I’m Drowning In Milk!

These days, my husband is bringing in 7+ gallons of milk each morning. The abundance is dizzying. 

Also? It’s exhausting. Some days I just can’t bear to deal with it. That’s when I skim the milk, make butter with the cream, and then feed the milk to the pigs. It feels like such a waste — all that glorious creamy milk — but as my mom always says, nature’s wasteful. And as I say, Being miserable ain’t a virtue, people! 

Parmesans
These beauties are only 4 months old – they’ve got another 8 months of aging – but I had to call it quits on the natural rinds and vac-pack them, even though their rinds finally stabilized, thanks to frequent dry brushing, some oil rubs, and relocating them to the smaller cheese cave that has a lower humidity.

The reason I had to bag ’em? Space! The cave that I use for natural rind development is smaller and prime real estate, so I had to transfer them to the mustier basement cave which is only really suitable for vac-packed and clothbound cheeses. However, I’m hopeful that 4 months of natural-rind development was enough to get these babies going. 

(I recently opened a cheese that was well over two years old, and even though it had been vac-packed for that whole time, the texture had developed dramatically, evolving into a Parmesan-style crumbly sort of thing. Fingers crossed that these cheeses follow suit!) 

 Clothbound Cheddar

This 6-month old clothbound cheddar had been hanging out in the tiny wine fridge that’s next to the sofa. That fridge is very low humidity (about 30% – I just checked) and I was getting concerned that, despite its lardy bandages, the cheese was drying out. And. . . it was, sigh.

It was still good, but just not as dense and creamy as I would’ve liked.

Moral of the story: clothbound cheeses are a little more ambient-sensitive than vac-packed cheeses.

Jarlsberg
These days my swissy cheeses have been puffing beautifully! I love how this one reshaped itself into a square to fill the vac-pack bag.

Butter

Compared to winter butter, summer butter is a whole different beast: it practically glows with sunshine, thanks to the greening of the fields. 

Fact: fresh butter begs to be spread – nay, slathered – on thick slices of sourdough toast and then sprinkled with flaky salt.

Two More New Cheeses
I’m dipping back into b.linen cheeses, and the smell of stinky feet is beginning to leak out around the edges of the fridge doors and permeate the house. (Sorry, guests!)

Along with the munster, I’m working on an Appenzellar and Tete de Moine; I’m unreasonably excited about both! 

Today I’m doing a first: working in batches to turn 16 gallons of milk into two cheeses that I’m hoping to combine into one enormous one. Spoiler: it’s not going well.