Hi - I've been poking away on the net for months (years?) and only now found your site - it feels like a secret society I've only just discovered - or a Christmas present - that I will spend a lot of time unwrapping and enjoying ^-^ I'm pretty excited to have found you!
I'm Canadian, live in England (spent much of last year in Australia) and am now preparing for the shift (9 yrs later) back to Canada, to Nova Scotia where we've bought a small farm. My longstanding dream has been to be a farmstead cheese maker and raise goats - so away we go. One step at a time.
I'm hoping to make this into a semi-commercial operation over the next few years so - I have a lot to learn! I've done a few days of courses and have been helping at a cheese dairy 1 day/week recently (they make about 2000l in one go and make brie, blue, mozza - and we just tried making a hard double gloucester - fun!). I helped out for a couple of days at another hard cheese dairy as well but am only starting the journey into making cheese totally by myself, at a kitchen scale. I've made some soft cheese at home and last week did a hard Italian generic cheese (courtesy of Ricki Carroll's 'Guido' recipe - 2 more weeks to age) and some ricotta (didn't get anywhere with RC's ricotta recipe but morphed a couple I found on the web and got something delicious).
At the mo I've not used goat's milk at all - so I'm really keen to get some experience with it. Since I'm on this side of the Pond for a few more months I'd love to get to France or Italy to learn from others on working with goats milk - at the moment I've no contacts in either and I also don't know what type of goats milk cheese I want to make.. so the more varied exposure the better at the moment I'm thinking! Would anyone have contacts/suggestions?
Anyway, just wanted to say hi! I guess I should leave other questions for the forums. Thanks in advance for any help in my cheese journey. Cheers
Hello and welcome fellow Canuck (OK I grew up in Vancouver)!
Good luck with your new adventure, vary envious for working in cheese dairy, there are quite a few here working with goat milk, as you spend more time on the forum you should see some members with goaty avatars and also some members in Europe but sadly very few in France or Italy.
No suggestions on Goat cheeses, expect others will, you could look in the Geographic > France & Italy Boards to try and find people there and PM them or post in that board with what you are looking for.
Have fun!
Hi John, thanks for the kind welcome. I can definitely see this forum becoming cheese crack, rather addictive...
I once lived in Vancouver for a summer - after travelling from one side of Canada to another my friend and I were at the train station to leave as our train pass was up and wordlessly simultaneously turned around, looked at each other, and walked away. We spent 3 mths working in Gastown, driven on only by the announcement of a Neil Young unplugged concert in T.O... I recall how wonderful it was to smell sea air again on our arrival into Van - the first sense that hit me when that train pulled into Vancouver - 'home' away from home..
Thanks for the tips on where to look for France and Italian connections, I'll have a go and see what I come up with. It may be that I explore the sheep milk route as well so that probably widens my potential links - and learning. I suspect I can find a market for sheep's milk cheese where I'm moving, which is also important.. I love the idea of using a copper vat - so those mountain cheeses have a certain je nais se quoi (the Canadian in me coming out ;)
At the moment I'm riffling through pages of paperwork trying to sort out the regs on equipment. Pasturization seems to be a real bug bear in that part of the world (eastern Canada) - not sure what my options are that don't cost the price of a house mortgage..
Onwards to more cheese!