Snowy Day...perfect for making caramels.

Snowy day made for cranking the music in the kitchen and making caramels. 

Our goat milk, butter and salt.

There is a simple beauty in simple ingredients. 

What a luxury to get to watch the mixture caramelize...and it takes  about 3 hours less than our cajeta.

This year, after 21years of full time teaching, I am trying a new schedule - teaching 4 out of the normal load of 5 classes - which allows me to cram them all into one day of our alternating day schedule and have the other day free for farming and cheese making. This has been a lifesaver all fall as we adjusted to the demands of being a licensed dairy and found ourselves often busy each night until 11 and waking up to do it all again at 5:30 a.m. Although a bit of a financial pinch and tiring at times, the change in schedule and the natural energy which comes with following a dream made our new enterprise possible. 

Then January hit and the world finally slowed down. Today is the first day since May when I feel completely calm and unrushed. We are drying off the goats which means I am only milking every other night, and since there is very little milk, that means it is time to close up the cheese kitchen until April when we will be eager to start up all the excitement again. The days I am not teaching now take on a unfamiliar calm which I have a few weeks to learn to savor! It is amazing how we (especially in New England I think) become so used to busyness that we forget how not to be. The race comes to define our self worth and even when we could have a quiet day we fill it with running around. I am talking myself out of this insanity this week...it helps that snow has settled again over Maine and I have a delicious goal I have been waiting for a long time to pursue. 

I am going to perfect goat milk caramels. While most caramel candy recipes call for cream, I had read that goat milk makes especially creamy candies and figured it would be fun to work out a recipe suited for our Nigerian Dwarf goat milk. The results so far are heavenly. Today I began the process of keeping a more detailed record of my process so that I can pin down the best approach. Sea Salted Vanilla Bean Caramels this week. Next week I'd like to play with an espresso caramel. By April I hope to have the caramels perfected and cool packaging developed so that we can sell them! 

The Eve of Breeding Season

Vision of what is to come...GoGo has a family meeting with her kids who are just a few minutes old.

Think of how you feel on Christmas Eve or the night before a birthday as a kid. All the eager anticipation and possibility just hours away. This is how it feels at our farm each year on the eve of the buck's arrival. 

Each year, our holiday gift to the does in our herd (11 are of legal age this year, 18 next year!) is a month long visit from a leased buck. When they are ready to visit with him (in heat) they stand at the fence making faces and we send them over for a date. 

Right now our buck Hopkins is on the ride home to our farm with Chris and by nightfall tonight, likely one doe will be bred. This is the first step towards all those adorable snuggly kids who will follow in 5 months (April this year) and a fresh start of another milking and cheesemaking season. Who knows what it will bring.

We have met so many wonderful people in our first year as a licensed  creamery. The folks at Bow Street Market, Walnut Hill Market, and Sweetser's Apple Barrel have been so much fun to work with and we had a great time collaborating with OxBow Brewery and Ruth Miller for a beer and cheese tasting at The Lion's Pride, Ferry Beach Ecology School for a fundraiser at Cinque Terre, and Skyline Farm for their Harvest Dinner. And then there are the families who brought home goat kids from our farm this past summer or visited this fall for Open Creamery Day, a cheese class or just because they were in the neighborhood. Hoping these connections continue to grow next season and it all begins with the buck. 

If you are thinking about buying a couple of goat kids this spring for pets of milking goats, then this is the eve of an exciting time in your life too. In hours your little goat of the future may be more than a twinkle in your goat farm dreaming eyes, it may be a goat kid brewing through these cool months and ready for a new home in early June. 

If you would like to come visit the girls this winter or to reserve first pick of the kids, or just want to talk about how amazing goats are and what it entails to take care of them, please feel free to come visit. 

I'm off to go watch the goat show. Bucky boy is likely just minutes away! More news on the romance soon!

Fall 2013 Update: 
Last year 11 goats ended up bred and kidded successfully, producing a total of 29 kids (we kept Poppy & Fern). It was a pretty even split between doelings and bucklings and they found amazing homes with 13 families across the state. 

This year, our buck Tex has his work cut out for him. We plan to breed 15-17 does, so if our average of 2.5 kids per goat holds we should have 37+ kids in the last couple weeks of April and the first week of May. It never gets old. I am a whirlwind of excited energy knowing that by this time tomorrow night, a few goats might be bred! The first 12 does are already spoken for with deposits as are 8 wethers, again a cool bunch of families who we look forward to getting to know better through the process. I could not feel any more lucky and grateful to have discovered goats. 

