Homemade
Now that we are several months’ deep into a daily morning cow milking habit, it’s about time for some reflections. It’s exactly how they always told you - getting outside into fresh air first thing in the morning, no matter the weather, to sit quietly and do a repetitive task is profoundly good for you. It betters your daily composure and improves attitude.
Dealing with more than 10l of raw milk everyday balances this out nicely. The associated chores of filtering, bottling, processing all of the milk and endlessly cleaning and sterilising all manner of equipment provide a grind on your composure and attitude that will send you right back to just below average. The occasional extended calf chase through a muddy paddock in the rain with diminishing daylight may even introduce some rage at times. To get milk in the morning you have to lock up the calf each night you see. Dairy farms just kill the calf to make it easier and steal more milk.
I skim the cream in the afternoons just before bottling and make a pound of butter every third day. Most afternoons the kitchen and porch turn into a busy hub of milk getters and valley gossip. The latest docking dramas, eggs, health issues, information on missing dogs and deaths, stories about grandmothers or grandchildren, surplus fruit and vegetables are exchanged for cups of tea or the occasional rum and coke while we funnel fresh milk from a big stainless steel bucket into clean glass on the kitchen table.
The worst part of milking for me is making cheese - a chore I have grown to resent. In many ways, making cheese is worse than baking. Instructions need to be followed strictly. Everything needs to be measured and timed with precision, rather than intuition. The process is unforgiving. It is easy to mess up. The entire ordeal is dictated by a suffocating demand for cleanliness. Everything needs to be sterilised, some equipment repeatedly. Without a dishwashing machine, this is as onerous as it is annoying. At times, the rennet does not go off because there was a slight inconsistency in temperatures somewhere along the way. The ruined curds are then fed to the dogs and buried in the gardens for the worms. At other times, the process takes unexpectedly double as long as the already unreasonable average timeframe of two hours. The entire process requires full attention. It is not possible to do other things alongside the cheese. The wait times are nothing but a deceptive tease. You have to watch and gently stir the milk, whey, curds, depending on what stage of the process you are at, for lengthy periods of time where seemingly nothing happens. But as soon as you divert your attention elsewhere, you are punished with ruined milk.
Although there are long ‘wait and watch’ times in the process, there is no opportunity to nip outside and quickly attend to a horse’s hoof issue, tidy up in the shed, fix a trough, harrow a paddock or water the greenhouse. I can confirm that doing any of these things while making cheese will lead to failure. Making cheese forces you to patiently focus on one single task for hours. While I make cheese at least once per week, I ponder why I torture myself in this manner.
I have talked to quite a few people about cheese making by now, so I realise that there are plenty of people out there who genuinely enjoy making cheese. They love it. They love guarding a process and ensuring it will turn out well this time - a bit like lawyers who enjoy conveyancing perhaps.
My main conclusion is that doing everything individually is utter non sense. The fact that we have taken to pool resources and let those people who enjoy making cheese do it at scale and sell it to others is progress. Individual homesteading and the tradwife internet rat snot about homemade goods is the opposite of that. It is utter backwards crap. Don’t do everything yourself. Unless you are actually good at something useful, do not waste your time and just get others to make your cheese.
#ban1080
