[SOUND] Welcome. We are back at the Prairie Fruits Farm. This is, again, a goat farm just north of Urbana, Illinois. And I'm Walt Hurley, and I'm going to be talking today with our host, Leslie Cooperband, one of the proprietors of this farm. So what we wanted to do today was to focus a bit more on the cheese manufacturing, and then a little bit later on, we'll actually go in the parlor and see some goats being milked. So Leslie, give us an idea of where we're standing and what's going on here? >> Sure, so these two vats are 52 gallon vat pasteurizers. We transfer milk from the milk cows, which is two rooms away. It's a two-stage transfer from the goat to the bulk tank, bulk tank to the vat. On any given day, we can make a little over 100 gallons worth of milk into cheese. Our fresh cheese, it's about two gallons for every pound of milk. Some of these aged cheeses, it's more like four or five gallons for every pound of cheese. The beauty of a piece of equipment like this is we can pasteurize milk since it's a vat. We're required to pasteurize at 145 for 30 minutes, and then we cool the milk to whatever temperature we're needing to have for the specific style of cheese. So today, for example, we made two cheeses. We made a ricotta, and we made a ladled curd bloomy rind cheese that we call black goat. And those are both made with pasteurized milk. This vat had the ladled curd cheese. This vat had the ricotta, and this vat has in addition to we heat the, they're both jacketed. So the way that they're heated is hot water runs through the jacket, warms the milk to whatever temperature you set this to. This one also has an internal electric heating element down here, so we can boost the temperature up even higher. For ricotta, it's 185 degrees to get the curd to precipitate. So we actually bring this up to 185 degrees. >> So how do you generate the curd? >> By chemical acidification. So we add citric acid, and we add vinegar, white vinegar, and that's what precipitates the curd. The other one, it's a combination of culture, starter culture and rennet, which is an enzyme. >> And so how long before the curd is formed before you're taking it out of here roughly? >> In the case of the ricotta, the citric acid and salt are added when the milk reaches about 160 degrees. And then when it hits 185, we add the vinegar, and immediately, the curd precipitates. In this case of this ladled curd bloomy rind cheese, It takes about five hours before the curd is at a consistency that we can ladle it. >> So you want to show us one of these guys? >> Sure, so these are the molds or forms that we use for this particular style of curd. This type of form is actually called a half-Camembert mold. And this was full, actually, slightly mounded, when it was initially ladled. And we're actually tracking the acidification of the curd in the mold after it's been ladled. So we use this pH meter, so we can actually track pH from the milk into the cheese itself. >> So how long has this been in there? Since this morning? >> No, this is been in here for maybe an hour and a half tops. >> Okay, not very long. >> No. >> What have you got? >> And. >> About 5.85, something like that? >> 5.85, and pH is an extremely important measure for us because it tells us, it is our indicator of what we need to do next for a particular type of tea. So In this case, we're looking for a pH of about 5.5, 5.6 to flip these over. Before that, the curd isn't set enough. And then we'll flip them over, and they're going to stay overnight, flipped over. Tomorrow, they'll get flipped back over, and they'll actually get brined in a brine tank, which I'll show you where that is. And then we do, we ash the outside of this cheese, and then the milk has already been inoculated with a white mold. The white mold will start to grow on the outside of the cheese after about five or six days, and then we'll completely cover the outside of the cheese. And when it's completely covered, we wrap it in a special ripening paper, and they continue to age. So this cheese, we also keep very detailed records for each of the cheeses that we make. And we have recipes or make procedures that we have to keep track of the cultures that we use, the lot numbers for the cultures. This is all for our hazard plan and traceability, how much rennet we added, and how long it took for the curd to form when we ladled. So this, they finished labeling this curd about 3:15 this afternoon, so it's only been about an hour ago. This is the aging room for our raw milk cheeses, and right now, we have two cells of raw milk in here. Our moon glow, which is a washed dried tomme, that's T-O-M-M-E. This a classic farmstead European type cheese. We wash the outside with a cultured brine solution that also contains a tea that we extract from the leaves of one of the pear varieties in our orchard that's called moon glow. So this is actually the wash. >> So the moon glow comes from the pear, the name of the pear? >> The moon glow name comes from pear, yes. Yes, and these cheeses get washed two times a week for the first month of their life, and then they get washed once a week, so it's a pretty labor-intensive cheese. And it takes about four months before we actually get nice, complex flavor in these cheese that we consider it ready for sale. The cheese over here is our blue cheese. This is called huckleberry blue, it's another raw milk cheese, it's a natural rinded blue. Many blue cheeses, once they're pierced, because you need oxygen to get the blue mold to vein inside the body of the cheese, so we hand pierce ours, and we let a natural rind develop. Many of your Maytag Blue and many of those classic, well-known American blue cheeses, they actually wrap them in foil to prevent a rind from developing. The foggers that you see on the floor here, this is how we create the proper humidity regime for each of these aging rooms. We actually, these are foggers on a timer. So if I turn that you'll see it generates a fine mist that then results in a certain humidity level. This room, for example, we try to maintain the humidity at about 86 to 90%. The room where the bloomy rind cheeses live, that one needs to be minimum 90%, it's more like 95% relative humidity. This is where finished product lives and also where we continue to age these bloomy rind cheeses once they're wrapped, in these bins right here. This is the black code. It's got a very different kind of white mold that colonizes the rind. It's more crinkly look compared to that white fuzzy. This one is called geotricum candidum. It's a different genus and species of white mold. This is what the ash looks like, and you can see there's a very thin layer of a concurrently white mold growing on the outside of it. And this cheese is about ten days old right now. >> Okay, so Leslie, what do you have to do to be compliant in all the licenses that you have and so on? What kinds of things do you have to do? >> So we are licensed by the Illinois Department of Public Health as a manufactured milk processing facility. We also, with that designation, we can make ice cream, or in our case, we make gelato base. We can't do fluid milk, and we can't make butter. Those are considered grade A dairy plant processing products. So to do that, we have records that we keep, our pasteurization records. We have charts that our inspector looks at twice a year. We keep track of all of the make procedures that we do for each cheese. Each cheese has a batch number that is labeled on the packaging either on the wrapping paper or on the container of the chevre. We have records of when we opened a new product that we used, like cultures, salt, rennet, etc., the manufacturer, the lot number, when it was opened, and who opened it. Everyday, we have a whole procedure of recording temperatures in each of our rooms, our make room, our freezer, our walk in, and all the aging rooms. We actually do that at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. We have a daily Operations check list at the beginning of the day, the things that we have to make sure that we do, from sanitizing spaces that we're going to be working in to recording temperatures, etc. And then at the end of the day, we do that same thing. All of our labels have to comply with FTA requirements for the name of the cheese, the weight of the cheese, the name of the establishment, our address, and the ingredient list. [MUSIC]