It is incredible how fully they have found places in our hearts. Sometimes people ask us if they all have names and when we say "Of course!" are amazed that we remember who each one is. That is always funny to me. We have watched most of them be born and grow up, know each of their distinct calls without looking out the window, love each quirky personality. All 21 are family and we can not imagine the day when we start to lose them to old age, but for now enjoy every day that we share the farm with them...especially during breeding season when the magic of all that is farming is so crystal clear.  The eager anticipation of spring kids is enough to pull us through even the darkest winter days. 

Interested in checking out the wild rodeo that is goat mating? Swing on by for a look over the fence between Thanksgiving and New Years. ;) 

Long Overview News!

The tricky part about a cheese making blog is when you are really busy making cheese, there is no time to keep it updated. Hopefully this fall I will do a better job, for now, this a sweeping overview. It has been an exciting summer! This summer we are milking 8 goats by hand, finished our cheese kitchen and had a great visit with the new state dairy inspector which was followed by our dairy license! We are the 70th of the licensed cheese makers in the state of Maine! We hope all our readers will have a chance to visit the farm. We are very proud of the kitchen, our girls and the product!

We also got excellent test results back from the state lab! Our cheese is super clean! Feta, Chevre and Cajeta (caramel) all tested at ZERO coliform. Our milk has 5.29% butterfat content (which means we can make more cheese from every quart of milk than milk from most other goat breeds) and 4.23% protein (average protein of goat milk according to The University of Delaware Extension is 3.4 percent-so we are high in protein!) All great confirmation that our hard work at making healthy and delicious cheese is now a tested reality!

You can now find our Cheese at Bow Street Market in Freeport, the Walnut Hill Market (across from Ames Farm & Feed) in N. Yarmouth, Sweetser Apple Barrel in Cumberland and at Orchard Hill Farm in Cumberland.  Or e mail or call and come stop by the farm. Our production will be limited in our first year, about 100 cheeses a week.

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FALL Schedule of Sunflower Farm Events

Sunday, September 16, 2012
Eco Appetito
Cinque Terre, Portland, Maine
Noon-3pm
Sunflower Farm Cheese will be featured at Eco Appetito in September. Eat, drink & mingle for a good cause!
Executive Chef Lee Skawinski and his staff at Vignola Cinque Terre will highlight the best food and drink Maine has to offer:local meats and seafood • area artisan cheeses • locally grown veggies • desserts • hand-crafted beers • area wines
Event also includes: Silent auction • Door prizes • Live entertainment
Tickets are $40 in advance (available online at http://ecoappetito.org/ and $50 at the door. All proceeds will benefit Ferry Beach Ecology School and its Food for Thought program which teaches healthy food and sustainable living choices to children and adults throughout New England.

Sunday, October 7, 2012
Open Creamery Day & Sunflower Farm Opening Party for Friends & Family
FREE
Farm and kitchen will be open from 11-3 for the general public with an opening party for friends and family to follow from 6-8. If you are interested in also visiting other cheese makers around the state, see more info on The Maine Cheese Guild Website.

Saturday October 20, 2012
Womens' Cheese Happy Hour
4:00-6:00 pm
$30.00
Come visit in the cheese kitchen, cook up a few goat cheese appetizers to enjoy together and get creative mixing your own herbs in spices in to plain chevre to take home. A delicious chance to get a taste of cheese making and to visit with other fun women!
Call 829-8347, E mail hope.hall@thorntonacademy.org or message me on our Sunflower Farm Page to reserve your spot.

Cheese Label/Logo

We may still be a couple of months away from a finished cheese kitchen and state license...but there is something about having a logo design which makes the whole adventure seem real! I had played with a million options, hoping I could make one myself, but had a vision in my head and no drawing skills to pull it off. Then one night a couple of months ago I was stumbling around on Etsy and came across amazing graphite drawings by art professor Jessica Boehman on her Hans-My-Hedgehog site. I knew this was the look I wanted. Lucky for me, she agreed to do our logo as soon as the school year ended. The end product feels like she read our mind and then improved upon what we were dreaming of. In the center of the design is a drawing of our very sweet doeling named May. We keep telling her she is famous, she is more interested in hugs than fame right now.

The real life May!

