Another selection of photographs of our activities this time at Metropolitan Market’s new store in Kirkland, Washington, as part of their ‘For the Love of Cheese Festival’.Marian
Monday, 4 October 2010
Where in the World is Marian? - Metropolitan Market, Kirkland
Another selection of photographs of our activities this time at Metropolitan Market’s new store in Kirkland, Washington, as part of their ‘For the Love of Cheese Festival’.
MARY’S DAIRY DIARY - OCTOBER 2010
October, Indian summer or wild gales, hangovers from American hurricanes, whatever we get, we just know that the last vestiges of summer are disappearing as the sun gets lower and the mornings and evenings get darker. Everything grows slower, it’s a time of roots going deeper, leaves falling all around, the last of the summer birds leaving. The autumn carries a palpable sense of loss of summer.
It also carries the faint promise of next year – look carefully, and next year’s buds are there, next year’s calves are now mid term in the spring cows’ bellies. I saw the dramatic sight of four young buzzards playing over the hill, joyfully wheeling, swooping, calling to each other: the next generation has left home, and is looking to find a way in the world. Sally from our office, working her dogs with friends saw a troop of wild boar, big males at either end, smaller ones of all sizes processing across the field quite heedless of the watchers.
CROPS - Next year’s wheat crop gets drilled this year, after clean crops if they were clean or after summer fallows or after the maize crop just harvested. We will use the minimum tillage machine, scrabbling the surface, making a little seedbed just enough to nurture each individual seed, and without disturbing the earthworms and all the delicate universe of creatures that live in a well-structured soil. The crops germinate fast in the still-warm soil and the damp soil. Next year lets its presence known as the first shoots come through, a primeval talisman that winter doesn’t win for ever.
GRASS - The autumn flush of grass continues till the frost cools the soil, less growth than the spring but still a useful lift to all the animals, used to pecking out dry summer pasture. Now is the time we grow a little more grass, let the pastures lengthen so grass is there to graze into November and December, when the grass growth slows right down. This is the secret of grazing for 10 or 11 months – not that the grass grows enough all the time that we graze, but that we’ve stored it from now till then. So we measure the grass growth, watch the grass cover increase, plan where the animals graze next and next so that the last fields we graze are the driest underfoot to cause least damage and to extend how long the animals keep out of the barns.
COWS - The spring calving cows are settling into late lactation, less and richer milk. They slow down, progesterone-doped, happy to have you walk amongst them seeing how their backs are rounding out with the rich grass. We ask them to graze tighter to leave clean fields so the spring shoots will be the sweeter and the frost won’t damage the over-wintered leaves. Their milk can be more tricky to make into cheese, so we have our autumn calved cows to balance things up with some earlier lactation milk.
HEIFERS - Enjoy the sight of them in all the fields, as we start bringing first the youngest back to the barns out of the cooler weather, rain and mud. We bring them in in their age groups, and they dash down the road, all hands on deck to get them into the right place, will they treat that flimsy bit of rope as a barrier so they don’t dash off into the woodland – yes, if you keep them moving, shouts of ‘Ho, ho’ and lots of running to head them off in the right direction. We put it off as long as possible as until it gets wet and cold, they do much better outside, but eventually they must come in.
CHEESE - The milk gets more demanding as it gets richer, but it’s the skill of the cheesemaking to have it turn out as world class. The heart of the matter is to make sure it doesn’t get acid too quickly, so it drops its calcium (dry acid cheese) or retains too much moisture – acid fast cheese. You need some acidity to get the front flavour, too much and you get an acid spike to the flavour that is just boring at best or rank and bitter at worst. I have this sense of our flavour: ‘creamy at the front, balanced and complex in the middle, and a long complex finish’ in posh and ‘long, round and nutty’ in my head, so we watch the pasture, the milk solids, the starter, the make and the maturing to get it just so. It’s all work – we had a couple of vats of more acid cheese, and we think perhaps the vats where too big to really work every piece of the curd quite enough, not quite enough cheddaring to keep the acid development under control. Not bad cheese, but not great, so it won’t get sold as Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar.
