Sunday: Lessons in cheese and friends' generosity

In the words of the inimitable Monty Python, "blessed are the cheesemakers."

I spent today at Pholia Farm learning the basics of home cheesemaking, and now I am feeling very blessed indeed. Pholia Farm is a wonderful family-run sustainable goat farm that operates off the grid in Rogue River. They not only create their own cheese by hand out of the milk produced by their herd of 30 adorable Nigerian Dwarf goats, they also use solar panels and a micro-hydro water turbine to generate all the electricity they need to keep the place running. You can find them on the Web at www.pholiafarm.com. Pholia Farm offers lessons in goat husbandry, as well as several different one-day cheesemaking classes.

My class, Beginning Cheesemaking, consisted of a hands-on morning creating three different cheeses. Class sizes are small – only eight for this one, as that is about all that will fit in the little room where the cheese is made. Our group enjoyed a delicious outdoor lunch featuring the cheeses we had made plus others produced at the dairy. Afterward, the Caldwells' teenage daughter gave us a tour of the property and all its livestock inhabitants. I came home from my day at the farm carrying a little bag of cheeses we’d made and crowing about my newly acquired skill.

In the evening, after dropping off the tray of Greek goodies I’d made yesterday for the ballet fundraiser, we made our way to my school pot-luck with more dolmas and spanikopita. There, Andreas proceeded to tell anyone who would listen all about how easy it was to make cheese. Well, not quite, I’m afraid.

One thing I learned today was that cheesemaking is both an art and a science. That is the basic fact that makes it fascinating to me. Like wine- and bread-making, it is pretty clear that there is a scientific chemical basis to it that requires knowledge, but at the same time there are many uncontrollable variables (humidity, temperature, microbes in the air, to name a few) that only experience and a learned ability to improvise can overcome. Gianaclis Caldwell, who with her husband Vern owns Pholia Farm and who taught our class, explained to us that cheese “recipes” were just guidelines for beginners; expert cheesemakers learn by trial and error how to plan backward to work toward a desired end result. So I know that I can expect to experience multiple failures before I can produce a feta or a fresh mozzarella worthy of the name, but even mistakes can be tasty if you just call them something else.

I feel the need to mention here the generosity of some of our friends this week in regard to local bounty. I don’t know if it was the blog that did it; I suspect it’s just the way they are by nature. Andreas’s co-worker Jeff generously gave us a package of frozen salmon that he caught himself in a local river (I sent a loaf of homemade crusty bread in return but we still owe him big-time). When I arrived at work yesterday, I found four big, beautiful comice pears on my office chair, a gift from my library buddy Jan’s tree. Andreas’s co-worker Sherry has been showering us with beautiful garden eggplants, something we cannot seem to grow ourselves. Rex, one of my students, brought me biscotti he had made – I don’t know which ingredients were local, but some things I don’t care to know, because these cookies were delicious and homemade.

And then there have been the various squash appearing anonymously on our desks and doorsteps – I’m sure others are familiar with that phenomenon. It makes me think that if everyone had a garden and produced their own food, we could get through a Medford summer just bartering with friends and never visiting the store at all. Perhaps an experiment for another week.