Archive for ‘cheese’

Oregon Cheese Festival 2012 Discoveries

By Susie, 18 March, 2012,

The almost-most wonderful time of year is when the Oregon Cheese Festival rolls around. This Rogue Valley event — which kicked off with a Cheese Makers Dinner in Ashland — attracts many of Oregon’s best food and beverage artisans and farmers. My Oregon emissary Robin attended this year’s event, and here’s what really caught her palate:

Zella Hazelnuts out of Bend, OR was sampling delicious dry roasted hazelnuts made by generations of hazelnut growers. An interesting tidbit: The farmers switched from calling the nuts filberts to hazelnuts when they realized that no one knew what filberts were. (Here’s what the Oregon Hazelnut Marketing Board has to say about that.)
Zorba’s Chocolates out of Ashland, OR uses raw, unroasted cacao beans in their chocolate making to be as close to “fresh off the tree” as possible. Their chocolate was intense dark, and the espresso and plain ganache truffles struck me as delicious.
Aside from local favorite Rogue Creamery, some interesting “new to me” cheese makers I look forward to exploring more in the future included Tumalo Farms from Bend; La Mariposa cows milk cheese made by an Argentinian transplant in Albany, OR; Portland Creamery; Briar Rose Creamery from Dundee, OR.
I also had a wonderful locally made lavender jelly from L’Islandoux made by a delightful French woman.
And to top it all of, fantastically fluffy marshmallows from Marshmallow Heaven from Rogue River.

See who else was there — a long list of fabulous food worth pursuing next year!

~Robin

Want to Start a Preserves Business? Here’s One Way…

By Susie, 12 March, 2012,

inna jam Hot off the pixels, the San Francisco Chronicle introduces the new Food Craft Institute (FCI), based in Oakland’s Jack London Square from the folks who brought us the Eat Real festival. The institute will offer what I call “apprenticeship bootcamps,” with hands-on learning from numerous food crafters and entrepreneurs as well as business-ey types such as moi!

You can learn from the likes of Dafna Kory, who is taking her jam business – kicked off at the local forage sf underground markets – to the next level, thanks to Kickstarter. Chip in and get some of her popular preserves. Hope to see you at the FCI!

Or think really big about how you might start a unionized berry farm with an honor system farm stand like Swanton Berry Farm.

Food Crafters – Enter the 2012 Good Food Awards !

By Susie, 6 July, 2011,

The Second Annual Good Food Awards is now accepting entries! Food producers may now enter their products on the Good Food Awards website under the categories of beer, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, coffee, pickles and preserves, and (a brand new category) spirits.

Also new this year, the Good Food Awards will be recognizing a select group of winners with a Gold Seal. This award will honor producers who have reached the stage of full, certified organic status while also leading on taste and social responsibility. For more information click here to view the full press release.

The deadline for entries is September 1, 2011.

Visit to Krugerrand Farms – Farmstead Goat Cheese Maker

By Susie, 23 June, 2010,

me the goat cheese maker Have you ever wondered why hand made artisan farmstead cheese is so costly?

A visit to Krugerrand Farms, a daughter and father goat cheese operation in upstate New York, gave me all the answers. Here’s a short list:

The high cost of goating: feed, hay, and general caretaking
The time to individually milk 60-odd goats
The 1.5 gallons of fresh goat milk (about 10 pounds) it takes to make each pound of cheese. (After it gets finished aging it comes out to about 12 lbs of milk to a pound of cheese.)
Many hours to make each wheel of cheese (check out all the steps below; I left all the time cleaning up out, but this place is clean!)
Then many hours to wash the natural rind off the cheese before delivering it to customers

goat milk latte However it’s all worth it. Here I’d like to share my delightful visit and give you a taste of the story, love and labor that goes into Krugerrand Cheese. As well as the visual here of my latte made with milk straight from the goat. (Instant foam!)

Making Cheese – From Goat to Grate

Morning begins with the “running of the goats” – into the barn that is. There they await their milking and munching. The farm has a variety of goats, some prize winners. Lisa is a co-owner of the cheese company and also recently graduated with a civil engineering degree from a Michigan college.

Lisa and James Andela love their goats, which they milk each day. The goats – each who they know by name – eat natural feed during the milking.
Lisa milking the goats

Goats after milking Karla and baby goat

Every other day, Lisa and Jim make cheese. This one vat makes about 30 pounds of cheese. Each pound of cheese takes 9-10 gallons of goat milk. During the aging process, due to the natural rind, the cheese evaporates which is important to factor in when calculating the cheese making costs.
Pouring raw goat milk into the cheese making vat

This was the most fun part! There’s a horizontal and a vertical slicer and running it through the vat breaks up the soft curd into chunks.
Slicing cheese curd up during cheese making - Krugerrand Farms

Working the curds by hand lets the cheese maker more closely monitor the progress of heating and texture of the curds. Lisa gathers the curds to mold into wheels.

The pressed curds go through several stages before they’re ready to be aged. First it’s put in the brine (salt) solution for a couple of days. The brine creates the protective layer.

Then the cheese drains and dries for a couple of weeks on racks, before getting ready to hibernate to its glorious state of aged-ness.

The raw milk cheeses are aged for about 6 months (2 months is the minimum raw milk cheese needs to be aged in the U.S.)

All of the cheeses have natural rinds, and it takes a lot of scrubbing to “clean them” before the team ships them out to cheese shops, restaurants, and cheese lovers.

Learn more about Krugerrand Farm and the qualities of their cheeses.

You can also find them on Foodzie.

Want to visit Krugerrand Farms?
They’re looking into agri-tourism stays and WWOOFing so you too might be able to make a goat milk latte!

the cheese