PRIZES - I’m really excited that we won the trophy at the Frome Show for the best Farmhouse Mild Cheddar, the best Traditional Mature Cheddar and the mature also won best Traditional Cheddar, as well as a 2nd for Extra Mature and Unpasteurized Cheddar.
At the Great Taste awards our Extra Mature Cheddar and Vintage won 3 Star Golds, the Goats Cheese won a 2 Star Gold and the Mature Cheddar a 1 Star Gold.
At the British Cheese Award we won Gold for Mature Cheddar and Extra Mature Cheddar, Silver for Hard Goats Cheese, Herb Cheddar and Unpasteurized Cheddar, Bronze for Oak Smoked Cheddar, Mild Cheddar and Vintage Cheddar.
RECIPE - Lady Rayner suggested that Quickes Traditional Smoked Cheddar goes beautifully with a ripe Conference pear – just the job for an easy dessert.
MARY QUICKE
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Where in the World is Marian? - Metropolitan Market, Seattle
A selection of photographs from our activities at Metropolitan Markets, Queen Anne, Seattle, where we participated in their ‘For the Love of Cheese’ Festival (held outside in the store car park). You will note that we were featuring Cotswold, Tintern & Barbers 1833. Each of the stores made great displays of Barbers 1833 along with local Washington apples.
Marian
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Jo and Sam do Abergavenny
On Thursday 2nd September Jo and Sam went to visit Abergavenny and met up with Debbie Hewell. Here is photo graphic evidence that we sometimes leave the office in our shower caps...
Friday, 3 September 2010
Mary Quickes Dairy Diary - September 2010
Too quickly the days shorten, the year speeds away from the summer. Summer’s last richness hangs on the hedges and trees - blackberries, catch them this month before they go fly blown, apples, you know which variety is ripe now because the wasps start eating them, making their odd cuts into the apple, eventually hollowing it out. If you pick an apple with wasps in it, they are gorged and dopey, although I get cautious about which apple I sink my teeth into. I pick wild rose hips and haws, making a delicious jelly (wonderful with cheese). There’s plenty for the birds - next month, uneaten fruit will drop on the ground or rot on the bush.
CROPS - There has been good keep left in the field after harves: chaff and shrivelled grains that dropped out of the combine harvester, or ears bent over and missed by the header (the hexagonal arrangement at the front of the combine, that can’t pick up anything that falls underneath its steel fingers set in a line). When we ploughed, all that disappeared under six to eight inches of soil, just giving food to the birds that follow the plough to pick up the worms suddenly visible, but nothing for the seed eaters. This year, we will scrabble the soil to induce the weeds and that dropped corn, now a weed, to germinate. Later, we will use our minimal cultivator - deep tines to move but not turn the soil, little blades to smooth it back, discs to drop the seed into a cultivated slot, then tines to smooth it back down, and markers to know were the rows are. It will be interesting to see if our arable fields will feed more wildlife with this new method. It’s not that ploughing is bad for wildlife, it’s just that modern machinery means it happens all at once at the perfect time to grow the crop, and the wildlife have had a six week famine amid the plenty of autumn. In the old days, a man ploughing an acre a day with a horse, the job took all winter, leaving plenty of time for wildlife to find new food.
We will take our last harvest, the stately rows of maize, their cobs so temptingly like sweet corn, but starchy, not sweet. For the last time, the great harvesting procession comes onto the farm. The forage harvester is stately with its eight wicked large spikes jutting out of the front to cut the crop, tractors and trailers holding fourteen tonnes to take the cut crop to the pit, the great big rough terrain handler and the largest tractor to squash it all all down before we lay the plastic that keeps it safe, beautiful feed for the cows in the hungry months to come. Lots of farmers are short of feed this year, with the dry spring. With a reasonable harvest, we’ll be all right, but feed will be expensive. Harvest has been completely obliterated in the furnace of a summer they’ve had in the Russian and Ukrainian breadbaskets.