First Kids of the Season

May, Stella, Greta

Mama out on the first adventure with her kids

Pretty Greta

Tiny Stella

If you are getting a dairy going, during kidding season doelings are the equivalent of hitting the jackpot, a slam dunk, a hole in one! Imagine our joy when Sonnet, the first to freshen, delivered 3 healthy doelings! Stella, May and Greta are perfect little angel goats. Each of them is completely different in attitude and appearance. Greta is a big girl with an amazing zebra face. Stella, the last to be born, is tiny and a mini version of her mother. May looks like a cross between a barn owl (sweet arched hair over eyes) and a deer. She loves to be kissed and to nibble noses! To top it off, their mother is a great milker, so hopefully we have some future stars to look forward to! They are three days old and have already had 36 visitors, so they are very used to human love and attention, something that makes our kids extra special.

Sonnet delivered at 147 das bred. She looked ready the night before, so I sat in the barn from 4:00 in the afternoon until 6:30 in the morning when she finally started serious labor. It was well worth the wait for these beauties. With three does in the bank it looks like we will have both does and wethers to sell this year. If you're interested in buying a goat, feel free to stop by in May to visit the babies. Last year they went fast, so deposits are a good idea if you want your pick. We will likely keep these three, but there are lots more to come!

Next up this week Chianti and Tiger are due. Can't wait to see their kids.

Marinated Feta & Mediterranean Dreams

The other night, we were standing around the barn enjoying a beer and some storytelling. The goats were all in their stalls for the night, softly chewing on hay. It was one of those perfect summer moments that you know you will look back on when the snow is piled up outside. We were chatting with the father of one of our daughter's friends who is married to a woman from Greece. It was in the darkness of a summer barn that he shared with us a tradition from her village. Each year in the weeks that garlic scapes appear, the goats are let out to graze on these tasty aromatic flowers. (This helps the farmers because the scapes have to be cut anyway to allow the energy to go into the garlic bulb.) The resulting cheese is a treat that people far and wide wait all year for and come great distances to enjoy. My mouth watered just listening to him. And now it is clear I will have to plant a garlic garden for this sole purpose, but before then, it is time to make Feta! The cheese I would most like to make is a marinated cheese that is a mix between feta and chevre. So this morning after milking I set to work fueled by visions of goats munching on fields of garlic along the Mediterranean Blue sea. Hopefully these visions will add to the success of my feta.

My recipe is an adaptation of Mary Jane Toth's from Goats Produce Too. See link above to get your copy.

Mild Marinated Feta

Ingredients:

2 Gallons Pasteurized Goat Milk

1/2 tsp DCI Supreme Vegetable Rennet (Double Strength) from dairy Connection

1/2 cup cool water

1/8 tsp Mesophilic Culture MA 19 from France (some recipes use 1/4 tsp) 

(I want to try other cultures this summer and compare: MT1, MM100 and Dairy Connection Feta A)

Salt

Pasteurize Milk

Add culture at 86 degrees

Let sit for 1 hour

Mix rennet with cool water and add to milk

Cover and let set until you see a clean break 45-60 minutes.

Cut curds (see picture)

Let rest for 10 minutes

Stir curds keeping them at 86 degrees (easiest in a sink of warm water, or I used my pasteurizing vat) for 15-30  minutes

Hang curds for 6 hours

Slice into slabs 1-1.5 inches thick

Sprinkle with salt and let sit at room temp for 24 hours (turn and salt 2-3 times)

Then slice into cubes and cover with Olive Oil, garlic, basil leaves, peppercorns and other herbs.
Let sit in fridge in airtight containers for at least a week.
YUM.

2 gallons of milk in pasteurizer 

culture

salt

vegetable rennet

clean break means curds are ready to cut

cutting curds to form small uniform cubes

cutting curds releases the whey

let curds rest before stirring

stir curds for 30 minutes

while stirring try to keep temp at 86 degrees

ready to drain

cheesecloth ready over colander in pot

gently transfer curds to drain

before draining

after draining

slice feta 

Salt slabs and let sit. They should each have their own space, I layered them because I only had one container.

after 24ish hours

So now it's evening on the 2nd day

Most will add brine to feta in a jar and leave for a week (or a few) in the fridge.
I decided to jump to the marinated stage.

cut cheese into cubes and taste

before adding oil

add the things you love to olive oil

admire your creation while it sits for a week or more in the fridge to tasty up even more.

An added note: I was so excited to try this cheese that only one container made it to the 2 week mark! It was a thousand times better than the ones we ate right away both in texture and taste. I knew this would be true, but next time I will have the patience to wait!Because I was a little too rough on the curds the cheese was hard. Next time I will stir less.