How to Make Farmers Cheese

Farmers cheese final product, a soft crumbly cheese.

Cheese making is both an art and science, around which all sorts of cultural significances have developed.  Historically, cheese has been a highly localized food item where a specific type of cheese could only be found in one specific region of the world.  The reason for this is because these regions would have certain types of foods for cows, goats, or sheep to eat, resulting in a milk with a unique taste and ability to make cheese.  Local climates and the microorganisms present also played a major role in regional cheeses.  And of course, each region or family would have their own secret cheese recipe.  Unfortunately today, much of this localized specialty cheese has vanished with modern milk pasteurization laws and large cheese factories.  The laws make it difficult for cheese makers to sell their products in many cases and the factories are difficult to compete with.  Fortunately, some of these localized cheeses still exist today and if you have access to milk you can make your own cheese.  Grocery store milk is almost excursively pasteurized and homogenized, which is unfortunate for cheese makers but necessary to increase its self-life.  Unprocessed milk makes the best cheese, but for the rest of us who don’t have a cow in the backyard, store bought milk will still produce great tasting cheese.  There are many very complex cheeses, some of which take many months to make.  This particular cheese, known as farmers cheese, is probably the easiest of all.  

What you will need:
Pot you can heat milk on the stove with
Spoon for stirring
Cheese cloth, strainer or pantie-hose
Thermometer

Ingredients:
1 gallon milk
¼ cup white or cider vinegar, lime juice, or lemon juice (each will produce a different flavored cheese)
Salt to taste

Heat milk slowly on the stove top, stirring gently making sure not to burn milk to bottom.  Heat milk only to about 180 degrees Fahrenheit, any hotter will curdle or burn milk.  Once milk reaches 180 degrees, add the vinegar or juice by gently stirring in and take of the heat.  The milk should almost immediately separate into curds and whey.  Once the two are mixed let it cool for a while, then strain the mixture to separate the curds from the whey.  Allow to strain for about an hour or more in the refrigerator.  After straining mix salt with the curds to taste, it doesn’t take much.  After this the cheese is ready to eat.  It can be eaten plain or have fruits, vegetables, or herbs mixed in with it.  Onions, garlic, strawberries, apricots, rosemary, chives, or a variety of other things can be mixed in to make your own unique cheese.  

Curds and whey after adding an acid such as vinegar, lemon or lime juice.  The curds are the white part while the whey is the whitish yellow liquid part.

In this recipe an acid (vinegar, lime or lemon juice) causes the milk protein casein to precipitate out of the whey.  Casein is the white chunky curds that make up cheese while whey is the whitish liquid the casein separates from.  Using an acid to make cheese produces a soft crumbly cheese being the casein proteins weakly stick together.  Other cheeses use an enzyme called renet to precipitate casein out of milk whey.  Renet produces much stronger bonds between casein proteins and therefore stronger curds or hard cheeses such as cheddar.  In the near future I plan on having a post covering the use of renet in making hard cheeses.

Life of an Oak Part 4: the Eastern Forest Tree of Life

Life of an Oak part 4 of 4

After twenty or so years of slow continuous growth, the oak tree enters the next stage of life.  At this age most oaks begin bearing their first large harvests of acorns.  Ground fire disturbance during decades leading to mast production help the acorn bearing process along.  Native Americans knowing this would purposely burn oak woodlands to increase production.  While most oaks produce some acorns every year, years of large mast production typically happen every two or three years.  A few oaks, such as the White Oak, will only have large mast productions every five or so years.  Large mast production typically depending on spring weather conditions that affect pollination of the trees flowers.  During the spring flowering period for oaks, freezing temperatures will kill flowers or overly wet conditions will prevent pollination, both of which prevent large acorn crops from being produced.  Further complicating this matter is the fact that some oaks require only one summer to produce acorns such as White Oaks, while Red Oaks require two summers to mature acorns.

Mother of the Forest
Once mature, the open canopy of oaks allow flecks of sun to pass through the tree and across the forest floor.  Greater amounts of sun reaching the forest floor allows for a greater diversity of plant-live and
greater total plant production.  As a result, the oak tree not only feeds an abundance of animals with acorns in the fall, but by aiding thicker more diverse vegetation on the forest floor an abundance of organisms are fed through spring and summer.  Spring in an oak woodland is filled with a variety of delicate beautiful flowers such as Bloodroot, Dutchmans Breeches, Trillium, and Wild Geranium.  During the summer a thick green blanket of vegetation covers the forest floor.  Where oaks are more spread out such as in savannas or open woodlands even prairie plants can begin to establish themselves.  Other trees such as Maples have such thick canopies that forest floors under mature trees can often be quite bare.

These fallen pin oak leaves resist decay because of the chemical tannin within the.   By resisting decay and curling up like these leaves, oak leaves encourage low intensity ground fires in the fall.  

The Oak doesn't stop here however.  At the end of each summer and through early spring an abundance of dry curly leafs fall from the tree.  Other trees typically produce leafs that lay flat against the ground, absorb water, and rot quickly.  Oaks however produce hardy leafs that curl-up, resist decay, and remain dry.  These fallen leafs, as well as additional ground cover as a result of the oaks open canopy, produce an abundance of ideal fuel for a low burning ground fires. These fires clear forest floors, befitting both the oak tree and the overall community, as well as encouraging the growth of new oak seedlings.  And so the oak forest or savanna is perpetuated with its own help.