COWS - The autumn calving cows are now nearly all calved, just a few heavy girls in the field waiting for their udders to fill and the calf to come, patient, curious, crowding around when you come to see them, standing in a tight group to try to keep the flies off. There’s always one who barges forward, the others making way, then she’s there right in front of you, she’s feeling out on her own and exposed in the little circle around you, and you trust she’ll stop before she barges into you, obedient to the fiction we establish with cows that we are stronger than they are.
The milk is good, settled in composition from the new leafy grass that follows rain and the clover that still gives its scented flowers to the grazing.
The heifers are still outside on the grazing, getting wilder, more a herd, as they graze and grow. While they are outside, they are feeding on grass, so they don’t look to people for food. They see the point of us more when they are inside and we turn with dinner.
CHEESE - I like September’s cheese, of course the mature cheese we are eating will be last September’s. It has the benefit of the stalky late summer grass and the leafy autumn grass, a balance and richness that I love. We are in our newly spruced-up cheese dairy after August’s closedown, where we do the work that is too dirty or intrusive (scaffolding and so on) to do when we are making cheese. In the store, we carry on with our blowing of cheese, our solution to our cheese mite problem - fork lifting racks of cheese to where I have a dust extractor sucking, then my champion mite busting team blowing air from an air line to blow off cheese. It’s not a pleasant job (mite and noise) but it means we can keep the mite down to low levels, and we are starting to see cheese come through without mite damage at a year and more old. Now we are getting all cheese that will age onto fork-liftable racks, a big shift round of all our cheese stocks, but worth it to be able to manage this devastating problem.
PRIZES - At the Great Yorkshire Show we won 1st for Quickes Traditional Oak Smoked Cheddar and 2nd for Quickes Traditional Vintage Cheddar.
At the Taste of the West Awards we won Gold for Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar, Silver for Quickes Traditional Oak Smoked Cheddar, Silver for Quickes Traditional Extra Mature Cheddar and Bronze for Quickes Traditional Hard Goats Cheese.
RECIPE - There’s such a lot of tomatoes, courgettes, onions, garlic and now in Tom’s polytunnel, basil, aubergines and peppers. I like this vegetable lasagne, from Philippa Vine, a version appeared in the Farmers Weekly:
Cut the vegetables up into wedges or thick slices except the tomatoes and roast in a pan with olive oil and seasoning, add the chopped garlic just before the end of the cooking time. Make a cheese sauce with butter, flour and milk, and add grated or chopped Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar. Layer the softened roasted vegetables, lasagne sheets, then sliced beef tomatoes, chopped marjoram and torn basil then cheese sauce, I like to top with a little more cheese and dried breadcrumbs. Bake in a lower oven for around 30 minutes, and serve with salad.
MARY QUICKE
CROPS - There has been good keep left in the field after harves: chaff and shrivelled grains that dropped out of the combine harvester, or ears bent over and missed by the header (the hexagonal arrangement at the front of the combine, that can’t pick up anything that falls underneath its steel fingers set in a line). When we ploughed, all that disappeared under six to eight inches of soil, just giving food to the birds that follow the plough to pick up the worms suddenly visible, but nothing for the seed eaters. This year, we will scrabble the soil to induce the weeds and that dropped corn, now a weed, to germinate. Later, we will use our minimal cultivator - deep tines to move but not turn the soil, little blades to smooth it back, discs to drop the seed into a cultivated slot, then tines to smooth it back down, and markers to know were the rows are. It will be interesting to see if our arable fields will feed more wildlife with this new method. It’s not that ploughing is bad for wildlife, it’s just that modern machinery means it happens all at once at the perfect time to grow the crop, and the wildlife have had a six week famine amid the plenty of autumn. In the old days, a man ploughing an acre a day with a horse, the job took all winter, leaving plenty of time for wildlife to find new food.
