The Dairy Best by Carol Wallwork first posted online May 25, 2010

Harken!  I bring good news. An evolution is aging in the heartland.  Robust artisans are creating real cheese again and from surprising stock: goats, sheep

   and blast-from-the-past-herds of fat-rich, Jersey milk cows.

Refined taste and more humane animal husbandry is what artisan cheese is all about.  The ‘little dairies that can’ are establishing a market niche for those pining for more taste, less industrial-scale farming practices.  On these farms cows care for their own young and munch real grass in real fields.  Cheese artisans are producing scrumptious cheese while bringing abused land back to life.   Yes, it’s more expensive but the thought of drinking the milk or eating the cheese of abused animals does little for the appetite.

Liz Thorpe, in her inspirational book, The Cheese Chronicles can single handedly inspire one to go artisanal, cold turkey (pardon the mixed metaphor).  She says this about how to taste cheese--with your nose:
        “When you taste cheese or wine, there are very specific physical
        sensations associated with taste: sweet, salty, sour/acidic, bitter. 
        But your mouth is actually quite limited.  Most of the romance of
        food comes after it’s been swallowed.  You exhale.   A breath of
        air rushes up the back of your nasal passages and out your
        nostrils, and suddenly there are a million sensory impressions,
        most of which have to do with smell: grass, hay, stone, soil, leather,
        soap, perfume, swimming pool, lead, pencil eraser, and on and on.”

Add a 21st century dollop of hip networking with haute restaurants and gourmet shops that’s nurturing this young craft’s hefty price tag of $12-$25 per pound for artisanal cheese, versus under $5/pound for factory scale, animal compromised cheese. 

Cheese Basics
-Raw vs. pasteurized
-Types of cheese
-Dairy farming

Raw vs. Pasteurized
I bet you think pasteurization’s a given?  I did.  Jim told me about a fellow biochemistry student from his university days.  After graduation he was researching brucellosis and contracted the disease, a chronic one, like tuberculosis, which can reoccur, and can be fatal.  Thankfully, brucellosis is rare in the U.S., less than 200 cases a year, contracted by people with extreme contact with animals, like slaughterhouse workers. 

Pasteurization kills all bacterium, the good along with the bad.   And therein lies a cheese makers dilemma.  Some of the most interesting tasting cheese is made with raw milk, for aging cheese is a lot like creating fine wines.  State agriculture departments set stringent sanitary standards for unpasteurized milk production, far cleaner than milk slated for pasteurization, an unsettling thought. 
Also unpasteurized cheese must be aged for at least sixty days.

In the U.S. the law requires veterinarians vaccinate all young stock against brucellosis and test dairy herds annually.  Canada declared their cattle brucellosis-free in 1985.  Elk and bison can also contract the disease--it’s epidemic in caribou.  Brucellosis is zoonotic, meaning it can be transmitted to humans from animals, from human to human, or with reverse zoonosis, from human to animal. 

Purple Haze, a fresh goat cheese  with lavender! (Cypress Grove California)

Types of cheese
Fresh cheese:  A high moisture cheese usually eaten within days of production
                         Purple Haze, most soft goat milk cheeses, cream cheese

Bloomy:            All exterior mold-ripened cheeses such as Brie & Camembert

Washed Rind:  Stinky cheese, regularly washed in brine (salt water) often
                         fortified  with yeast, buttermilk or alcohol.  Limburger &
                         Virginia’s Meadowcreek Grayson, a domestic Taleggio-style  soft
                         cheese.
      
Rind Line:        A line of ash runs down the middle, reducing the acidity
                         that inhibits the cheese ripening.  Unlike Brie, the rind is usually
                         unpalatable, although safe to eat.
Uncooked
Pressed:           Aged from 2-8 months, Cheddars

Cooked
Pressed:          Vat heated first then aged in often huge wheels, 50-150 lbs.
                        Gruyere, Parmigiano-Reggiano

Blue:                Mold is introduced in powder form during cheese making;
                        the mold needs oxygen to grow so when the cheese is
                        pierced the blue-ing process begins

Grafton Classic Reserve (Vermont) A raw milk Cheddar, uncooked press





Dairy farm basics
All dairies used to be small and traditional until about 50 years ago, when scientists began tinkering to increase milk production with bovine growth hormones and high energy feeds such as corn and soybeans.   Dairies grew in size and began housing cows in confined quarters to minimize labor requirements.  Large amounts of energy and chemicals are required to produce the high energy feeds versus simple grass pasture rotation and re-tilling the land for naturally maintained herds. 


