in addition it’s dark when the milking starts so what sun or daylight there is has had no chance to raise the temperature of the air or surroundings.  The milking system works by accumulating about 8 litres milk in a jar and then pumping it through into the dairy.  However it now takes longer to accumulate the 8 litres allowing the milk longer to cool as it does so.  It’s then pumped through cold pipes into the dairy.

Then there’s the room temperature or really to put it more accurately, drafts and currents of cold air.  If you look at the thermometer in the room the temperature hasn’t dropped massively and the heaters are going full blast and turned up as high as they can be.  However in the corridor where we do the packing the temperature is quite a bit colder which means that at this time of year, doors need to be closed to preserve the temperature in the dairy.

In the past couple of weeks the milk has gone from setting a bit too quickly because of its solids to setting very very slowly. Thinking back, the last of our fast setting milk was also at a point when the days were a little longer and then there was the brief Indian Summer when everyone went to the beach in October.  As the weather broke, the setting problems begain.  In looking at why this is happening (largely to me but it has happened to Martin too) we’ve looked very closely at the different ways in which temperature affects what we’re doing and how without us actually changing what we do, the parameters have entirely altered just because it’s autumn and we have less milk.

1. The milk is colder.  Any time it is left standing before the starter goes in, used to be a brief period of pre-ripening time as it was at 27C but very little is happening at 18C.  The lactic acid bacteria activity from the milk itself and from the starter once added is less even if the milk is heated and the starter added at around 31C because where there was a pre-ripening period, now there isn’t.  This in turn affects the quality of the set because the beginnings of acidification would free up a certain amount of calcium ions from the milk which helps for a good set and increases the yield.

2. The milk needs to be warmed up much more slowly and consistently.  To heat quickly, using the ‘flag’ or mini radiator type thing we use to warm milk (it works by running hot water through it) and stir the hot milk in, means it loses temperature more quickly.

3.  Even warmed more slowly, the milk doesn’t keep its temperature in the same way because there’s much less of it.  Whereas with quantities like 70 or 80 litres, the milk might drop 1 degree between adding starter and then adding rennet an hour later, it can now drop 2 or 3 degrees.  Losing temperature more easily again of course means the set will be weaker.

4.  The top of the curd, where you usually test the set, is colder than the lower part of the vat as it’s the area that’s open to the air the most.  Often this will set more weakly than lower down the vat.

Even by increasing rennet and trying to keep the vat next to the dairy’s heaters at all times after it’s been heated, the set just isn’t as strong as it has been.  The implications of this on the cheese are pretty huge.

1.  Weak curd forms a more sloppy substance going into the cloths.  Small and more mushy particles of curd clog up the cloths and reduce the effectiveness with which they let the cheeses drain.

2. Weaker and colder curd drains more slowly anyway.  It doesn’t free drain in the same way.  More cloth pulling only has a limited effectiveness as the cloths are clogged up already and also because with a weaker structure you end up losing fats and squashing the nutrients out of the curd by using more force but still finding that it feels soft and wet in texture.

And the effects of the weaker curd on the drainage cloths are:

Badly formed rinds because they are largely formed from the soft particles that collected on the cloths.  When salting or maturing further, these rinds are loose, too moist and come away from the cheese.

Cheeses that hold free moisture.
That old enemy we’ve been fighting with our draining cloths!  Because the cloths are clogged up, hindering drainage but also because the curd didn’t have enough resistance to the cloths to force out the free moisture when they were pulled up tightly and in the end slightly collapsed under the pressure we have floppier and less stable cheeses when they are turned out.  The effect of this is that the cheeses do not mature in a stable manner.  They don’t retain the calcium which will allow a full and elastic breakdown and they develop what is more of a lactic cheese texture with a very runny breakdown just under the rinds and a curdy, moist, acidic centre.  It’s not that this is unpleasant to eat, in fact it can be very tasty, it’s just not what we want.

Before I began making cheese, I might have tried to explain this to a customer by saying that at the end of lactation with the milk composition being different and the pasture being different, the cheese would change.  Having made cheese for a few months, I would now tell it very differently.  The biggest change has been the temperature.  So much for terroir!

Enter the cows

On returning from Piedmont just under a month ago, I checked Facebook to see a post from Nicola about 2 new additions at Holker Farm.  While this could have been puppies, pigs or donkeys, I was fairly certain that it was the much anticipated Shorthorns.  I was right.

