Bonnie Hastings in Olalla, Washington

It’s rare that we interview a young person who has achieved Bonnie’s level of expertise in home cheese making. We’ll have to check back with her in a few years to see where she goes from here…

Bonnie’s Story

I’m 24 and I am the 6th of 9 kids. I live on a 5 acre farm which my family has lived on for about 27 years and, before that, my grandpa.

I got interested in cheese making a few years ago after experimenting with smoking bricks of cheese on my charcoal grill. The intense, smoky flavor was definitely a grade above store bought smoked cheeses. That first success gave me more confidence to try making my own cheese from scratch.

I started getting raw milk by the bucket full from the local dairy. My family loves cheese so I have no problem using all I make. In cheese making season, when the dairy has plenty of milk, I process up to 30 gallons a week.

My family and friends consumed batches of my squeaky cheese curds and I went on to make Cheddar, Swiss, Pepper Jack, Havarti, and lots of others.

There have been quite a few flops, but I love trying new types and experimenting with the process and flavors. I even tried making a Coffee Cheese.

It is satisfying to produce high quality, yummy, cheeses. I like to serve my sharp aged Cheddar and mild Swiss on a cheese board with dinner or for dessert, and my soft, tangy, Feta topped with fresh berries and a drizzle of honey. Yum!

I enjoy the challenge of making do with the supplies on hand in my kitchen.

I use a large peanut butter jar with holes punched in the bottom for my cheese form.

At first, I tried pressing cheeses under a pile of my Mom’s weights, but my carefully balanced stack would often collapse with a crash in the middle of the night. I finally built a press with scrap wood from my dad’s wood shop.

My biggest cheese was a 6 lb. Cheddar I made as a surprise for my family at Christmas. It aged on a shelf in the basement and the flavor came out creamy and sharp. The best yet!

My personal favorite is Caciocavallo, an Italian cheese. I have fun stretching and forming the hot curd and dropping it into salty brine to harden. The finished cheese hangs in the open air for up to 2 years and develops a wonderful chewy rind. The taste of the young cheese is most like Mozzarella but, as time passes, it takes on a Romano type flavor. So good!

The Caciocavallo is formed like a Mozzarella. I stretch the hot curd and form it with my hands into the final shape. Then, I put it in ice water to quickly cool and harden. It sits in a salt brine overnight and then I tie a string around the neck and hang it up!

I hang it in an out-building so it keeps cool but doesn’t freeze. I have a row of hooks in the ceiling away from the wall so mice can’t get at it to climb. Bugs haven’t really been a problem.

The biggest challenge is keeping the cheese cool in the summer. During the hottest months, Caciocavallo begins to sweat and it could potentially lose all it’s moisture. To protect it, I wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerate it for the summer, then hang it up again when the weather cools off. Not ideal, but it works. I sure wish I had a year round root cellar or cheese cave!:-) Someday…

I mostly learned by trial and error with recipes off your website. I started browsing and pretty soon I had a whole pile of recipes printed. 🙂

Really, I think that once I got the basic techniques down with Cheddar, I felt comfortable with expanding. Except Mozzarella. I have never been able to produce a satisfactory batch of Mozzarella! Oh, well. I encourage my friends to start with Cheddar because it is pretty easy and gives you the feel for cheese making.

My latest experiment is making my own rennet using local stinging nettles. I ran out of rennet one time and started looking for substitutes. The owners of Blackjack dairy, where I get my milk, told me that nettles have natural rennet so I googled it to get a basic idea and just tried it.

Instead of the rennet, I steeped a lot of nettles in hot water, strained the nettle leaves out and poured several cups of the liquid into my prepared milk. It took 8 hours to coagulate instead of the normal 1 hour but it worked!

Next time I want to make it more concentrated and see if it will work faster. I am excited to play around with this method more!

My Goals

Next year, I hope to perfect some of my techniques, especially to get more experience with aging cheese on the shelf with no refrigeration. I have noticed decidedly better flavor with open air methods rather than in my cheese cave fridge – sharp and full, but no bitterness.

I plan to make a lot more Swiss! This was my first year to try it and I loved it! I plan to keep on making Caciocavallo, Cheddar, Swiss and Feta (my reliable favorites) and to try a few new ones.

Also, I’d like to try a harder cheese like Parmesan and age it for more than a year. This week I tasted a 5 year Gouda and I would love to create something like that – so old that the flavor is completely transformed. It is hard to wait that long to open a cheese!

Other Hobbies

I work at Tractor Supply and when I am home I do a lot of different things. I like creative woodworking, reading, grilling chicken, experimenting with sourdough, playing in the house with my niece and exploring outside.

For the last few years I have had two goats for milk and also to take care of brush and produce fertilizer for my garden.

Our barn was built in 1917 as a dairy barn, so with a little fixing up it was a great place to keep goats. Between the two mommy’s they had 4 babies this spring.

I finally sold all of them this summer because I wasn’t able to spend much time with them. I’ve been extra busy with work during Covid, and I have the garden to keep up with, etc. My family also has chickens and ducks for eggs, and 4 barn cats. We get a lot of eggs, enough to sell some. Last year we also raised a few meat turkeys.

We have a big vegetable garden, and chickens who produce lots of eggs. When we have time, we enjoy singing together or listening to Dad read aloud.

I grow tons of squash, pumpkins, beans, cucumbers, and zucchini in one garden. My Dad keeps the greenhouse full of tomatoes, lettuce, greens and herbs, and then we have several groups of boxbeds for the root vegetables, celery, corn, more greens and dahlias. We eat a lot of vegetables.:-)

I just harvested about 50 spaghetti squash, some Red Kuri, hubbard and pumpkins. I stored them in the barn and they should keep good through January. This year we are trying to grow some winter vegetables and that is going good so far. We’ll see!

Every year we harvest walnuts from the nut tree my grandparents planted in our driveway.

We shake the tree with a long hooked pole and then gather the nuts off the ground. They store for a few days on trays and then we dry them in a dehydrator. The shells are hard but they crack right open with a nutcracker.

I like to crack nuts in the evening while my dad reads aloud to the family. Sometimes we have a walnut cracking party to get through them faster. Several of us start early in the morning, spread out over the room with buckets and boxes of nuts, and talk, play word games, or start an audio book playing while we work. It’s more fun to do it together and we get a lot done before the days work begins.

Some of my favorite woodworking projects (made as Christmas presents for my siblings rooms):