As planned, I spent all of last Saturday at Bobolink Dairy, helping Jonathan White make cheese and watching what he does there on a daily basis. All in all, it was a good day. I had fun, learned a little, worked kind of hard, and, most importantly, got a pretty good feel for what the day-to-day life is like.

The farm is located on the Vernon, NJ/Warwick, NY border. This is about 45 minutes from Ringwood, NJ, where Kari and I grew up and where we stayed the night before. To be their for the 7:30 milking, I had to get up around 5:30. Ouch. I’m not used to seeing 5:30 in the morning. More than likely, the last time I did it was the end of my night, not the beginning of my day.

I arrived at Bobolink at about 7:15. The area around the farm is quite beautiful. It’s interesting, actually, that 45 minutes from Ringwood in one direction brings you to Manhattan. 45 minutes the other direction brings you to farm country. True, some of these farms are being converted to McMansion-esque housing developments, but it’s still pretty rural. But I digress.

The little parking lot happens to be right next to the bake-house, a roofed-over concrete floor and Jonathan’s hand-built wood-fired brick hearth oven. Taylor, the baker who lives on the premises with his wife, was already hard at work, and looked like he had been for some time. Stuff starts early here.

Jonathan came out soon after I arrived and took me right to the cow’s barn where Josh, the herdsman, was getting started with the milking. There are about twenty-five or so cows producing milk at Bobolink right now. All are grass-fed and spend most of their time outside. This is in contrast to the typical dairy cow’s life, which is usually spent confined to a pen eating grain feed.

All of the cows have names, which I thought was a nice touch. Jonathan seems to really know his cows too, pointing out which are a little grumpy, which are timid, etc. He pointed out one cow, whose name escapes me, who will likely be turned into meat at some point soon. They haven’t been successful getting her pregnant, so she’s not producing any milk. Such is the way of life on the farm, I suppose. I’m assuming she’ll be better braised than grilled, being a milk cow and all.

The cows, for their part, seemed pretty content. They were eating cut grass while being milked because it’s the end of the grass-growing season. Because of this, they’re producing about half as much milk as they were at the height of the season. In the next week or so, the herd will be dried-off and that’ll be it for milk—and cheesemaking—until next spring. Commercial dairies usually keep their cows lactating year-round.

In season, the cows are milked twice a day, everyday. Therefore, cheese has to be made every day. The milk at Bobolink is never refrigerated, nor is it pasteurized. It gets piped directly from the cows straight into the cheesemaking vat, which already contained the previous evening’s milk - which has soured overnight. I drank some of the milk right out of the cow (well, it was diverted from the pipe into a jar—I didn�t suck it right out of the udder or anything) and it was really good. I�m not a big fan of milk for drinking, but this was really quite different than any milk I�ve had before—much better, in fact.

While the cows were being milked, I washed dishes. Not really dishes, but the cheesemaking equipment we�d soon be using, including knives, molds, trays, etc. Cleanliness is of utmost importance in cheesemaking, and everything is washed and sanitized before and after each use.

After the milking, we made cheese. The cheese we were making is called �Jean-Louis,� a twenty pound wheel, and is described by Jonathan as, �our largest cheese, which ripens slowly and develops rich, meaty, crisp, clean flavor. Named to honor the memory of Chef Jean-Louis Palladin.�

The entire process took a few hours, but the actual work involved didn’t take all of that time. There were a few hours while the milk was gently agitated and brought up in temperature. Then Jonathan added rennet and, once the curds were set, we cut them using a special curd knife (like an oversized hard-boiled egg cutter). My only previous experience making cheese was in our apartment. Cutting the curds here—with 40 gallons of milk—took much less time using the special knife than it did at home using a spatula in 2 gallons of milk.

After the curds were cut, they were left to rest a while. Basically, as they sat whey was expelled and they firmed up. For different cheeses, the curds sit for different amounts of time to achieve the appropriate firmness. After the curds were ready, we ladled them into the molds—for Jean-Louis, we used large perforated metal rings, about 12 inches in diameter and 12 inches tall. From forty gallons of milk, we got two full molds of twenty pounds each. After the molds were full, we turned them a few times, to allow for even settling, and they were left to rest overnight. After this rest, they�ll have settled down to about a third of their original height, as more whey is drained out. The next day, they�re removed from the molds, salted on the outside, and left to sit another day. Then they�re moved into the ripening cave.

The cave is really a shipping container with a door with the temperature and humidity controlled. The cheese age in here for at least 90 days (for shortest time permissible by US law for raw-milk cheese) and up to about 6 months. Most, I think, are in there four months of so. This depends on the type of cheese. The aging-room stinks of ammonia, a natural by-product of the molds that are ripening the cheese. This smell, though, doesn�t carry over to the cheese itself unless it�s over-ripened and has turned a corner.

So that was pretty much my day. Along the way, I helped Jonathan find a salmon serving dish in one of his barns, hung out with his family a little, and helped him cater (with cheese, bread, salmon, and shrimp) an event at Mountain Creek Ski Resort. All in a day�s work, apparently, for a local cheesemaker and farmer. By the end of the day (around 3:00) I was pretty much wiped out.

I feel like I got a really good taste for the daily operations at Bobolink. I can still picture myself doing this full-time, but I�m still not sure how to get there. I�m trying to work something out with Jonathan where I can do a short apprenticeship or something. I think that�s really the only way to really learn everything that goes into it.