"Farmer cheese" forming curds with the addition of vinegar at high heat.  At right, the finished product.

While the ground is frozen and we are still waiting to start maple sugaring, Daisy continues to turn hay and grain into milk for us.  We have been making butter, ice cream and cheese from the milk.

It is useful to organize cheeses into families based on the distinct ways used to coagulate the fat and protein of milk.  All cheese-making is concerned with removing lactose and water to concentrate milk’s proteins and fats but there are a multiplicity of methods to achieve this end.

The most simple cheeses, among them Cottage Cheese and Cream Cheese, use acid as a coagulant.  The acid is typically from a lactic-acid producing bacterial culture.  These cheeses require only minimal cooking after curds form to prevent an active culture from producing further acid.  These cheeses have high moisture content and should be eaten within 2 to 3 weeks.

Fresh cheeses like Queso Blanco and Queso Fresco use the enzyme rennet as the coagulant.  Rennet can be derived from the stomach of a calf or other ruminant, or extracted from a certain plants, including the common pasture plant bedstraw (Galium spp.).  Rennet-coagulated cheeses use no acid-producing culture, and so the pH remains close to neutral.  This is a benefit for a cook who wants a cheese that can be fried, but it can be risky to store a cheese at such a high pH because more microorganisms may thrive.  Some cheese-makers add a culture to Queso Blanco to reduce the pH to about 5.8, slowing the growth of microorganisms but maintaining enough alkalinity to make a cheese that won't melt in the skillet. 

Our “farmer cheese” is a heat-acid precipiatated cheese in the style of Ricotta and the Indian cheeses Channa and Paneer.  No fermentation or culturing is involved.  We have been making this cheese regularly and the procedure is simply to heat the whole milk to about 175 F and then add acid.  The cheese curds form within seconds, separating from the increasingly yellow whey.  We use apple cider vinegar because it was commonly available in the early 1900s to New Jersey farmers, but any organic acid will do the trick.  Lactic and citric acids are most commonly employed. 

One fascinating advantage that heat-acid cheeses have over other simple cheeses is that the high heat denatures the whey protein, making it available to be coagulated along with the protein casein when acid is added.  This greatly increases the yield and protein punch of the final product.  Furthermore, the whey protein bonds well to water and so the resulting cheese holds great moisture content but is quite firm.

The second marvel of heat-acid cheeses is that they have a pH in the skillet-worthy range, between 5.2 and 6.0, because milk at high heat requires less acid to coagulate protein.   

For the curious, an extremely comprehensive guide to cheese making and all things dairy can be found at  the University of Guelph's website on Dairy Science.  Use your google or cut and paste this link: http://www.foodscience.uoguelph.ca/dairyedu/home.html

Stay tuned for dairy demonstrations at the farm in the near future.

A sample of a true 1900 ice harvest can be seen in an incredible piece of footage taken in 1919. Click here to see this short video from the silent film era.

Hannah Houghton uses ice tongs to grab ice.

Annie Hasz, Ian Ferry, and Kyle Runkle saw and pike the ice.

Six year old Garrett Houghton pikes ice. This is his second season of helping with the harvest of ice.A section of the ice was cleared of snow, scored with an ice plow, and then sawed into even rectangles with circa 1900 ice saws. Other staff and several young volunteers grabbed pikes to slide the cut ice to the banks where it was loaded up on a wagon via a ramp and ice tongs.

A total of three ton of ice was hauled off the pond and unloaded into Howell Farm's ice house. This early harvest will supplement the harvest scheduled for January 29, when Howell Farm welcomes visitors to join them in reliving the essential winter harvest of the turn-of-the-last-century.

Howell Farm visitors and volunteers in potato field.

At Howell Farm, potatoes are unearthed with a potato plow pulled by horses then gathered up by hand (see photo below).

Other Crop Notes:

Farmers Rob Flory and Pete Watson drive the potato plow with horses Jack & Chester.The recent rain has improved conditions for what little crops are left on the farm. The sweet corn matured too early to be served at Howell Farm's "Fiddle Contest" event on Saturday, August 28, so farmer Rob Flory and his son Martin Flory have been chopping the corn stalks and feeding it to Howell Farm's cow Daisy since green grass has been lacking.

Howell Farm entered medium brown eggs, grade B maple syrup, and honey at the Middletown Grange Fair. Brown eggs received a 2nd place ribbon and Howell Farm's prize winning maple syrup attained another blue ribbon. Honey was not awarded a ribbon.

Pumpkins have also done very well compared to previous years at Howell Farm. Farm manager Gary Houghton says that the dryness has kept mildew away that ruined last year's pumpkin crop.

However, the drought has taken its toll in the South Crop Fields (see crop map) where the soil contains more shale. Crops like Timothy hay that is expected to regrow after the first hay cutting withered out, "but some of the deeply-rooted weeds like Canada thistle have [not]" says farmer Rob Flory. A turn-of-the-century solution:  on Saturday, August 7 farmer Ian Ferry drove horses Jack & Chester as they pulled a 1918 McCormick #6 sickle bar mower and cut the thistles. Thistles and weeds are not easily stopped and will require much of the farmers' time to keep them from taking over the crop fields.

The newly restored threshing floor housed a large antique thresher, proudly proclaiming its manufacturing origin of Trenton, NJ. Spelt and other summer grains were bountiful due to the dry conditions; there is no great loss without some small 'grain'.

Intern Christie Naylor and Farmer Rob Flory (on wagon) pitch spelt sheavesThreshing removes the seeds from the stalk and usually separates the husk and chaff as well, however in the case of spelt the husk is left on since it is difficult to remove and as it offers valuable fiber for the animals consuming it. Farmer Rob Flory, interns Christie Naylor and Daniel Bailey operated the thresher run by a Galloway gas engine (c. 1910) to thresh out the bumper spelt crop.

Spelt is used primarily for Howell Farm's horses as it is a gluten free substitute for wheat. Though massive and strong, horses have delicate stomachs that cannot handle much glutenous substance. Spelt also produces particularly fine straw that is long and golden, which makes it easy to bind into sheaves while in the field. The straw is being stored loosely in Howell Farm's hay mow in the Horse Barn.
The remainder of Howell Farm's spelt will be threshed during Howell Farm's Fall Festival event October 2 & 3.

The cucumber patch covers a small section of the Kitchen Garden but has capably supplied Howell Farm's two interns plus two resident farmers, who tend the garden and receive the fruits of their labor.