One of the ladies, in the barn, with a curious sheep to the left

My first day back in the dairy was the first morning milking and they yielded us probably about 30 litres milk.  Since then they have settled happily in to their once a day milking regime and I’d say in the last week we’re getting nearer to 60 litres.  Nicola has been taking advice on their feed, switched the cake they get in the evening to a better quality and more nutritious one and given them a mineral lick all of which have contributed to them producing more milk but also milk with what seems like good solids.  Otherwise their diet is largely hay based and not particularly intensive.  They came in looking a little thin shortly after giving birth but are gaining condition and seem to be doing well on their once a day milking regime.  Not too taxing and yet yielding us plenty of milk and having now worked out a more regular size, we’re making roughly 10 cheeses weighing about 500g (probably) per day.

When I first started at Holker, Martin talked about how particular sheeps milk is and how once you get used to it, you’ll look at cows milk thinking, ‘What’s wrong with this milk’.  It has to be said I wasn’t entirely prepared for just how different the 2 milks would be.  The difference is (and was) perhaps heightened because the sheeps milk is end of lactation milk so the solids are huge – 8% fat and over 6% protein on one recent test.  The cows milk is early lactation and just naturally has much lower solids anyway than sheeps milk.  The first obvious difference however is the colour.  Cows milk is more yellow but at the same time more translucent, sheeps milk bright white and just standing until the end of the milking, there is a thin layer of yellow cream on top of the vat containing the cows milk.  The colour difference remains throughout the make as well, the whey is clearer and more yellow when cutting the cows milk, the sheeps milk whey, while a yellow colour is slightly thicker and whiter.

Cows milk curd after cutting
Sheeps milk curd after cutting 

The texture is very different too.  In fact it was tricky working out when to cut the cows curd in the first couple of days because the set is much more delicate.  After a couple of days we felt it was going to naturally need more rennet than the sheeps milk and have managed to achieve a firmer set as a result.  However when looking for the ‘clean break’ when determining when to cut the curd, the set of the cows milk when it breaks cleanly is a lot more jelly-like than that of the sheeps milk which is dense and robust.

Drainage is hugely different too.  Whereas the St James needs regular cloth pulling and done pretty forcefully at that, the cows milk cheese (current working name Feallan from the Old English for Fall i.e. Autumn) needs cloth pulling largely much more gently and rather than forcing moisture out, you’re just trying your damndest to keep up with the natural drainage of the curd.  Where St James needs to sit overnight in its cloths with a follower on, by about 3pm Feallan has been turned once in its cloths and ready to be turned again and taken out of the cloths.  In future we’ll get followers to be put onto the Feallan too but for now, they just drain without pressure overnight which leads to slightly less reliable shapes but the drainage seems to happen ok.

Early batches of Feallan and St James on Day 2 in the hastening room before salting.

As for maturing, well we have a couple of batches that we tried binding in spruce cambian (the leather textured layer below the bark that is used to bind Vacherin) which Martin set off into the Holker Estate to cut off trees in their timber stores.  More recent batches have been left to mature without and when we can compare and contrast the matured cheeses, we’ll get an idea of which tastes best.  Currently though, they are being washed a couple of times a week until they are roughly 2 weeks old by which time they have a reasonably convincing covering of B. linens and then they are being wrapped to continue maturing in paper.  Next Tuesday, Bronwen and David from Neal’s Yard Dairy will come and visit the farm and we will get a chance to try some of the older cheeses with them.  The cheeses will be about 5 weeks old by then and some of the oldest have a nice breakdown already.  It will be very interesting to hear what they think.

Cheese in Bra

No, not an unfortunate sartorial incident in the cheese world, Cheese is in fact a 4 day festival organised by the Slow Food movement in Italy to celebrate all things milk related.  And Bra is a mid-sized town near Cuneo in Piedmont.  That’s not to say, of course, that the English speaking visitors and exhibitors at said festival haven’t had the odd snigger over the idea in years past.