Cycle of Forest Life
The oak is truly a mother and nurturer of the forest, part of a larger cycle involving humans providing fire, wildlife being fed and dispersing seed, and the forest community being structured by the presence of this magnificent tree.  The mature mother oak produces an abundance of seed feeding forest wildlife.  Light is let through the tree canopy growing more plants that provide more food for wildlife.  Fallen leafs and thicker ground vegetation encourage fire that clears invading plants.  Forests cleared by fire encourage the tree to grow stronger and produce more acorns.  Wildlife, fed by the oak, disperse and plant acorns in new areas.  Fire in-turn produces ideal locations for acorns to sprout and grow into new oaks which will again nurture a healthy forest habitat.  And so the oak comes full circle.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Happy Thanksgiving!  Here on the Practical Biology Blog we try to take a biological perspective on things, turning the ordinary into interesting biological education.  And of course, eating is biology, so Thanksgiving is an easy lesson in biology.  What we consider today as a traditional Thanksgiving meal really is no reflection of what the original Thanksgiving meal looked like.  If we do our history, however, we can come pretty close to figuring out what the original 1621 Thanksgiving meal looked like at Plymouth.  History tells us that the original Pilgrims, especially during their first year in the New World, were primarily farmers, gardeners, hunters, and gatherers.  Some of these skills, such as gardening and farming, they would have learned in England.  Most of them they would have had to learn from the Native Americans.  Even skills they learned in the Old World would have had to be relearned in the context of the new conditions in America.  

A little more history.  When the original Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620 they barely survive the winter.  If it were not for them finding a large stash of hidden corn in an abandoned Wampanag Native American village they all might have died.  I must add here, the Pilgrims were a peaceful Christian people, they did not kill the Native Americans and did not steal their food.  In the year to come the Pilgrims and Wampanag people developed a peaceful relationship through which the Pilgrims learned much about how to survive in the New World.  Remember at this point, the New World was nothing like it is today.  In 1620 and 21 the New World was a very hostile place to Europeans.  The winter was far harsher then anything they had encountered, there were no markets for food or established agricultural system, no stores for supplies or tools, no houses, and no buildings.  It was pretty much what we would consider wilderness and everything they needed had to come from the land or the little they carried over from England.  These Pilgrims had no clue how to survive with meager supplies in a wilderness they had never encountered before.

So that first year was extremely difficult.  In-fact, it was so difficult that normally modestly dressed Christian Pilgrims were described as being dressed in rags or nearly naked.  They had virtually nothing that first year.  But after a peaceful relationship with the Wampanag people was developed they began to learn how to hunt, fish, trap, grow food, and gather food from the forest plants.  During that first year, the Pilgrims learned to live on the land so well that by fall they had an abundance of food.  During that first year they went from having next to nothing and no real idea of how to survive to learning how to survive and having an abundance of food.  Anything could have easily wiped the entire Pilgrim group out during that first year but it didn’t, and they did as every good Christian should, they thanked God.  A big part of this thankfulness took place with a three day celebration full of food, games, and just having a thankful good time among themselves and the Native Americans they befriended.  This celebration became known later as the first Thanksgiving.

So the first Thanksgiving meal would have been composed of food items grown and gathered by hand, not bought from a store.  The meal also would have been heavily Native American influenced being that is who taught them how to gather their food.  Some of you may be wondering at this point, what does all this have to do with biology?  Much in every way.  Of course gardening is biology as well as living off the land.  All of this had its context in the Eastern Deciduous Forest ecosystem of New England.  So all of the plants and animals they gathered would have only come from the local environment.  We do know the Wapanag people contributed five deer to the first Thanksgiving.  The Pilgrims also hunted a huge number of what they called fowl.  Fowl likely was duck, goose, turkey, and other birds.  Other than that we really don’t know exactly what was on that first menu.  We can take clues from the local environment of what probably was on that menu through.  It is also very likely that they ate eel, lobster, mussels, and fish.  As for plant products there were also probably nuts such as acorns, walnuts, hickory nuts, and chestnuts.  Fruits and berries gathered from the forest would have been out of season during the late fall when the celebration took place.  There would have also been an abundance of garden produce including squash, pumpkin, corn, leeks, carrots, parsnips, cabbage, and turnips.  Some of these plants were given to them by the Native Americans while others would have been brought over as seed from Europe.  Also interesting is that the corn would not have been sweet corn, it would have been ground up and served as cornbread, mush or pudding.  There was also very little or more likely no sugar.  So no sweet desserts except for what could have been sweetened with molasses.  No pies, no cranberry sauce, and no sweet potatoes with marsh mellows on top.  Maybe a little wine and beer but most likely only water (The Pilgrims didn’t have a problem with moderate consumption of alcohol).  

If you think about it, this would be quite an interesting meal.  I mean, who wouldn’t want lobster and eel for lunch three days in a row! Have a happy Thanksgiving!