Fall is the perfect time for visiting local creameries‘ cheeses—especially when it’s an auction item, and we have quite a few auctions on Shaw Island! Here are the “winners” for this year’s field trip: Our adventures took us to Larry and Debbie Stap’s Twinbrook Creamery and also to LIndsay Slevin’s Twin Sisters Creamery. Lindsay and…
Tag: cheese
Really Local
Returning from teaching in Italy is always a pleasure—we’re bursting with local here in the Pacific Northwest, as I write about in FoodWISE. Washington is one of the states with the highest percentages of direct food sales in the U.S. We’re particularly suited to grow berries, and Barbie’s Berries provides a bounty of the soft,…
Sustainable Food–Living off the land, the garden, the ferment
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…
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…