Around this time last year, my sister Christina came across a stand at the Union Square Greenmarket. The stand was from the Valley Shepherd Creamery in
Long Valley, NJ. They sold cheese, and the cheeses were named Califon, Tewksbury, Oldwick and more. Hey! These are the towns in and around where our parents live! She tried some cheese. It was good. Very good. Especially the Tewksbury, which is where Mom and Dad live.
Fast forward nearly 12 months, and here we were, paying $150 for the privilege to see how cheese is made, and to make a wheel of it ourselves.
The class is taught by the inimitable Eron Wajswol, an engineer/builder turned farmer/cheesemaker. We got to see some sheep and goats, learn about how cheese is made, visit the aging cave which was blasted into the side of a hill on the120 acre property, and mostly observe the making of a vat of cheese. We got to participate in the making of our own wheels of cheese at the very end. It was made of mostly cow’s (Jersey and Gurnsey cows) and sheep’s milk.
Here’s what I learned:
1) Sheep don’t produce much milk, but their milk has a higher fat and protein content than cow’s or goat’s milk. I never knew why sheeps milk cheese was my favorite but now I do. Ewes have a short cycle for their milk production (unlike cows or goats, who can produce milk all year round), so you can only get a ewe to produce milk for about half the year.
2) If your’e going to come back as a sheep in your next life, try to be a genetically superior male sheep. That way, you get to spend most of your days grazing around and a few months a year in a pen with 30 ewes in heat. If you’re not going to be genetically superior, though, then it’s better to be a girl (assuming you don’t mind being milked by a machine every day and spending a few months a year in a pen, in heat, with 30 girlfriends and one genetically superior ram). Otherwise, you’re going to end up as racks and chops pretty quickly.
3) Cheese making is a tough business, and it involves a lot of ingenuity, from animal husbandry to fancy mechanical devices. I was amazed at how a successful artisanal cheese operation involves combination of technology and hands on work. Much of the cheese making decisions were made by hand and eye (that looks like it’s about 30% whey), but there were also some state-of-the art machines to aid with milking and turning the milk into cheese.
If you’re at all interested in learning about the process of making cheese, this is a fun, easy way to do it. If you want something more hands-on, then this is probably not the best class for you. If you just want to try the cheese, you can check out their new store in SoHo.
Here are some pictures from the class:
Pouring the milk into the vat
The cheese curds in the mold:
Flipping the molded cheese for even compression:
Pressing the cheese to condense it into its final shape:
Finished product, ready for aging (though these are different cheeses from the ones we made):