               Cows and other dairy animals should live well, producing only as much
               milk as is healthful for them. This means that dairy animals
               should live out of doors, eating grass and being milked seasonally,
               and not indoors, being fed grain, hormones, and being milked to
               death.
                                                                         -Bobolink Dairy, NJ

Homefront by Carol Wallwork first posted online June 10, 2009

Emmy is Claire’s champion  whippet, seen here testing    
our new hand-knotted

Afghan rug. Whippets

are the sprinters of the dog world so they’re long and bony.  When it 

comes to nap time - by

necessity - they’re ace comfort detectors.         Our new rug’s hereby certified with the  

WHIPPET  
PAW OF 

APPROVAL
   

The Wines of Araby by Carol Wallwork first published online May 7, 2009

Homemade Latte in a Sam Taylor mug

What’s the most valuable (legal) commodity, besides oil?  Right---coffee.  Discovered in Ethiopia in the 9th century, transported to Yemen and Egypt, eventually it made it’s way to Italy. European traders were great disseminators of the coffee tree (they stole the beans to plant in various colonies).  “The vast  majority of growers of coffee,” explains Mark Pendergrast in Uncommon Grounds, “live in  the most beautiful places on earth, with tropical volcanic peaks, in climate -controlled heavens that rarely dips below 70 F or tops 80 F.”  The downside is they earn on average $3/day,receive scant medical care, have no running water, electricity or decent food.  If you buy a Starbucks coffee today, you’ve just spent the average daily wage of a worker on a coffee plantation.*
Two of my favorite novels are about failed coffee plantations:  Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen and The Flame Trees of Thika by Elsbeth Huxley.  It is a complicated, multi-layered substance with an equally complicated history, fraught with betrayal and intrigue. One of the more stimulating tidbits about coffee is it made it’s debut in Europe not long before the start of the Industrial Revolution.  The English at that time drank beer or gin, when they woke in the morning until they dropped off at night.  Everyone was sloshed. Brewing neutralizing the deadly water. Had coffee not percolated down to the masses by the early 1800s the Industrial Revolution would not have occurred.  Powerful stuff.
   

There are two types of coffee.  Robusta beans, hardier,more resistant to disease but bitter--the cheaper grade.  The refined bean is Arabica, harder to grow but the nectar of coffee lovers everywhere. Helped along by the invention of the espresso machine in 1950s Italy and the 1970s incorporation of Starbucks, which has grown into the largest coffee company in the  world.  *A way to help neutralize the bitterness of the coffee business inequity is to buy fair trade beans.

Northern Lights by Carol Wallwork first published online November 6, 2008

Hand-carved birch board by Fred Livesay

“The wood is birch and was cut early in the summer of ’06.  It grew in the yard next to my Mother’s house and had been slowly dying.  My Mom’s neighbor had the tree cut down because they were afraid it might come down on the house in a storm.  Most of the wood from that tree is very curly from the stresses of a slow but growing death.”
               -Fred Livesay
                St. Paul, Minnesota wood carver, 

                teacher, museum consultant            

Handwoven Double-walled Russian-style Birch Basket by John Zadada

 

September 2006 Jim and  I traveled to Grand Rapids, Minnesota for the annual Goods from the Woods Expo.  I also took a wood carving class taught by Jögge  Sundqvist, one of the foremost green wood carvers in Sweden, like his father before him.  I tried carving freshly cut wood with knives as sharp as scalpels, sort of like surgical whittling.
 

Detail, Birch Cutting Board by Fred Livesay

I came away from my time among the wood carvers with only one nicked finger and a radically changed view of how I wanted to fit in the world.  They reminded me of what I’d misplaced--that simple joy of being engaged with my surroundings.  Their knowledge of birch is encyclopedic, like a Medieval monk’s sensitivity to parchments and ink recipes compared to a  first year art student’s. They see wood in it’s totality-environment, life cycle, grain, color and shape.
Returning home I looked at my environment in a new light.  I began collecting goods from the woods.  I also began experimenting with hides, eventually developing a style of hand stitching purses and backpacks using traditional Native American materials---deerskin, glass beads, trinkets, feathers--but with contemporary designs. 

In July 2007 I displayed a collection of Northern artisans works at Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, Virginia. 

Carved Viking Bowl by Jon Strom, Cook, Minnesota 2008

Kief to Carrington, North Dakota by Carol Wallwork

(first posted online 2009)

                                      Near Kief, North Dakota           by Carol Wallwork September 2006

Left Dan & Marian’s Kief, North Dakota farm early Sunday morning, heading home to Virginia, driving southeast toward interstate expediency.  But first, the good roads.

Spooked a clutch of juvenile pheasants zig-zagging out of the ditch until their momma glided in, giving direction.  Then this church.  It’s elegantly simple, with finely balanced Lancet windows.  A stately icon of past settlement--of faith, enterprise and now quiet.  A kind of quiet , broken by pheasant cackle, grouse wings, fox yips and moonlit coyote howls.  Soon, the flurry of dusty pickups will thump on gravel, punctuated by deer-season thunder.

Stopped for Daryle Beckley’s long-horned cattle drive on Highway 200 near the outskirts of Carrington.  Cowboys sipping coffee, teenagers colas, both eating kuchen and venison sausages.  It’s windy but not too cold.  If only I could slip out of our Toyota van and alight on one of their horses, riding to a place far different from our near-Beltway life.