Making Squeaky Cheese Curds

Have you tried cheese curds? They are delicious! They are easy to make, too.

To make cheese you need 2 gallons of milk. Raw milk will give you more cheese than pasteurized milk from the store. Pasteurized milk is easier and less expensive to get than raw milk. We have Echo, so I have plenty of unpasteurized milk! A gallon of milk weighs 8 pounds. Each gallon of milk gives between 1 and 1 1/2 pounds of cheese. What happened to the rest of the pounds? Read on and find out!

I also need some rennet, and some starter. Starter changes the milk slightly so it's able to turn into cheese. You can find out more information about what a starter does, and what it's made of here.

Rennet is used to make the milk turn into a curd, which is a little like jello. You can find out more about rennet here.

How to:
Slowly heat 2 gallons of milk to 96˚F over low heat.

Once the milk reaches the right temperature, add the starter culture. I'm using a C-201 thermophilic starter. That's a lot of big words for 1st grade.

The starter is in the small spoon. I add a 'dash' to 2 gallons of milk.

I mix the starter in and let the milk sit for about 20 minutes to 'ripen.'
That means the starter has done it's job and it's time to add the rennet.

I add 1/2 teaspoon rennet mixed into 2 Tablespoons of cool, filtered water.

Once the rennet is added, I cover the container with a camp chef cover that
keeps the milk mixture nice and warm.

It's time to wait again. Leave the milk undisturbed, that means don't move it, don't touch it, don't check it. It needs to rest for 30 minutes. I usually clean the kitchen or vacuum or find something else useful to do while I'm waiting for the curd to form.



After I cut the curd, I mix the curds for 5 minutes.

Then I have to slooooowwwwly raise the temperature of the curds to 116˚F by turning on the stove very low.
This takes about 30 minutes, and I need to keep stirring it.

Can you see a difference in the curds (the white chunks) between the first picture and the last picture?
Heating the curds makes the whey (the clear, yellow-ish liquid) come out of the curds. All cheese is made from curds.

Next I need to separate the curds from the whey. I'm making cheese, I need the curds, but not the whey.



About 12 pounds of whey went down the drain, that's about 1 1/2 gallons. (Remember I started with 2 gallons, each gallon weighs about 8 pounds.)

I have to wait about 30 minutes or more depending on how dry I want my curds. It takes a few hours to make cheese. I usually have a few 30 minute breaks to get useful things done.

Time to open the cloth!



Now our family gets to enjoy some fresh Squeaky Cheese Curds! They are delicious! We like them better than the orange Squeaky Cheese from the store. My Squeaky Cheese isn't orange because I didn't add any food coloring to it. If you want your cheese to be orange you need to add a special food coloring.

I hope you have a chance to try this recipe at home!

Then and Now: Milking

Echo doesn't mind sharing her breakfast with Dale.

Dale doesn't mind Echo's big nose.

I love the chickens! They clean up all the grain that the
goats and Echo spill onto the ground.

Chippy is very friendly. On Saturday she decided to take
a ride on my shoulder while I was doing chores.
I think Chippy is cute when she sits on my shoulder!

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On a small farm like ours we do some things the old-fashioned way, the same way they did them a long time ago. Sometimes we do chores the way bigger farms do.

Feeding the animals is done the old way on our farm. I fill each bucket with the right amount of food for each animal. Some animals get more food than others because of the job they do. If a goat or cow is pregnant we give them more food. If they give milk, they get more food. If they aren't pregnant or aren't giving milk they get less food because their body isn't working as hard.

We don't milk the cow and the goats the same way. We milk the cow with a milker, which is how big farms do it. A milker needs electricity and it is a lot of equipment.

We milk the goats by hand. I only need a bucket and a cover to milk the goats, which is how farmers used to milk cows and goats a long time ago.




The milker is hooked up to a vacuum pump. A vacuum pump is just what it sounds like. It sucks air just like a vacuum. The vacuum sucks the air out of the big, covered milk tank. Your vacuum sucks air out of a tank, too, which sucks the dirt into a tank or a bag.

The vacuum pump pulls air out of the tank which sucks the milk out of Echo's udder.




I don't need anything special to milk the goats. I need a pail and a cover for the pail to keep the dirt out if the wind blows the hay around in the barn.

This is the filter for the milker. A filter keeps the dirt out of the milk
just the same way the cover on the goat milk bucket keeps hay and dust
from blowing into the bucket.

The white filter was inside the metal tube. The milk goes through the hose,
through the filter, and into the tank.

There are advantages having the vacuum pump and milker. It's fast, and it works without me standing there. While the milker is milking Echo I have time to clean her stall and put some hay in her feeder. If I milk Echo by hand, like I milk the goats, it takes me about 45 minutes. I only need a pail and a cover.

The are also disadvantages to the milker.  It cost a lot of money. It was over $2,000 to get a milker set up like the one in the video. We need electricity to run it, so if the power is out I have to milk Echo by hand. It takes about 20 minutes to clean, and costs money for filters.

