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Cart Training Your Goat
Training your goat to pull a cart is fun and useful. Pulling a cart is not hard, driving a cart requires two people who both love working with goats, the same amount…Training to pull a cart, first introduce the harness to your goat, put it on him and walk him around. Practice stopping and starting with voice commands, give lots of praise and treats when he responds with the correct behaviour and keep lots of patience when he doesn’t understand or feel like doing it right now. Introduce the cart by letting him sniff of it, pull the cart on one side of you and lead the goat on your other side, this will get him accustom to the sound the cart makes moving and he’ll get used to it being close. When the cart rolling beside him doesn’t bother him, you can hook the cart to your goat. Just for cautions sake, have a second person there to help unhook in case the goat gets frightened. One person to hold and calm the goat and the other to unhook the cart. If your goat has accepted the training so far, you probably won’t have any trouble but always a good idea to be safe. When the goat is pulling the empty cart comfortably, you can begin adding weight in the cart. Use common sense about what you put in, things that rattle go slowly and praise lavishly with treats. When your goat is full grown and in condition they can pull about 1 and a half times their weight. If you have a young goat, keep the load light, up to 3/4 of their body weight. The main things to remember, take the training slowly, repeat each step several times before moving on to the next step, keep it fun and give lots of praise and rewards. You will be rewarded with a goat who is useful and enjoys working. Zack helps me move haybales, bags of feed, fire wood and give kids rides all for peanuts.
Now what I mean by driving being different from pulling. Driving is done when one person is riding in the cart or is behind the goat, giving commands and the goat is responding correctly. Normally the goat is being led when he is just pulling and if he is not pulling my weight he can pull more of whatever chore we are doing. But, it is lots of fun riding in the cart being pulled by your goat. So to train, it really takes two people to get started. After your goat is wearing the harness without problems you will need someone up by his head cueing his response to your verbal command for “giddy up” and “whoa” turning. First tell your goat what you want him to do and if he doesn’t do it have the other person cue him with a lead rope and reward the response. Then do it again, tell him what you want wait a second if no response the other person cues and rewards. Keep the lessons short and frequent, daily would be best. When your goat is comfortable with the commands, gradually have your helper get futher and further away until they are not needed. Practice starting stopping and turning, then add the cart. You will need the helper back when you introduce the cart for safety, for the first couple of times.
Now my personal experience with Zack and driving. He will follow along with me without a lead, so kids can hold the reins but I have to be there to guide him. Zack doesn’t respond to my family as well as he does for me and I can’t lead and give the drive commands at the same time. Also, my family does not have as much fun leading Zack as I do in the cart. I think you see where I am going with this…However, I have a lot of fun working with Zack so I enjoy just leading him while he pulls for me.
Almost Spring
Finally March is here which surely means spring isn’t too far behind. I have had enough snow,ice, slush, and mud…Bring on the flowers and green grass and leaves. My name is Leah Rennick, I live in Hallsville, Missouri which is just 10 miles north of Columbia and I raise Kinder goats. The big gray wether I am scratching in the picture is Zack, he is my packgoat and a real sweetheart. And really “My” packgoat because he doesn’t listen to the rest of my family too good.
This is my husband, Craig. He was raised a city boy which I have transplanted to the country. I bought our first Kinder goats while he was deployed to Iraq in 2005. Craig is a Staff Sargeant in the National Guard reserve and we are getting ready for his second deployment to Iraq. He will be leaving in April so we are rushing this month to raise a hay shelter before he goes. My oldest son, Tyler, is 14 and you can see him here lending a foot.
Tyler, is in 4-H, and has started his own Kinder herd. He bought his first doe, Bramble Patch Kinders Ebony’s Reflection, from Sue Huston. “Ebby” is a beautiful black doe and her first year had twin black bucklings. Tyler decided he wanted a second doe to increase his herd and he wanted a light colored doe for variety. Last year we looked and finally found a doe, Still Meadow Flower Blossom. However, they would only sell her if we took her twin sister also. Her sister was beautiful, so I bought her, then found out she was pregnant. I bought one of her babies also to keep as a second packgoat. So, Tyler’s goat cost me two additional goats. We bred Ebby was to our buck, Tickleweed Hill Farm Treat and they produced two beautiful does this past January, one Tyler is keeping and the other I am keeping. Below is Tyler pictured with the doeling he is keeping. Please notice the very light creamy white color.