We will take our last harvest, the stately rows of maize, their cobs so temptingly like sweet corn, but starchy, not sweet. For the last time, the great harvesting procession comes onto the farm. The forage harvester is stately with its eight wicked large spikes jutting out of the front to cut the crop, tractors and trailers holding fourteen tonnes to take the cut crop to the pit, the great big rough terrain handler and the largest tractor to squash it all all down before we lay the plastic that keeps it safe, beautiful feed for the cows in the hungry months to come. Lots of farmers are short of feed this year, with the dry spring. With a reasonable harvest, we’ll be all right, but feed will be expensive. Harvest has been completely obliterated in the furnace of a summer they’ve had in the Russian and Ukrainian breadbaskets.
COWS - The autumn calving cows are now nearly all calved, just a few heavy girls in the field waiting for their udders to fill and the calf to come, patient, curious, crowding around when you come to see them, standing in a tight group to try to keep the flies off. There’s always one who barges forward, the others making way, then she’s there right in front of you, she’s feeling out on her own and exposed in the little circle around you, and you trust she’ll stop before she barges into you, obedient to the fiction we establish with cows that we are stronger than they are.
The milk is good, settled in composition from the new leafy grass that follows rain and the clover that still gives its scented flowers to the grazing.
The heifers are still outside on the grazing, getting wilder, more a herd, as they graze and grow. While they are outside, they are feeding on grass, so they don’t look to people for food. They see the point of us more when they are inside and we turn with dinner.
CHEESE - I like September’s cheese, of course the mature cheese we are eating will be last September’s. It has the benefit of the stalky late summer grass and the leafy autumn grass, a balance and richness that I love. We are in our newly spruced-up cheese dairy after August’s closedown, where we do the work that is too dirty or intrusive (scaffolding and so on) to do when we are making cheese. In the store, we carry on with our blowing of cheese, our solution to our cheese mite problem - fork lifting racks of cheese to where I have a dust extractor sucking, then my champion mite busting team blowing air from an air line to blow off cheese. It’s not a pleasant job (mite and noise) but it means we can keep the mite down to low levels, and we are starting to see cheese come through without mite damage at a year and more old. Now we are getting all cheese that will age onto fork-liftable racks, a big shift round of all our cheese stocks, but worth it to be able to manage this devastating problem.
PRIZES - At the Great Yorkshire Show we won 1st for Quickes Traditional Oak Smoked Cheddar and 2nd for Quickes Traditional Vintage Cheddar.
At the Taste of the West Awards we won Gold for Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar, Silver for Quickes Traditional Oak Smoked Cheddar, Silver for Quickes Traditional Extra Mature Cheddar and Bronze for Quickes Traditional Hard Goats Cheese.
RECIPE - There’s such a lot of tomatoes, courgettes, onions, garlic and now in Tom’s polytunnel, basil, aubergines and peppers. I like this vegetable lasagne, from Philippa Vine, a version appeared in the Farmers Weekly:
Cut the vegetables up into wedges or thick slices except the tomatoes and roast in a pan with olive oil and seasoning, add the chopped garlic just before the end of the cooking time. Make a cheese sauce with butter, flour and milk, and add grated or chopped Quickes Traditional Mature Cheddar. Layer the softened roasted vegetables, lasagne sheets, then sliced beef tomatoes, chopped marjoram and torn basil then cheese sauce, I like to top with a little more cheese and dried breadcrumbs. Bake in a lower oven for around 30 minutes, and serve with salad.
MARY QUICKE
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
New Aprons for the Fancy Food Show
We were all sporting our newly designed shirts and aprons at the recent Fancy Food Show in New York. Gratefully supported by many suppliers including Long Clawson Dairy, Quickes, Abergavenny and Barbers, the show was well attended. There was also growing optimism from the trade that the economy is showing some signs of improvement at long last.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)