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Welcome to our blog, Genzano it story
and this post, cheese making
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A container on a fire that could also be used to make cheese in the farm, as most times in the farm we were pushed to use whatever there was available, when I was young and working in the farm.
Cheese making in the farms
The king of cheeses must be Parmigiano
Reggiano, as its name suggests it is from the province of Parma and surrounding
territories in northern Italy, here I would like to point out, what is the
Difference between Parmesan and Parmigiano-Reggiano?
The answer to this question is this: (I
am going to use this explanation from the internet) Due to Italian D.O.C. laws that protect the names and recipes of certain cheeses, a
cheese cannot be called Parmigiano-Reggiano unless it is made using a specific
recipe and production method within the provinces of Parma, Reggio-Emilia,
Modena, and specific regions in the provinces of Bologna and Mantua. The D.O.C
laws are meant to preserve the integrity of traditional cheeses by insuring the
flavor and quality. Therefore, any cheese made outside of these regions with a
slightly different recipe or production method cannot be called
Parmigiano-Reggiano.
One may guess that the recipes for this
great cheese has been the work of very many generations of Italian cheese
makers in the first place, and then many generations of organizing the great
factories of cheese making, one has to look at some of these photos where they
cure and store the cheese until it matures to see what I mean.
Now, I am saying this because I
know for a fact that in the old times lots of people made their own cheese; in
fact I have made some cheese myself and I would like to tell you how it was
done the old way, as most farmers had to do it anyhow, and because I was in the
farm I did it also, so let us see how I have learned to do it.
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Working in the farm
When I was young I ended up to
work in our family farm, as I have already said before, therefore while I have
been writing about my life in the farm, I have become aware that I have learned
how to make cheese in the farm and I am sure that some of you would like to
know how it was done in those times; well I have to tell you that this is not
exactly making parmiggiano cheese, but is it more like the poor farmer cheese.
So here I am going to tell you hereunder how to make this types of cheese and
ricotta my grandma way.
Now before I start I need to say
that what I am writing here has really happened in the fifties, I had to tell
you this because a lot of things have changed since then, but the principle of
how these things are done does not change much, so what we did then can still
be done now, so let me tell you what we were doing then?
In southern Italy and perhaps in
many other parts of the world, the farmers use to milk the cows the goats, the
sheep and perhaps other animals as well, so that they would have their milk and
also could make their cheese and other milk products, so this was also
happening in our small farm. For those
people that is not familiar with this sort of farm life I need to explain that
milking is done twice a day in the morning and in the evening, milking is a
must to do at the right times otherwise the animals will suffer, and also if
you don’t milk them then slowly those animals will produce less and less milk.
So, what to do with all this milk that we collected by milking the cows etc.
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Cheese making grandma way
In our case we had two milking
cows, so we would collect up to 30 litres of milk every day in spring time,
when there was plenty of green food for the cows to eat. In those times
everybody needed to be self sufficient and nothing would be allowed to go
waist, the theory was waist not want not, therefore everybody was ready to do
those things necessary to save whatever had to be saved, therefore the milk we
had collected from the cows we used to made cheese, this is what all farmer
would do in the old days and I am going to explain it to you how all this was
done, including some description of how in the very old time was done.
When I was very young my Grandma
would come to the farm to make cheese from this milk that we had for a few
years, and she taught me how to make cheese. The whole process was simple but
at the same time it was hard for a young bloke, but as I grew older and
stronger and able to do it I was left most times on my own. So, if you don’t mind let me go over the
process, because I would like to make a record of how these things were made in
the past. You see, today in the farms things are different, because now there
is a vehicle that collect milk from these farms and take it to the cheese
factory to make cheese and any other milk products. So let me tell you how I
made cheese and ricotta when I was young and how my forbear had made cheese
themselves for centuries if not thousands of years before me.
After milking the cows the
evening before and the morning I had about 30 litre of milk that I could make
cheese with. Now the first thing that I had to do was to light a fire in the
fire place of the farm and make sure that there was enough fire wood ready
beside the chimney for the whole process, set a strong three legged steel
device on this fife that I had started that was capable to hold the weight of
the milk in this special container safely. Then I would get this special large
copper kettle, but this copper kettle had to be clean and treated from a
specialist perhaps once a year with a coat of tin or something like that, this
treatment is very much like galvanising the inside of the pot, and it needs to
be done properly, so that all copper surfaces inside the kettle should be
covered in full. Now that I had this
large kettle ready, I would strain the milk with a fine strainer while I am
filling the kettle with the milk and after that I am ready to make cheese.