(A cobbled street in the ‘centro storico’ of Bra, leading to the main piazzas 
and all those cheese stands)

Bra is a self contained town with enough of its own industry to mean it doesn’t rely on Slow Food for its trade and existence.  It existed before Carlo Petrini started the movement and it continues to maintain its independence.  That said though, I doubt even in Italy it would have quite the same amount of good food and restaurants if it weren’t for the Slow Food movement having its headquarters here.  Then, every 2 years the town puts on a homage to all things Cheese and quite literally the entire town dedicates itself to the promotion of cheese.  Talks and tastings are held in some of the baroque buildings that form the older centre of Bra, its streets and piazzas become a market for cheese makers (particularly those who Slow Food have designated worthy of Presidia status – a protection for a highly artisan or unusual cheese that is in danger of dying out) and cheese maturers or retailers such as my erstwhile colleagues Neal’s Yard Dairy.

(The NYD stand this year, Stilton side)

Neal’s Yard Dairy has been selling cheese in Bra since 2003.  Randolph first visited the fair 2 years before that to help out a friend, Ari Weinzweig of Zingermans who had been due to give a talk there and was unable to get a flight post 9/11.  He was simply struck by the unique atmosphere of the place and the abundance of interesting cheeses and people there – completely unlike any trade show or food show held in the UK.  The town is entirely welcoming to its huge influx of visitors too with local shops getting behind the idea and theming their displays around cheese for the duration of the fiera.  If this was the UK, much as I hate to talk my country down, there would be groups of people moaning about parking and rubbish and the disruption to their daily routines.

(The butcher up near the Hotel Cavalieri getting into the spirit of Cheese.  
For those who like to know this sort of thing,
 this is where Giorgio Cravero buys his salsiccia di Bra.)

When we took the first stand in 2003 we noticed further benefits too.  Italians of all walks of life have a much more extensive vocabulary to describe food than the Brits, they are interested and keen to try new things and pretty forthright about saying what they think be it good or bad.  For a shop that values feedback, these comments on  our cheeses are hugely interesting.  There was also the minor consideration that as a place to meet and socialise with wholesale customers, the atmosphere of Bra can’t be bettered.  Maybe it’s all that Italian Dolce Vita, or ready access to Barolo, or the cafe society but people drop by and chat in a much more relaxed way than they ever do at any trade fair in the UK or USA and simply by enjoying a coffee together and having a chat, great ideas can spring up in a completely natural and unpressured way.

This year was my first year out there as a cheesemaker.  Before leaving NYD, Jason Hinds who had basically been my boss, asked if I’d join them on the stand as I’m an Italian speaker and, more to the point, I suspect, if I was there, my Italian speaking and absolute Trojan parents would be more likely to come along too and help explain and taste out cheeses to the Italian public.  As such, of course, there is a different perspective to the one you have as a cheesemonger.  I particularly wanted to know what they thought of the cheese and had a sneaky feeling they might well like it.  This proved to be the case.  I was waiting for people to come back with comments for improvements, over salted, too strong etc but didn’t really hear much of that.  On the contrary I did hear that pretty much everyone liked it.  To say that was a big pat on the back would be understating it really.  Of course the batches had been deliberately selected by Bronwen and the buying team to appeal to the Italian palate (a bit more adventurous and raucous than the UK) but between her selection and our cheesemaking, we made them happy.

With that established, the next thing I enjoyed while out there was meeting former colleagues and the wider family of the NYD network.  Mateo and Andy from Jasper Hill in Vermont were out there with their families, Joe Schneider and his Stichelton team were on the stand (naturally), Caroline and Will who make Stawley, Julie Cheyney formerly of Tunworth, Kate Arding who I worked with back in my early NYD days and who is now part of the Culture Magazine team, Val Bines, Jamie Montgomery, Mary Holbrook… I could go on and on.  It is a bit like in part a great big reunion of a lot of people you really want to chat to and you sell cheese and talk about your different cheeses altogether.  Yes it’s definitely an occasion for the cheese geek but as such it’s very rewarding and interesting.

(The 2 Joes (Schneider and Bennet) talk cheese over a beer in a quiet moment on the stand)

And have I mentioned the eating out possibilities yet?  Not only is this Italy but it’s Piedmont, widely regarded as one of the best areas of Italy for food and wine and everyone is putting on the classic dishes over this weekend: vitello tonnato (veal with a tuna emulsion basically), vegetable souffles, fresh tajarin (thin tagliatelle) with butter and sage, hand pinched ravioli (agnolotti del plin), carne cruda (thinly chopped raw rose veal with olive oil), salsiccia di bra (raw rose veal sausages – seriously don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it they are addictive), meat braised in Barolo and panna cotta.  And then there’s Caffe Converso, the ONLY place in Bra to get your coffee and pastries with its wood panelled walls and the little shop next door selling home made chocolates, nougat and their own chestnut cream and upmarket Nutella.

