Now almost a month after our Western Washington University “cook-in” and “dig-in,” our class is finally over and I’m posting a few pictures of sustainable food. Below, “natural” yoghurt drains, releasing its nutritious whey (for other lacto-fermentation projects), with soft cheese remaining (for spreads). Many recipes for this can be found in both FoodWISE and…
Tag: cheese
The easiest cheese…Feta
On many small farms, practical wisdom encourages an entrepreneurial spirit, wanting to do more than the minimum required. Farmers understand the need to balance the restrictions of food safety rules (like the sixty-day minimum aging requirement for raw milk cheeses) with their other aims, like producing the highest flavor. Rules talk needs to be tempered…
Cheese, glorious cheese
I still consider fermented foods such as yogurt, cheese, and sauerkraut to be wholefoods. Natural processes of fermentation are everywhere. Milk wants to be cheeseand sour cream: it starts to sour soon after it exits the animal unless properlyrefrigerated and handled. Cultures aid the transformation. That is the origin story of cheese: probably discovered millennia…
Gigi cutting cheese for Ian and Drewsy’s South Carolina wedding!
This was pre-departure, cutting three different cheeses: Manchego I, Manchego II, Buttery Jack, Washed-rind style Télème… …and, in South Carolina…
Part of our farm ecosystem—bath loving kitty
This is Paka, the water-loving cat. See Insta—gberardicat@ for the live video
Milk, cheese, ecosystem
It’s quite wonderful to milk our own sheep and make fresh milk cheese—in our animal ecosystem of sheep, chickens, cats. Our animal ecosystem (Sheep and kitty) Far right: Barred owl
Gorgeous cheese, freshest milk, “native” cultures
Gorgeous cheese—it’s cheesemaking time again! Kilele (mom of triplets, Francis, Leo, Clare) and Sufu (mom of singleton, Big Agnes) are producing beautiful milk—high in fat and protein. The milk is ripened with cultures, and some whey saved from the previous batch of cheese. Coagulant added, later cut into curds, and eventually whey separated to reheat…
“Real Brie” and “Real Manchego” cheeses
Brie and Manchego—I’ve started to make soft, mold-ripened cheeses, and I must say they are delicious. You can eat them as soon as the mold has developed, a week after setting the curds, even better, two weeks later. And a month later? Delish! But is this REAL BRIE—no, it’s not going to taste like the…
Monastery cheeses: Trappist, Ale-washed
Branching out into monastery cheeses—with our sheep milk.* Besides the famous Bethlehem Cheese from the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut, there are a number of Trappist cheeses I am working on. this first experiment was a delight—aged with regular washings of ale, frequently turned, and resistant to the pesky cheese mites (so far). The…
Beating the pandemic: FoodWISE monks
Today, we see a lot of backsliding with COVID precautions and infection rates. Our food supply is vulnerable. As I wrote in FoodWISE, our food system is like an interconnected web, “All the farmers, millers, butchers, bakers, grocery clerks, and cooks are the people who inhabit the web—making it work, and depending on it for…