Last sunday was my first delivery for Ging`s Artisan Goat`s Cheese- CSA in Brussels.
For the past few months I`ve been working hard to choose which ones to present and loving every minute of it.
I finally came up with these beauties for the first delivery.
- a fresh goats cheese with honey from our own hives ( sadly no picture)
- a fresh goat's cheese with apricot and sage ( top left)
- a hard cheese with cloves and cumin ( 3 photo, top left)
- a fresh aged, white moulded goats cheese, called "oh, so Billy" ( 3 photo, top right)
- a fresh aged, charcoal ( charcoal, made here on the smallholding) goats cheese. ( bottom photo)
My passion for making traditional, artisan goat`s cheeses:
I am passionate about my artisan cheese`s, to me it is very important to know were all my produce comes from and what impact if any, it has on the enviroment. With these thoughts in mind it took me down a road to make my own cultures and rennet for the cheese`s, so I could truely say everything in the cheese making is natural and made here on the smallholding. After a far bit of research I discovered it was possible to make a culture for cheese making with ant eggs !!! yes ant eggs and I make the rennet with nettles.
Collecting the ants eggs and how I make the culture:
well ofcourse true me style, I had to go hunting for the ant eggs, after a bit of trial and error, digging holes all over the place, I discovered that I only needed to move a animal feed bin in the field and there they were, lots a ants running around like mad trying to move there eggs, I just assisted and took about a teaspoon of them.
now here are the steps to make my culture ( it also works for making yoghurt )
- I started with about 125ml of milk
- I put the ant eggs in a little piece of sterile cheese cloth and I tied it so the eggs wouldn`t mix freely with the milk.
- I slowly heated the milk up to 25 celcius and then put the milk into a thermos flask to keep the heat constant.
- After about 5 hours, you will see that the milk has set, it looks a bit like a soft jelly, then it`s good to go.
- strain the eggs in the cheese cloth out of the milk and...
hey presto, we have a culture for the cheese (yoghurt).
I use around 60ml of this mother culture in 1 litr of milk to make a new batch of culture and freeze it for further use in cheese making.
