"You can't spell 'truth' without 'Ruth.'"
tumblr dot com
we're not kids anymore.
styofa doing anything

blake kathryn
Cosmic Funnies
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
taylor price
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
No title available

shark vs the universe
Show & Tell
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Monterey Bay Aquarium

izzy's playlists!
YOU ARE THE REASON
NASA
Cosimo Galluzzi
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
will byers stan first human second
seen from United States
seen from Trinidad & Tobago

seen from Trinidad & Tobago

seen from Trinidad & Tobago
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Brazil

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from El Salvador
@milkingsheep
"You can't spell 'truth' without 'Ruth.'"
John Fahey - Azalea City and Other Toxic Nostalgia
Interesting – thanks to Marcus over at Dying For Bad Music for alerting me to this.
“This is an unreleased original John Fahey album. Written, recorded and completed at the same time as Old Girlfriends And Other Horrible Memories. There is no artwork for this and would probably have been on the Varrick label if originally released.”
I haven’t listened to it yet, but if it’s 1/10 as good as this cover photograph, we’re all in for a treat.
Hi, I was wondering what your sheep are fed? And also do you lamb twice a year to get milk all year? How many are you milking? Thanks!
The sheep are fed hay in winter and green grass the rest of the year -- some GMO-free grain to keep them standing still while being milked. Freshening is staggered in order to provide milk year-round.
Mohawk Harvest Cooperative in Gloversville, NY
Green Star Co-op in Ithaca, NY
Four Seasons Natural Foods in Saratoga Springs, NY
Talbott and Arding in Hudson, NY
Community Co-op in Little Falls, NY
Sunflower Natural Foods in Woodstock AND Rhinebeck
The Hawthorne Valley Farm Store
Commodities Natural Market in the East Village
Cinnamon Girl Grocery on Flatbush Ave
Mother Earth's Storehouse in Kingston, NY
The Cheese Traveler on Delaware Ave in Albany NY
Hudson & Charles in the West Village
Westerly Market on 8th Ave at W 54th
Eli Zabar's Eli's Market on 3rd Ave above 80th
Cheryl Fillekes tasting out the Mohawk Drumlin Creamery Sheep’s Milk Greek Yogurt in Queens last week -- we sold out!
This weekend, the old lagering tunnels of Crown Finish Caves, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, play host to a fascinating series of cheesemaking events. David Asher, author of “The Art of Natural Cheesemaking”, will be leading a series of cheesemaking classes, focused on his unique methods of “lab-free” dairy production, from simple farmer’s cheeses and yogurts, to bloomy rinds in the style of Camembert, hard-aged Tommes and other advanced cheeses.
Asher is an organic farmer, cheesemaker and educator, based on Saltspring Island, British Columbia, where he runs the Black Sheep School of Cheesemaking. As he describes his approach on his site, he is “A guerrilla cheesemaker [who] does not make cheese according to standard industrial practices - he explores traditionally cultured, non-corporate methods of cheesemaking.”
The recipes eschew the use of the standard foil envelope-packaged, lab standardized starters, ripening cultures and adjuncts (if you’ve ever made cheese at home you’ve probably encountered these; here at Cheese Notes we’ll confess to using them on a regular basis); rather, with the use of Kefirs and other naturally produced produced mother cultures, he generates impressive results, producing cheeses that look, taste and smell like the real thing.
Which they are, of course; the history of cheesemaking, over the last thousands of years, has largely been one of cheesemakers fabricating cheese as Asher does, working with mother cultures, innoculating from one batch to the next, carefully stewarding the precious cultures over weeks, months and years, because there were no Chr. Hansen’s or Danisco’s to order from if you let them die. It’s only in the 20th century that widespread production of cultures in labs became standard practice, and the majority of cheesemakers came to rely on these prefabricated cultures in their daily work. The recipes are designed for the home and small-scale cheesemaker, but could certainly be scaled up to commercial production. And indeed, there are many commercial cheesemakrs who do utilize these methods, in whole or in part; for example, Peter Dixon, Vermont’s cheese whisperer and the maker behind Parish Hill Creamery, utilizes mother cultures which draw on the native microbiota of his Vermont terroir, and there are many others.
On Friday I attended the reception for the weekend, hosted by Crown Finish Caves and Slow Food USA. After mixing and mingling for a little while with fellow Brooklyn curd-lovers, Asher gave a talk in which he explained the fundamentals of his approach. The use of Kefir is central to Asher’s method; this unusual microbial gem is thousands of years old, a gelatinous lump of microbes that is teeming with a dizzying variety of organisms, which can turn milk into a delicious, efervescent beverage (Kefir), but can also be used as the starter culture for a wide variety of cheese styles. The organisms necessary are present; it’s just a matter of teasing them into action by exposing them to the proper conditions. Asher even manages to activate complex geotrichum and penicilium rind cultures, which you might not expect to be present in Kefir, thus producing bloomy rind, Camembert, Crottin and more.