(Caffe Converso – a place of pilgrimage)

All this and the chance to learn about other cheeses and try new things too.  The Strada dei Presidii is the road along which the endangered cheeses are displayed.  This ranges from the weird and wonderful like Swedish goats cheese, smoked cheese from Poland, to the more recognisable like Bitto an Italian mountain cheese like an aged and drier Gruyere or Sbrinz and finally Somerset Cheddar represented by Montgomerys, Keens and Westcombe.  Cheddar may not initially seem an endangered cheese but given that it is ubiquitously used as a name for hard block cheese these days, the Somerset Cheddar boys are claiming the name back for those still making cheese in the original county of Somerset and following an old fashioned and traditional recipe.

(Swedish goats cheese and a somewhat impressive poster of the goats!) 
(Romanian cheeses matured in fir bark and Polish smoked cheeses) 
(Bitto – the Italian mountain cheese)

For anyone with even a passing interest in all things Cheese that hasn’t discovered it yet, this fair is worth the trip.  See you there in 2013!

For another perspective on the Cheese event and more pics too have a look at Justine’s blog littlemisslocal.com

How do you cook?

As the milk amounts decline (the tups went in last week and half the ewes are now served), I’ve been thinking back to when I started making cheese in April and how the way we make cheese now has changed.The biggest change is that we’ve slowed the recipe right down.  Whereas we were heating the milk up to achieve a set time of an hour and then having to work the draining cloths hard to get the free moisture out of the mass of curd bits, we’re now getting a set time of more like an hour and a half or longer.  We’re not heating the milk as much now.  In fact I’m not heating it at all.

I do take the temperature of the milk when the starter goes in and from that, I’ll work out (in a slightly guess-work style it has to be said) how much rennet I want to add to get the set time of an hour and a half.  Sometimes this works out and sometimes I get it wrong and it goes slower than that but, on the whole, it does seem to work out that if the milk is around 27C then 1ml rennet to 5l milk seems to be the right quantity.  If the milk is warmer, say around 30C, then 1ml rennet to 7l milk seems to get a set time of an hour and a half.  If hotter, still like 33C which was the temperature on the occasion I first got the hour and a half set  by adding too little rennet by mistake, 1ml rennet to 10l milk.  So I adjust how much rennet to use roughly based around that scale.

I think that this suits me better because I’m not the sort of person who can cook to a recipe every day.  I like to get the gist of a technique and then cook it my way. Certainly looking ahead to when I’m doing my own thing, this is something I’d be interested in continuing.  At the beginning of the season, of course, I couldn’t apply this attitude to cooking, to cheesemaking.  I needed to stick to the recipe religiously because I didn’t have the experience and also because I’m making cheese for someone else.  It wasn’t my sales on the line if I messed it up.  I suppose with a bit of experience and practice I’ve got more confidence now to react more to the circumstances of the milk temperature on the day rather than make it do what I want and heat it to a specific temperature every day.

It seems to be a more forgiving recipe that we’re using now with the longer set.  There’s more moisture but it’s not free moisture.  The curd is more fragile and needs more gentle cloth pulling but still seems to drain appropriately anyway.  Even moister cheeses still don’t have the levels of free moisture.  The first cheeses made with this sort of set, are maturing rather nicely.  I like the texture of the one cheese I’ve kept back in the stores (and that I’ve marked for me to buy for myself  when it’s ready).

The other thing is that we’re leaving the starter for about an hour to mix and get working in the liquid milk before adding the rennet.  The idea behind this is that the bacteria can get going better because it should be easier for them to get distributed and to get dividing in a liquid rather than in the set curd.  Or so we hypothesise anyway.  Another thing that should help this also is the fact that at temperatures like 27C, the milk reaches its first fragile set much more slowly.  In fact it can still be liquid an hour after the rennet has been added but still reaches the firm set (or second set as it can be known) in about an hour and a half or a little longer.

My gut feeling is that this long set and longer ripening time will make a good texture and flavour when the cheeses are mature and ready to sell.  Time will tell I suppose, but if the mistake cheeses of the 28th June are anything to go by, I can allow myself to be cautiously optimistic.