This is Justin, my 10 year old son. He is in my 4-H Working Goat project. He has a Kinder wether which he is training to be a packgoat. He is also thinking about buying a Kinder doe to start raising his own Kinders.
I raise Kinders and sell them for breeding stock, companions, and market. I use the milk for home use, but mostly I make cold process goat milk soap and goat milk lotion. I sell the soap and lotion both retail off the farm and whole sale through a small flower and gift shop locally. I have made some cheese, but really love making the soap and lotion.
I am looking forward to being the March blogger and sharing my love of the Kinder goat and how I spend time with my goats with you. For now, it’s time to call it a day and get some sleep…
Wild Blue Cheddar
I made Blue cheese. A long time ago. Blue cheese is easy to make and quite complicated to age. And it takes a long time. My first effort isn’t very good, it is really mild, not the right texture (more like chevre), and has no veins of blue in it. It doesn’t taste bad, it tastes like a very mild blue.
I learned a lot. The biggest thing I learned is that if you do this you are likely to get blue mold loose in your cave. I think it might be real hard to avoid this. I knew this might happen, and I tried very hard to be careful. I kept it in containers I got specifically for this, and the cheese was never exposed to the cave. But you have to turn it over a lot, and you have to handle it. I think mold got on the lid from taking it on and off. I understand that once you have blue mold in your cave it might be impossible to get rid of it. So it might be a good idea to avoid this cheese for awhile, or at least be really paranoid.
So I had a little chunk of cheddar aging in there, and it didn’t have a tight enough seal. It got blue mold. It was about 5 weeks in the cave before I noticed the blue mold. This was a complete accident. I was curious, so I left it alone until it was about three months old. It was an amazing cheese, naturally. It had the flavor of cheddar, plus strong blue, plus a bit of bite at the end, it was really great. It had a nice texture too. I wished it had a bit more salt in it. It’s long gone of course.
I’ve been trying since to replicate it, and the picture is my first attempt. It gets scraped off every so often, this is before that. I think it’s kind of pretty. But I love blue cheese. I’ve got several others working on this in the cave right now, but this is the only one I’ve tasted. It’s not up to that original accidental little piece, at least not yet. I think I’m going to be trying to do this forever. If it could be consistent I think I really would try to find someone to make it commercially. Not me. There are quite a few people making goat cheese commercially in New Mexico.
Unless you really want to experiment and play, and are willing to do the work and take the time (years), and love the flavor of blue cheese, I recommend staying away from blue mold. And if you are all of those things, you may need two caves.
This is going to be my last post, the month is about over. I have really enjoyed doing the blog, I hope reading it hasn’t been too big an ordeal. It was a lot of fun, and I highly recommend it for any of you that haven’t signed up to do it yet. I’m going to miss doing it. But I’m also looking forward very much to hearing from the rest of you!
Have a wonderful weekend, and a terrific year! I hope everyone’s kiddings are perfect. Mine don’t start until the last third of March.
Cheddar
I made cheddar about a dozen times last year. Most of them had a decent flavor but were too dry. I followed several recipes, and I’m not sure I have a favorite. Here’s a picture of one of them. with one edge cut off.
I am reluctant to put a recipe here because of copyright issues. So here is a link to a cheddar recipe http://www.cheeseforum.org/Recipes/Recipe_Cheddar.htm. I haven’t made this recipe, but the essentials are the same. Goat milk recipes usually recommend keeping things about 2 degrees cooler than cow milk recipes in all the temperatures. The cheese forum has a load of recipes. I just found this page and you might not need a book, just this place. It looks like it needs a thorough exploring. One nice thing about this recipe is that it calls for a gallon of milk instead of two, so you could make it with less milk, or you could double it if you have plenty of milk. It would need the smaller of the two molds that come with the Hoegger cheese press if one gallon of milk was used.