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Making cheese and ricotta the old
ways
My dear readers, I want to point
out that the way I am making cheese and ricotta this time here, is the way that
we used then and of course there may be other ways to make cheese and ricotta,
but hereunder is the way that I was taught from my grandma.
So now that I have the fire going
steady but at a slower pace, this three legged device set over the fire to hold
the kettle safely, I had to be extra careful to lift the kettle containing milk
over the fire without getting burned. Here I had to be very careful that the
milk would warm up only to 37-38 degrees and no more, otherwise the whole process
would not work. So once the milk reached this temperature I would take the
kettle off the fire. Now let us go on to see what I need to do next, you see to
make cheese you need to add something like enzymes or an extract so to speak in
the milk while it is around 37 degrees to make the milk curd. In my young days
I was lucky here because this extract could be bought at the chemist and so it
was a lot easier that the old ways, when you had to prepare your own extract.
Anyhow at this point I would measure the amount of (caglio) this extract and
mix it in the milk with a wooden devise which was purposely made.
You see in the old time people
had to do most things in wood for this purpose because wood does not rust, it
does not contact heat so while one end is hot the other end will not be
affected and remains cold, and also it does not react with milk, therefore
wooden utensils were safe to use; and last of all but not the least important
was that these wooden utensils could be carved from the farmers themselves,
when in winter was cold and miserable to go out of the farm building.
Now let me tell you how the
enzymes to curd the milk were collected or prepared in the past, when there
were no chemists to help the process how to curd the milk. I know this is going
to be a shocker for some people but that was the way that it was done in the
old times. First of all a very young lamb is killed after feeding on milk, so
that its stomach is full of milk. You see in the young lamb stomach there are
these enzymes that curd the milk for the lamb to digest, as this is the way for
the lamb to absorb the milk nutrients and grow. You need to harvest the stomach
of the lamb, because this is where all the process starts. There are a few ways
how to use this stomach, and one of the less shocking ways is that once you
have this lamb stomach you seal it by tying top and bottom and hang it up to
dry in a cool clean place. When it becomes dry you can use the powdery stuff
inside to curd the milk. You need a little bit of this powder and a little
lukewarm water to mix together and you are ready to add it to the milk you want
to curd. This is how it was done in the very old days when there were no
chemists to help, this is the ways our forbears have done it, since this is the
way that Mother Nature itself has set up.
Now let me go back to cheese
making as we have left the milk to curd for a while. 10 minutes or perhaps a
quarter of an hour has passed since we have added this caglio to the warm milk
and now the milk is firm like jelly, my next move now is that I use the wooden
devise the I stirred the milk with and push it into this curd and start
breaking it to small pieces. After that I stop and wait a moment for the
particle of fresh cheese to start sinking to the bottom as the whey and the
cheese become separated, now I put my washed clean hands in the kettle and go
to the bottom of it, the fresh cheese has all sunk at the bottom, so I start
pushing it slowly to one side of the kettle, by doing this I am slowly
compacting the new cheese by pushing the whey out of it, I am going to do this
until a firm ball of new cheese is formed. Once I have this firm new ball of
cheese in my hands I lift it into a container; wait a minute this is not a real
container, but it is something like a woven basket purposely made for this
task, so that the whey can continue to run out the fresh cheese. Now I have
about four to five kilogram of fresh cheese and by the time it matures may
become three kilograms. The whole process does not end here, because there are
a couple of other things I need to do. One is that I need to get all the whey
in the kettle so that I can make ricotta, and after I make ricotta I have to
dip for a few minutes the new fresh cheese that I have just made into the hot
whey after I have made ricotta. This action is a sort of pasteurising the new
cheese, you see the milk we have used has never been pasteurised. Having made
the new cheese now that cheese needs to be cured for a few months, this curing
usually involves sea salt and vinegar. Now in this hub I have made cheese and
in my next hub I will make ricotta. See you then.
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Genzano it story
Cheese making
IS GOING TO BE CONTINUED;
Next time with, ricotta cheese making in the farms
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Some useful links
Some hub links
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