He also showed us how, through the use of a simple slice of sourdough bread rubbed with a bit of blue cheese mold, he is able to grow his own blue cheese culture, which he can then innoculate into his milk for the cheesemaking.
After his talk, Crown finish laid out a sampling of their cheeses, including the Paymaster, which won a ribbon at this year’s American Cheese Society competition, the Capacious Buck, Suffolk Punch, West West Blue, and more. A delicious spread was provided by Crown Finish’s neighbors at 925 Bergen, The Pixie and the Scout (the brisket and their housemade kraut were the highlights for me).
The events for this weekend are sold out, but if you’re interested in learning more I highly recommend purchasing “The Art of Natural Cheesemaking”. And if you find yourself on the west coast of Canada, check out his classes at the Black Sheep School.
Nice work!
Where it all starts...munch munch munch
Life.
moar mongering #cheesemongerinvitational
Triboro bridge en route to #cheesemongerinvitational
Rockin Sensory Evaluation Old Style at Cornell!
First cheeses. Pecorino Drumlino on the right, Gruyere and Toma on the left.
Cherry Tree next to the creamery. Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
50 gal @Ovinshire Farm Sheep's milk in new MicrpDairy Designs bulk tank! Chart Recorder ON!
App Alert: Max McCalman’s Cheese & Wine Pairing
iPhone-carrying cheese and wine lovers now have a new resource to turn when they’re not sure what white to pair with that washed-rind: Max McCalman’s Cheese & Wine Pairing is now in the App Store for iPhone (an Android version may come in the future).
McCalman —one of the early evangelists for cheese in the U.S. through his work as an author and educator, and his years leading the cheese program at Artisanal and restaurants like Picholine — is a Maître Fromager and the author of one of the definitive books out there, Mastering Cheese: Lessons for Connoisseurship from a Maître Fromager. On his blog, he discusses the genesis of the app:
It all began about twenty years ago, one block east of Lincoln Center, when a guest at Picholine Restaurant declined the suggestion of Port for his cheese selection and asked for a different wine-by-the-glass option instead. This began my quest for optimal pairings for all the fine cheeses I would encounter. I initially wrote out notes on each pairing: The Silverado Cabernet Sauvignon starts off on the right foot with the Spenwood, fruity vs. savory, then they go their separate ways, with no synergy in the “finish;” all that remains is a memory of the Cab while the cheese lingers sweetly to the end; the wine is flattened.
Even though extensive and informative, these notes were not user-friendly for quick reference. Those thoughts were recorded onto a Word document but were quickly replaced with quantifiable scores so that I could look up Cabernet Sauvignon, for example to find a complementing selection of cheeses, or in reverse, look up Spenwood and find a list of satisfactory wine partners. An early decision to be made was how to score those cheese and wine matches. I came up with a five-point spread, from +2 (a great match) to -2 (a disaster), with 0 being the neutral point (nothing lost, nothing gained). There was a temptation to rate a pairing a 0+ from time to time, but I soon left those middling scores for others to record and stuck to whole numbers…
…Converting all of this data into a viable app has been a months long project and it appears we can finally see the light at the end of the proverbial cheese tunnel now. The first version of the app will launch May 1st (subject to Apple’s approval) and will be supported by iPhone, with a nice chunk of the thousands of pairings included. The frequent updates will include new entries, interactive features for the subscribers, such as adding their own scores and comments, ‘favoriting’ cheeses, wines, and pairings, as well as a revolutionary in-app purchasing and fulfillment solution. Future extensions will feature beer pairings, then spirits, then ciders, etc.
Check out the full post, and get the app ($2.99, iPhone).
Really important data to have captured. Years of research...
Cheese Science:
B/c of its high protein & fat content, it takes half as much sheep’s milk as cow’s milk to make the same amount of cheese.
And, for the same reason, there’s “no whey” to drain off the yogurt to make it Greek!
Over at their Tumblr, Consider Bardwell Farm talks about the birth of Slyboro, their cider-washed cheese. Via considerbardwellfarm:
We don’t try to add new projects to our already busy schedule without good cause. The yearlong allocation of milk, daily cheesemaking and affinage (or, “cheese babysitting”) make adding anything to our plates a decision we approach carefully. Goat milk, especially in our corner of Vermont, is tough to come by. We have 135 does milking right now, and with a limited supply of Manchester and Danby every year, taking milk away from those batches meant gambling precious casein on an entirely new product. Slyboro was a risk that has paid off.
The key and namesake of this fella is it’s hard apple cider wash. Slyboro Cidery, down the road in Granville, NY, helps us connect our region’s cheesemaking tradition with that of the drink that the average American once downed 35 gallons of yearly. We can only dream of similar per-capita consumption rates for the Slyboro…
Read the full post.
Go Leslie! considerbardwellfarm