Getting the Goat…

I was thrilled this fall to discover a source of raw goat milk not too far away!  In fact, it was on the way to orchestra practice (a fair schlepp) which I go to every Tuesday night, a coincidentally, a stone’s throw from my brother’s house on the Chesapeake Bay.

For my first try at an all-goat, I tried one of my favorite cheeses:  Goat Gouda.  I could use my new cool cannonball shaped cheese mold, to boot! I was very ambitious and purchased four gallons of raw goat milk.

Well, to make a long story a bit shorter, somehow that four gallons of milk turned into an enormous cheese!  You can expect a pound of cheese, more or less from a gallon of milk,  but these four gallons ballooned into over SEVEN POUNDS of cheese.  

That’s the size of my first grandchild born this October!  I had a heck of a time getting the curds to fit in my Gouda mold.  

It ended up looking more like a over-inflated rugby ball than a sphere!

In later cheeses, I noticed that this raw goat milk has other exceptional qualities… It takes only the tiniest bit of rennet to coagulate this particular milk—that is, to turn milk into curds!  

I discovered this when attempting to make some Goat Brie.  The first try firmed up unexpectedly early, foiling the subsequent steps in the procedure—I dubbed this one “Salvage Goat”  in hopes that it will still be edible down the road.  The second attempt went better (with less rennet used).  Fingers crossed!

At the workshop I attended last month, we learned how to test for the milk’s flocculation point—an essential factor in timing the curd formation step.

I tried the method out back at home on the Bries, but both times I missed the critical point—the goat milk had set well before its supposed time.  That means that the amount of rennet needed reducing.  

Here’s milk that has not reached the flocculation point:

Look at those beautiful cloudy  billows!

Here is another drop of milk a few minutes later:

It sinks straight to the bottom!  

Now, at that point, there’s some important timing calculation to inform the length of curd set…but that part I haven’t figured out yet!

Anyway, the important thing is that I know know more about the essential nature of this particular milk source.  I know that I can expect higher than usual yield, and I now know that I can use approximately 75% less rennet than the guidelines call for!

Way too much information—but I find it fascinating!