This system solves all of the varied volume challenges a dairy faces. The volume produced can vary every day, and yet with a large number of dairies in the co-op, the volume is evened out and remains fairly constant. A dairy can concentrate on producing as much milk as possible without any waste from overproduction; the bottler purchases all the milk.
Co-op production demands pasteurization. The milk from all of the cows from each dairy is first mixed in the bulk tank at the dairy. Then the contents of the bulk tanks from all of the dairies are mixed in the tanker truck, and then the milk from different tankers is conceivably mixed at the bottling plant. If one cow was sick, if one milking machine contaminated with coliforms, the entire co-op batch could be contaminated. Granted, the bad milk would be hugely diluted, but the possibility of a huge public health incident is too serious to risk, and so pasteurization is needed.
With pasteurization, the entire volume of milk is treated to eliminate pathogens in the milk. Without pasteurization, the dairy industry could not have expanded from small, local independent dairies delivering their own milk to a nationwide system of large dairies shipping milk all over the United States.
At least in the state of Washington, raw dairies are required to bottle their own milk. They are not allowed to sell their milk to a bottling plant. This is logical, as the large factory could not be confident that it could keep the raw milk and the milk to be pasteurized separate throughout the process.
Making cheese is the answer to a simple problem: Milk has a short shelf life. It needs constant refrigeration, a large challenge up until the Twentieth century. Grass that cows eat to produce milk is most prolific in the summer, and the option for feeding cows in the winter—hay—is difficult to produce and therefore expensive. Finding ample sources of protein for people to eat throughout the year, made difficult by cold winters, gave cheese an added bonus.
Cheese solves all of these challenges. When cows are eating lush spring, summer and early fall pastures they can be milked, and the milk is transformed into cheese, which can be stored throughout the year with minimal refrigeration to be used as needed.
You can look at cheese making—and charcuterie as well—as the result of a challenge that plagued people living off of the land. Their solution is a pleasing culinary delicacy, but its roots lie in a basic need: preserving food through the winter. The various riffs on the basic idea of cheese all relate back to cheese’s preservation function. Coating cheeses with ash helps keep flies away; smoking has the same function. Ricotta is a way to utilize more of the proteins in the whey to get the most from the work of raising the cows.
The cheese cooler in my kitchen was manufactured as a chocolate cooler, the supplier tells me, the thermostat set from the customary forty degrees of a normal refrigerator and lower to the more comfortable fifty-five degrees that chocolate prefers, and, as it happens, the temperature that cheese prefers as well. The shelves have been adapted from their standard kitchen aluminum to the much more friendly pine to house the cheese. Aluminum could leave a bad taste in the cheese and its inability to temper the moisture of the cheese makes it inappropriate.
Seeing the rows of hard cheeses that will spend their year-long life in this case gives me comfort; it is the equivalent of a savings account. Financial times may be strained, but we will always have cheese to grate on the dinner noodles.
Cheese making is similar to other simple pursuits. There are only a few rules, a short list of ingredients and yet the results are infinite; some cheeses are really quite bad, most are adequate and every so often a fabulous result arrives. The blocks of dyed cheese shrink-wrapped on the supermarket shelves are in fact cheese—or so I want to believe—and they have the same basic preparation as a lovely raw-cow’s-milk Camembert from an artisanal French producer.
The basics of cheese production are: changing the acid level of the milk by adding cultures, adding rennet to coagulate the milk, cutting the curds to expel the whey, forming the cheese and aging the cheese. There are certainly variations to this simple procedure, but all cheese making follows this basic idea.
In order for the milk to have the ability to curdle from the addition of rennet, the pH must be brought down. The addition of a culture to the milk performs this function. The culture pitched into the milk converts the lactose to lactic acid. Conceivably milk could be allowed to sour on its own over time. If left at a warm temperature for a few hours the milk would sour and culture on its own, equally changing the acid level.
Immediately after the bacteria culture has begun to do its work, a rennet is added to the milk. The purpose of the rennet is to curdle the milk; to gather the casein proteins in milk to coalesce together.
Although vegetable rennet also exists, the classic rennet is from the stomach of a calf. When a calf is still suckling from its mother, its stomach needs special enzymes to break down its mother’s milk for digestion. When the stomach—the abomasum—of a young calf is removed and cultured with the addition of a liquid, the result is the rennet. The capturing of rennet and its use in the making of cheese is one of the reasons for the existence of veal. The other is simply the need to breed dairy cows yearly. Dairy cows produce an abundance of young calves each year.
A small volume of rennet is poured into the warm milk—as little as a teaspoon per ten gallons of milk. Within minutes the powerful enzyme pulls all of the casein proteins in the milk together, creating a thick jellylike substance. The whey begins to be pushed out along the edge of the curds.
In order to expel the whey from the curds—the basic idea of cheese making—the curds are cut to create more surface area. Long-bladed knives or wires slice through the thick jelly at designated intervals to create individual cubes of a desired size. The more cuts and the smaller the cubes, the more whey is extracted; the fewer cuts and the larger the cubes, the less whey will be able to seep out from the curds.
