Barbara with Grace who lived for 17 years.
Barbara and her husband have been raising and judging Cashmere and Angora goats for over 15 years (Caprette Cashmere). They also have a few Nubians, which is why Barbara makes cheese.
Cashmere goats produce cashmere fiber. Cashmere milk is very sweet but the goats only provide up to ½ gallon/day.
Angora goats produce mohair. They also provide very little milk, although it’s high in fat and the kids do very well on it.
The Nubians are her big producers – more than a gallon a day. However, they are currently dried off until January.
Tawny, the oldest
Barbara has 5 Nubians right now, but she only needs 3, so 2 will have to go.
Flash, Tawny’s daughter. Tawny and Flash will both kid in January.
When they freshen, she uses the milk to bottle feed the babies. She explained to us that it keeps them tamer and she and her husband are getting too old to chase wild goats!
They each produce about 1 gallon of milk/day.
Barbara has developed an intolerance to lactose, IBS-D, but she can eat cheeses of all kinds and she loves her Nubian milk. She can’t wait to be milking again, even though it means being home all the time.
Her wonderful fresh cheeses:
For now, she can only make fresh or soft cheeses because her wine cooler is broken (it stopped regulating the temperature and she hasn’t been able to get a part for it). She makes mozzarella, burrata, ricotta, cream cheese, yogurt and queso blanco.
These are some of the cheeses she made in May. Front left: burrata from her mozzarella. Top left: yogurt for snacking and next to it – cream cheese from another batch of yogurt. Top right: ricotta from the mozzarella whey. Right bottom: Queso Fresco.
Barbara makes a gallon of yogurt at a time in her 8 quart Instant Pot. She adds milk powder (from King Arthur Flour) to thicken it. It’s whole milk powder, not instantized, so it needs to be stirred into the heating milk. It takes some time to dissolve, but it doesn’t settle to the bottom the way some milk powder does.
After the initial high heat, she cools and then cultures. Then, it sets for 15 hours. It’s enough yogurt to make 2 pounds of “cream cheese.”
Yogurt equipment which includes the culture, milk powder, Instant Pot, a bit of the press and the strainers she uses depending on how much she makes.
She considers her strained yogurt to be cream cheese (or Labneh) when she follows this procedure: She strains it in very fine mesh devices (E81 & E80) to make Greek yogurt. Then, when she takes it a few days longer, it gets very thick, enough to press for three more days. The result is a slightly tangy cream cheese which she likes much more than yogurt by itself.
Her cheesemaking equipment
She also makes “killer” mozzarella in her commercial steamer/cooker. It has a large tray that holds 4 gallons of milk.
The steamer/cooker I use to make large batches of cheese.
The temperature settings are right for making most soft and hard cheeses. It is Chinese made and it was less than $100 new, without the tray which she had already bought from e-Bay. (Fortunately, she didn’t use it to dye fiber as she was going to!)
She gets 3 pounds of mozzarella and about 2 pounds of ricotta in the same cooker (no transferring to another pot for the stove).
She took this mozzarella out of the freezer recently – the last block of Mozzarella she made in the big cooker. It was 3 lb. & 7 oz. She froze it, then I cut it in fours, kept one for the house and refroze the rest.
She uses her queso blanco in appetizers. It cuts nicely into cubes so she can put things on it with toothpicks. She also uses it as a filler in lasagna.
Barbara is hoping to make hard cheeses soon and blue cheeses which she can age in her refrigerator. For now, she’s ready to harvest her very prolific Pomegranate tree’s fruit – to juice, freeze, then make jelly later for gifts and to enjoy.
In January, it will be the season for kidding, shearing Angoras and combing Cashmeres, so she has to get things stored before she gets too busy.