The first cheddar I made was done in a pot on the stove. That turned out to be very impractical, when you get to the part about raising the temperature of the curds from 86 or so to 100 or so no more than 2 degrees every five minutes. This is really hard to do on the stove, if not impossible. But I tried. We ate the cheese. The next time I did it in a sink of hot tap water, that was still too fast. It was about then I got the Weck style canner. That made all the difference in the world in terms of making it easier.
If you don’t have one, this should be done in a sink of hot tap water, and not as hot as it can be. In order to get anything to heat up that slowly you need a temperature outside the pot that is no more than 6 or 8 degrees warmer than what is in the pot. You can do the initial warming, up to the 86 or 88 degrees (F) on the stove, but this slow increase in the temperature just won’t work on the stove. In the sink you will raise the temp of the hot water slowly as the temp of the curds in the pot goes up.
This is the toughest part. And it gets easier after you do it a few times.
Cutting the curd takes a little figuring out too. You need a long narrow bladed knife, and some instructions, which you can find on the cheese forum also. I think you can find everything you need to know there.
All of these recipes and pages and lists say that cheddar and the other cheeses that are traditionally waxed, must be waxed. I don’t know if this is true or not. I waxed the first one, and it was pretty good for a first attempt, but it got mold under the wax. Waxing is not a simple thing. There are good directions for it that come with some of the wax when you buy it. But in the end it looks like it has to be dipped to be done well, not brushed on, and it has to be dipped more than once, and the wax has to be pretty hot. There are some volatility issues. It’s very messy. I am going to address this again this year.
But last year I packaged all the rest of it in foodsaver bags to age. Everyone, literally everyone, says this is unacceptable. Some of them say the cheese has to breathe, and can’t in plastic. This is surely true, but I don’t think it breathes in wax either. Most of the people who make cheese are rigorous traditionalists, and might not be willing to see such a big change. But I haven’t done enough of it to know yet if it will turn out good. This year I think I am going to vacuum seal half and wax half of the same batch of cheese to see what kind of differences there are. And I’m going to do it more than once. And maybe while doing that I’ll figure out that it isn’t as hard as I thought. But I have never dipped any.
Foodsaver bags aren’t always great either, sometimes you don’t get a good seal, sometimes there was still some whey coming out, most of the time it had to be redone at least once for one reason or another. But it didn’t get mold if the seal was good. Ever.
More about mold next time.
In the meantime, check out http://cheeseforum.org/
And have a wonderful day!
Hard Cheese
There are a few things you have to have to make hard cheeses. Most of them require 2 gallons of milk, so you need a big enough container for that. It seems like an 8 quart pot should be big enough, but it isn’t. It needs to be stainless steel or enameled. I use a 16 quart milk bucket that I got specifically for this purpose, but I don’t use it on the stove top. If you have a Weck style canner with a drain spout for pasteurizing that is a perfect device for making cheese. I got one specifically for cheese, but not until I knew I really was going to keep doing it.
The other thing you need is some way to press the cheese. You need to be able to get up to 50 
pounds of pressure. I got a cheesy press, and it was what I used the first time I pressed any cheese, but I was afraid it was going to break, and I had a terrible time getting the cheese out of the mold too. I ended up getting the fancy press from New England Cheesemaking, and I love it, but if I was going to do it again I would get this one: http://hoeggergoatsupply.com/xcart/product.php?productid=3268&cat=35&page=1, and get this with it: http://hoeggergoatsupply.com/xcart/product.php?productid=3265&cat=35&page=1. This is an excellent cheese press at a great price. They sell the same press with plastic molds for $10 less, but it would cost much more than that to buy stainless molds relative to plastic ones. Either way the molds can be boiled to sterilize and also put in the dishwasher at high temps. If those links don’t work let me know in the comments and I’ll try again.
If you are inventive and build things you can make your own cheese presses, but you need a way to gauge pressure and you need molds. A set of stainless steel molds like the ones that come with the Hoegger press will likely cost as much as the press does. Having said that, there are places on the web with instructions for building them.