Once the curds have been cut and the whey begins to pull away from the individual cubes, the curds are formed into a shape to become the final cheese. Round, square, squat, tall, pyramidal or cylindrical—each shape and size has some implications for the final nature of the desired cheese and also plays on certain cheese-making traditions. The curds can be pressed, layered and cut, or simply ladled into a mold. Curds may be salted while curds, or salt can be added later on the surface, or the whole cheese can be brined by submersing it in highly salted water. The cheese can be consumed immediately or aged for days, weeks or months, depending on the desired outcome.
That is the basic procedure for making cheese. Milk curdled, the whey removed, the curds brought together and formed into a cheese. All the many cheeses of the world follow that same procedure and yet they are completely different. It is the variations that make the spectrum of cheese vast and interesting.
The choice of milk is fairly straightforward, whether cow, sheep, goat or possibly water buffalo. A combination of two or three of these types of milk makes cheese even more complex and unusual. Personally I have no interest in milking a sheep. They are just too smelly and uncute for my taste. I can’t even comment on water buffalo. Life is difficult enough without milking a water buffalo every day.
The temperature at which the milk is coagulated can have an effect on the final outcome. Lower temperatures produce lighter, fresh cheeses; higher temperatures make for a tighter curd for hard cheeses. Once the curds have been cut and the whey begins to be expelled, the curds are often cooked as well, though not for fresh cheeses. For harder, aged cheeses, the curds are cooked up to 125 degrees. This creates tough, firm curds. The whey is completely expelled from the curds and the resulting cheese will be firm and dry.
The choice of shape for the cheeses is varied and probably the most evocative of the final product. We all know by sight what a Brie looks like or a Stilton or a Parmesan, without ever taking a bite. The shape is what mostly informs the prospective eater, although the color helps as well.
The shapes are not as arbitrary as they look. The basic idea is th
at smaller cheeses ripen faster than larger. Brie wheels are very wide and yet very thin. The cheese is never more than two inches thick, and will therefore ripen quickly and over the entire area. Parmesan cheeses are tall and round. Very little of the mass of the cheese has any surface area. The Parmesan will age for months without completely drying out. Fresh goat cheeses are often formed in muslin bags, to be quickly drained and used as fresh cheese spreads immediately, therefore a mold is not necessary.
The most difficult part of cheese making is the aging. The basic variables are temperature, humidity and cultures in the air. As it happens, these three qualities are connected. The type of cultures present, or the type of cultures that can be presented, are dependent on a suitable combination of temperature and humidity. Without the appropriate physical conditions, the desired molds cannot live.
Of course, this is a basic explanation of cheese. Some cheeses are coated in wax, some brined, some curds are washed with warm water to cook them, some are smoked and so on. The variations in preparation and presentation could easily fill a book, and certainly have.
Whenever there has been an overabundance of milk at my farm, I have experimented with making different cheeses. Some have been successful, others really quite poor. The former are enjoyed here at the table, the eager pigs consume the latter.
I love to sit in the kitchen, tasting the cheeses right from the cooler. They are tasty, full of flavor and nourishing. More importantly, however, they are unique and of this farm. I can look through the open French doors out to the pasture thirty feet from the doors and see the cows. Lily and Boo and Dinah, Luna and Andi, are there grazing, watching me as I watch them. It is their milk that is the basis for this cheese. It is their cream that is the basis for the butter that lurks in the crock in the cooler as well. It’s a long voyage from pasture grass to raw milk to fresh butter or aged cheese, but every stop along the way is fascinating and can be tasted in the final product.
As I immersed myself in the world of dairy, I started to mull my business opportunities. Unlike beekeeping or managing an orchard, one can hardly manage to dairy as a hobby. The time commitment is enormous, and on top of that, the equipment and facilities require a very serious financial outlay. Conservatively, I would guess I spent in the ballpark of $50,000 on the buildings alone. Owning an operational dairy made me feel like a real farmer, but in order to keep my fledgling dairy afloat, I would have to figure out how to start turning a profit.
Eight
Raw Milk
When Dinah arrived here five-plus years ago, I had put little thought into how she would fit into the overall scheme of this farm. Keeping a cow, milking her and selling the milk seemed simple at the time. In the end it was more complicated than I could have imagined. I thought I would pour her fresh milk into mason jars and sell it to my neighbors. Raw milk is simply that: milk that it is not pasteurized. The vast majority of all milk sold in this country is pasteurized, milk that is heated to a high enough temperature to kill any possible pathogenic bacteria or diseases present in the milk.
I started down the road toward having a licensed raw dairy much by accident. I had visited a farm on the island owned by a friend who had cows and who was selling raw milk. He related to me that he couldn’t produce enough milk to satisfy all the demand he had for raw milk. He was getting a decent price for the milk, so at first glance it sounded ideal.
Raw milk is in demand throughout the nation. It constitutes a very small percentage of total milk sales, but the people who are looking for it are fervent, willing to pay for it and will do what it takes to get it. No large national company supplies raw milk; it is illegal in many states, and controversial in all states. Thus we have a great demand, no supply and little competition. From a business perspective, selling raw milk is excellent.
