Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [90]
14. The cheeses can ripen in any capacious lidded container such as a Chinese sand pot, a cake carrier, a large plastic storage container, or a Dutch oven. Put a doubled-over piece of paper towel in the bottom, put the piece of cheese mat on top of that, and put the cheese on top of the mat. Cover with the container’s lid.
15. Ideally, you will now place the ripening container in a location where the temperature ranges from 50 to 55 degrees F and the humidity is about 90%. If you have a thermometer and hygrometer, good for you. If you don’t, just pick a cool spot, like a basement crawl space. If there’s no cool spot in your house, the refrigerator will do.
16. Flip the cheeses daily, replacing the damp paper towels with dry ones. When you reach in one day and the paper towel is dry, you can stop changing the towels. But you should continue to flip the cheese daily. The soft white mold is the penicillin mold you sprinkled on the milk, expressing itself as a blooming rind. In about 3 weeks, the cheeses should be soft and ready to eat. If they’re still firm, give them a few days. To store, you can just put them in a small lidded plastic container or plastic bags in the refrigerator. They last a long time—months.
Makes 2½ pounds
CHAPTER 14
GOATS
If rather than a lush green garden, you want your outdoor space to resemble a Third World village, I suggest getting some chickens, who will methodically denude the landscape of every blade of grass, low-lying weed, and wildflower. And if you want to rid yourself of shrubbery and small trees as well, get goats. Very soon you will have the adobe patio of your dreams.
When you start making cheese, it’s a matter of days, perhaps hours, before you “idly” look up the local municipal code to see if you are permitted to keep a couple of goats, East Friesian sheep, maybe even a cow. While you can produce surprisingly good cheeses with supermarket milk, unhomogenized fresh milk is the coin of the realm.
Cows were out of the question for our suburban lot, and goats, I soon learned, are illegal, as are sheep. I was not about to let this deter me. I took Jennie Grant as my role model. A few years ago, Grant was quietly and illegally keeping two goats in her Seattle backyard when some neighbors complained to the authorities. She launched a petition and won a city council member to her cause, and in 2007, goats were legalized as pets in Seattle, an eminently sensible change.
I can see both sides of almost every issue, but I can see no reason whatsoever that goats should be illegal anywhere that dogs are permitted, which as far as I can tell is everywhere. I wrote a note to our supervisor inquiring why this law remained on the books. As I pointed out in my letter, goats do not bark, they do not smell. They do not (usually) bite and never rampage through the neighborhood killing chickens. They eat invasive, flammable brush and poison oak, and they actually produce something useful—fertilizer and milk—which dogs do not.
The supervisor responded that he was surprised at this law, that he had always assumed two small goats were permissible, that his very own brother-in-law kept goats in Mill Valley. Although this was as legally relevant as a bubble gum wrapper, I printed out the e-mail, pinned it to my bulletin board, hopped onto Craigslist, and began shopping for goats.
The Nigerian Dwarf supposedly descends from the miniature goats that were brought over in the 1930s on ships from Africa to feed lions and tigers heading for American zoos. A few lucky goats survived, the ancestors of today’s Nigerian Dwarves. As the name suggests, these goats are small. A full-size Swiss dairy goat is the size of a Great Dane and can produce a gallon of milk a day. A Nigerian Dwarf is the size of a border collie and gives a quart or two of milk per day. This is the tricycle of goats and this was the goat for us. Owen and I picked up our first goat from a Sonoma County farm when she was ten days old. She was smaller than a cat and had a Yoda