We decided on our farm that it was worth it to get a milker for the cow.

We decided that it's best to milk the goats by hand. I could use a milker on the goats, but I have to clean the inflations and hoses between each goat. The inflations are the parts that attach onto their udders. It's faster to wash my hands between goats than it is for me to wash inflations and hoses between goats.

It takes about 10-12 minutes to milk each goat. That's less than 30 minutes, which is faster than milking the cow. If I used a milker it would take me 20 minutes to clean the milker between each goat, that would be about 40 minutes of cleaning, plus 6-8 minutes for the milker to milk each goat, a total of almost an hour!

A long time ago when more people had small farms, the boys and girls would often be the ones that would do the milking. Quin and Xander like to help milk when they are visiting.

It makes sense for me to use the milker for the cow, and milk the goats the 'old-fashioned way' by hand.

I hope you learn about the way things were done a long time ago, and the way things are done now.  It's nice to know a lot of different ways to do things. You will be able to come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things if you know a lot of different ways to do things.

Remember to 

Do something kind 

for someone else

every day!

Mud and Yuck!

We usually have snow in January. This year we have rain and mud in January.

It's nice that we can be outside without heavy jackets all the time. It's nice that we can be outside more often because it isn't as cold as usual.

It's awful to work in the barn with all the mud and muck! All the rain has made muddy spots where the animals live.

Look at all the water and mud.
It's so mucky that we always have to wear boots.

We also have to dig small drainage ditches so the water will drain away from the barn.
Can you see the small stream?

We also have to clean out Echo's stall and her pen outside the barn
every single day or the muck builds up so deep that we can't walk
through it, and Echo won't walk through it.

All the muck and mud that we dig out of the stall and the front
of the barn gets dumped into the garden.

Do you see Echo in the photo? I feed her out in this pen when the weather isn't rainy so she doesn't have to stand in the mud when she eats.

All the muck and mud is smelly if it sits in the stalls and the barn. It's not good for animal hooves for them to stand in the mud, either.

Mud and muck is really good for gardens! All of the mud and muck is like vitamins for garden plants! I think it's very interesting and nice that muck and mud is good in one place on the farm, but not good in another place on the farm.

This January we've had a lot of rain. Last January we had snow.

This is a photo from January 2017

JJ and Scout love the snow. This year they haven't had a chance to play in the snow.

Instead JJ is sneaking out of the fence, and then sneaking back in!

Matthew will be fixing the low spot under the fence so she can't sneak out.

JJ and Scout are very smart dogs. Sometimes that is a bad thing because they can figure out how to get outside a fence. We really like how smart they are because they learn things so quickly and can be a real help around the farm.

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I've been thinking about the garden already. It's almost time to plant seeds inside so the small plants are ready to put in the garden in June. Are you thinking and planning ahead for Spring and Summer? Farmers and ranchers are always thinking ahead a few months. We are always thinking about when to plant our garden, when kids and calves will be born, will we have enough water to grow a garden this year, do we have enough feed and hay for the animals?

Your teachers have to plan ahead, too! They are already thinking about what to teach next week, and next month! They are thinking about what needs to be copied next week and what activities they will be doing with you.

What do you think you will be doing next week? Are you still doing something kind for someone else every day? What can you do for someone this afternoon? What can you do for someone tomorrow? Can you do something that will make someone else happy?

Enjoy the nice weather and have fun playing outside at recess. Lots of fresh air and sunshine is so nice in the winter!

Remember to 

Do something kind 

for someone else

every day!

Water in the Winter

It's cold outside!

Water is really important for animals. They need to have water to keep healthy. It's been very cold outside so their water freezes.

We use electric water heaters and electric buckets for the water.

Do you see the round piece of metal at the bottom of the bucket?
That is a heater that keeps the water warm enough that it doesn't freeze.
The animals are a little sloppy and they've dropped hay into their water.

This bucket has an electrical chord that plugs in.
The bucket has a heater inside the bottom, you can't see it
because it's enclosed inside the plastic.

This is a special hose.
The hose has a heater in it!
It keeps the water from freezing inside the hose.
That's important because if there is ice in the hose we can't use it.
If we can't use the hose then we have to carry buckets of water to fill all the barrels.
That's a lot of work! We would have to carry 14 or more buckets of water every day
to fill up all the barrels. 

Water is important for healthy animals. If they have enough clean food and water they can stay warm and healthy during the winter, even when they live in a barn with no heaters.

There is also a heater in the water that the chickens drink, but the chickens don't mind eating snow if they aren't in the pen. The cows, sheep, and goats don't like to eat snow or peck at ice to get their water so we make sure they always have water, not ice, in their barrels and buckets.

Heating water takes a lot of electricity so this year we put solar panels on
the roof of the barn. That should help keep our costs down.
We have a great place for the solar panels.
Not everyone has as nice a place for the solar panels as we do!



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