Slow Food Pig Roast and Cheesemaking

Before that happened, we had to leave to get to a Slow Food Pig Roast near Stratford, which Danielle had invited us to. The Pig Roast itself didn't have as large a turnout as Slow Food had hoped, but it was still a bundle of fun. We met a couple farmers, including the gentleman who raises pigs for Grant at Black Hoof. We met our hosts, Kris and Mark, who are a potter and a farmer, respectively. Mark does pigs, corn and a couple other crops, and Kris and her potter pals built an Anagama, an ancient Japanese pottery oven that is pretty amazing. I know what your thinking, what does that have to do with food? But let me assure you, she makes functional dishware, casseroles, and cookware, so ha! It is food related!
Anyways, this oven is insane, it fires for six days, and needs to be fed wood every five minutes. It runs so hot that ash is really a non issue. It glazes the pots and melts, so clean up is minimal after a firing. She has a list of people who want to come and fire. These ovens are relatively scarce, so potters flock to them. Moving on to the roast itself. The piggy was nicely cooked for handful of hours, and had just come out when we arrived. We lended hands where deemed necessary, so we shucked and cooked all the corn, and helped out with the focaccia. The wood oven was firing too high for the first round of bread, and we got a nice peice of burnt madness, which was nevertheless tasty. After that round we shoveled a bunch of smoking hot coals into the corn pit, so that the temp would stay up there. Worked out well, but there was a lot of excess food. On the upside, the ring of people we got to hang out with after all the normal folks were gone was a blast. Everyone was really relaxed, and had a good time. We met Suresh Doss and first lady Nina Popovic, of Spotlight Toronto, a wicked online publication revolving around food and wine of Toronto and it's region. They are awesome folks, and we got to meet up with them again on our second pass through Toronto. After the roast was complete, we all went down to a local pub to wind down the evening and relax a little. Little by little, our group got smaller and the conversation wandered from subject to subject. Eventually we asked the bartender if we could leave our van in the back and just stay there, which he permitted because he knows Mark. It was a pretty excellent evening, and we were to awake early to go make cheese. As darkness closed in we decided to call it a night and rolled out to the van.

The following morning we awoke to the back alley sounds of garbage trucks and angry squirrels, and decided that perhaps it was time to leave this place and get cheesemaking. Ruth's pal Paul let us shower at his house, at her insistence that we be as clean as humanly possible before entering the dairy. We then changed garb into our finest livery of hair and beard nets and dairy clothes before being sanitized and washed in. The dairy is awesome, not only is the facility pretty kick ass, but the people who work there are fun. We got to make cheddar, which I will never look down on again. When cheddar is mentioned, my neural nets light up. I make a lot of associations. From favourite dishes, defintely, but also associations to processed cheese, Kraft, bad cheddar cheeses and cheap shreddded cheddars. Now I have one more which trumps all. The process of making cheddar is not a simple one, nor even just as simply complex as regular cheese. Cheddar is a wild scene. Cheddar is grunt work. After pasteurization, the whey gets pumped into a massive vat with paddles that basically get it heated up enough to have fun with rennet. The microbial enzymes are added, and then the curd starts forming. My first task was to keep the curds small, so I was arms deep in a tub of warm whey, getting slapped around by paddles and trying to find large chunks to break up. It was fun. After the curds have formed, the whey is drained off for the piggys, and we are left with pure hot curds. These are pressed, left to coagulate, then cut to drain. After they have solidified slightly, they are cut again and then flipped. We flip them a bundle of times over around an hour, ensuring each side has proper exposure to being pressed on the steel. This forms blocks. I was astonished at these blocks, thinking they would be pressed into cheddar themselves.
However, it was not to be. You then run the blocks through a curd mill, which slices them into pieces small enough to be curds again. The first press is just to drain whey. After the cutting, the real work begins. The cheese must then be salted and kept moving. Two shovels are needed, as well as one person to salt the cheese and break up chunks by hand. It is a prodigious amount of labour. Larger facilities do have a mechanical process, but I was much happier to do it by hand, as it meant not only was I doing it the original way, but also the only way I'll likely ever be able to afford to. The curds, after salting and vigorous mobility, are then put into a box lined with cheesecloth and pressed pneumatically. The structure is pretty brilliant.
After cheddar, and in between steps of cheddar, it was camembert time. The camembert is a much more delicate cheese, and has less procedural difficulties than cheddar. It is cut with small, harp like objects into tiny cubes, then someone(me and fabian) will drain off the whey with a basket and sieve. Keeping in mind that the whey is for ricotta and pig feed, and not the floor. After most of the whey is carefully drained, the curds are packed into molds with holes to help keep maximum drainage going. These molds are really cool because they not only shape the cheese and give it it's finished consistency, but they stack like lego! In one massive block of plastic, around 50 wheels of camembert sit and get ready for edibility. It's a pretty awesome enterprise. The third cheese we started we did not get to finish was the ricotta, because we cleaned, scrubbed down, and then went to hang out in the ripening room with Daniel, the prodigal son. The ripening room doubles as the hang out and packing facility, and we were prepping cheeses for the upcoming markets. We had been tasked with rolling up the little prince, an ash covered softy with gooey goodness inside. After another hour or so of wrapping, we had a brief discussion about our next step, and decided that due to our schedule being so far behind it is incredible, we would move on. We thanked everyone profusely, gave Ruth a bottle of wine, and partied on. The next step was the legendary Niagara Peninsula, and it had a lot of wine in store for us, so we needed our time there. It turned out we needed more time than we even we thought. Again. Thanks again to the slow foodies and cheesemakers of Stratford, you will not be forgotten!