Soon after this initial visit to my friend’s farm, I began my hunt for a dairy cow. Within a few months I was milking Dinah and selling the milk.
I would milk Dinah into large plastic containers and then place the warm milk into the cooler to chill. The next day I would open the container, find the milk chilled, pour it into half-gallon canning jars and deliver it to friends on the island. The milk was tasty, the glass jars harkened back to simpler times and my customers were happy.
Unfortunately, I had no license to sell milk. I knew that selling raw milk, or any milk for that matter, without a license was illegal. Oddly, I managed to put that fact out of my mind. Collectively, the impression among those of us who sold raw milk and those who bought it from us was that the state had no interest in granting a raw dairy license and that contacting them would lead to the sudden demise of your dairy. The intrinsic nature of the business kept me from thinking too deeply about the nature of my lawbreaking. All I was doing was milking a cow and selling the milk to people who wanted it: how could that be against the law? Lawbreakers were people who practiced in deception, who produced one thing and called it another; that was fraud, this was just providing a service for nice folk who liked milk. I was not one to ever break the law, or so I thought. I paid my taxes, mostly, never ran a red light, never drove too fast and in general have no ability to lie.
And then one day it all changed. In the southern part of Washington State just minutes from the Washington-Oregon border, was a small farm that was selling raw milk on a small scale, just like I was. This farm had set up a “cow-share program,” whereby their customers technically owned shares of the cows. Although it is illegal to sell milk without a license, it is legal to drink the milk that your own personal cow produces. And so small farms attempt to get around the licensing of dairies by “selling” a percentage of their cows to their customers. Each customer pays for the hay and grain and boarding of their percentage ownership of their cow and in return is given a share of the milk produced by that cow. The system is logical and creative, if nothing else. Unfortunately for the dairies, the state of Washington does not accept cow-sharing as a legitimate method of circumventing the licensing procedures.
Still, all would have been fine had the milk been healthy. Sadly, this farm sent out gallons of raw cow’s milk tainted with E. coli 0157:H7. The result was more than a dozen children sickened from the milk, five children hospitalized and two children in need of continued health care.
The news rumbled through the farm world quickly. The state moved in, shutting down the farm, and explicitly documenting the health violations. The farm was charged with selling milk without a license and additionally was threatened with federal prosecution. Because the farm’s customers lived in the state of Oregon and drove across the river to Washington State to buy the milk, and because the farm owners were aware of it, the farm owners were threatened with a federal crime.
The day that I heard about the E. coli outbreak, I pulled the plug on the milk cooler in my farm stand, and refused to sell milk to any of my customers until I could be licensed by the state. I contacted the state Department of Agriculture the next morning and began the steps needed to obtain a Grade “A” license for the selling of raw milk.
Six months later I had constructed a dairy fit to be licensed by the state of Washington for the sale of fluid raw milk for human consumption. Contrary to my original perception of the Department of Agriculture, they were quite cooperative. Their attitude is that it is better to keep track of raw dairies, inspect the facilities and test the milk, than to create a culture where raw milk is sold outside of the law, inspection and testing.
Although selling raw milk within the restrictions of the Department of Agriculture was at times frustrating, I slept a bit easier at night. The fear of small white government cars with exempt license plates pulling up in my driveway and slapping me with a cease-and-desist order vanished.
I do miss one part of my old way of selling milk outside of the law. Originally the milk from the cows, up to five gallons at a time, was cooled in large plastic containers. The milk was simply placed in conventional refrigerators until the next morning. I never checked the temperature hour
s after the milk was put in the cooler, partly out of ignorance, or partly out of not wanting to know.
Milk has certain characteristics that are not immediately apparent. Although milk is liquid much like water, it takes a considerable amount of time to cool. In order to comply with the state’s requirements, the milk must be chilled to below forty degrees within two hours of the cow being milked. This is the most difficult requirement to meet.
Bacteria, both good and bad, reproduce in milk. Milk is an ideal breeding ground. It is fluid, it is warm—ninety-eight degrees—when it comes out of the cow, and it is full of sugar that is the perfect food for bacteria. These factors are what make milk so risky. If milk lacked any of these three criteria, then it would be far safer. Carrots, for example, are solid, not fluid. Pathogens cannot colonize a whole carrot within days, much less hours. If milk was cold out of the cow, bacteria could still take over the full volume, but at a far slower speed.
If milk is quickly chilled, then the bacteria have a shorter period of time to regenerate through the volume of milk. It is therefore imperative to chill the milk within the two-hour window, as required by the state. When I originally placed the large five-gallon containers filled with warm, ninety-eight-degree milk into the cooler, the milk took around twelve hours to cool to forty-degrees. The bacteria had many hours to regenerate throughout the milk, colonizing it completely.
If the bacteria were pathogenic this would have been a disaster. The hazardous agents, instead of being present in the milk in very small volumes, would have reproduced to the point that every glass of milk could have had a sufficient volume to get the consumer sick. Luckily, this never happened.
Growing a Farmer Page 14