I talked already about thermometers. I use two digital probe thermometers while I’m making cheese, one in the milk and one in the water, since I’m using a canner and water bath to heat the milk. If you do it on the stove one is all you need. One is all you need anyway, I use two because I have two. You can use regular thermometers, but the ones I have don’t look accurate, and they are a lot harder to use.
You need recipes. I like Ricki Carroll’s “Home Cheesemaking”, and also “200 Easy Homemade Cheese Recipes” by Debra Amrein-Boyes. There are also recipes on the web, although if you Google for Cheese recipes you will get recipes for cooking dishes using cheese. I have a favorite email list for goat cheese that has a lot of recipes in the archive, if anyone wants that link let me know in the comments and I’ll put it there.
You need cheesecloth, starters, rennet, and cheese salt. You can use pickling salt I understand, but not table salt, and especially not any salt that contains iodine, it apparently interferes with the process of making milk into cheese.
And you need time. And patience. It isn’t hard to do, but it is very labor intensive, especially in the beginning.
Next time I’ll talk about making a cheddar.
My experience with Camembert
The first thing about aged cheeses is that you have to have a way to age them. I got a small refrigerator, I was lucky to find one that has no freezer, I don’t know how hard that might be to do now. Then I put an external thermostat on it to control the temperature. (Cheesemaking supply places have these.) The temp in a cheese cave needs to be higher than any refrigerator will stay. But it needs to be relatively constant. I think a freezer might be a better choice for this, because it doesn’t have two temperatures to maintain.
Another thing to think about is that if (when) mold from mold ripened cheeses gets loose in your cave, you will have a time getting rid of it. If you can ever get rid of it. I have a story about that for later. You might want to put off mold ripened cheese for this reason.
I have not made what I would consider a successful camembert. I love the commercial camembert I have eaten, and brie as well. Camembert is quite a bit easier to make, at least with the recipes I had at the time, (Home Cheesemaking, by Ricki Carroll) So I made camembert. I made it from pasteurized milk and also from raw milk.
I followed the recipe as carefully as I possibly could. Because I live in the desert, aging cheeses at the humidity levels required is very difficult. The humidity here is sometimes in single digits, and usually around 20%, you can get the humidity inside a little refrigerator up to about 45% with a pan of water. It needs to be over 90% for the mold growth you need for these cheeses. So they have to go inside a container inside the “cave”, and then you just hope for the best.
The camembert turned out looking like camembert, and it got “oozy” in the center, too runny at least once. I think that was from not getting enough whey out of it. It was more crinkly in the rind than commercial camembert, and had a much stronger flavor. It was a little too strong for me. My mother liked it a lot, I think her taste buds are going and it takes stronger flavors for her to really be able to taste things. It’s possible we should have cut it sooner.
I looked for a picture to link to, I haven’t got one, and I couldn’t find one, although I know I have seen them on the web.
I read the book “American Farmstead Cheese”, by Paul Kindstedt, about the processes involved in making cheeses. It has no recipes. It is an amazing book for understanding what happens to turn milk into cheese. I can’t claim to have understood it, but even so it was very helpful. It is very technical in parts. It also has some discussion about commercial cheesemaking. I’m going to read it again, after I get through “The Ruminant Animal”, which I got recently but have not opened yet. That looks really tough to me also.
Anyway, the Kindstedt book has discussion about raw milk cheese and bacteria, and provides some data. All raw milk cheeses that can be legally sold in the US must be aged at least 60 days. The bacterial levels after 60 days are much lower, for a variety of reasons. Camembert is ready sooner than that, and can’t be aged that long. So I got a little leery of it. But I’ll try again one of these days. We ate it and mother kept it for so long I had to take it away from her and throw it out, and no one got sick.
Kinstedt presents a lot of data about food borne illness from cheese, and it is very rare. Plus in almost all cases it was from cheese made from pasteurized milk in enormous quantities and was traced to contamination after pasteurizing. But next after that is the soft mold ripened cheeses like camembert and brie. Overall it seems to always come back to milk handling.
So I kind of recommend skipping to cheese like cheddar once you want to go beyond chevre, mozzarella, and ricotta. I will definitely try the soft mold ripened cheeses again, just not quite yet.
Next is cheddar.
Have a wonderful weekend!
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