Kinder Goat Breeders Association

KGBA

Guest Blogger

Making Goat Milk Soap

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Well it was perfect weather for staying in and working on my soap this weekend. I made several batches in January and February preparing for this summer when I hope to have a booth at a local farmers market. I let my soap cure a minimum of six weeks before using it. This allows the lye to reach a safe Ph. level and the bar to harden. Now I have approximate 12 batches that have cured and it is time to trim and wrap to get ready to sell. I am experimenting with different molds to find something that will give me a nice 4 ounce bar everytime. Here are my latest ones, they are made from a food grade plastic which the soap doesn’t harm while in saponification (this step gets really hot) and I don’t have to put a liner in the mold to remove the soap from the mold. With the wooden molds I use either plastic trash bags or freezer paper to line but both have drawbacks. The plastic trash bags leave wrinkles in the corners and the freezer paper is more expensive and more time consuming.
I have been making soap for about four years. I gotbought my first kinders in 2005 and started making soap in 2006. I was very hesitant to make it because the first thing I read on every book or article telling “How to” make soap, was the warnings and cautions of the dangers of working with lye. Finally after reading, Anne Watson’s book “Smart Soapmaking” I jumped in and gave it a try. Once I began using my home made soap, with the milk from my own goats I have not used anything else. It is fun trying different oils and fragrences for different benefits. Olive oil makes your soap harder, coconut oil provides a nice lather, and of course different essential oils offer their own benefits. There are many websites with recipes and directions on how to make soap so if you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it. It doesn’t require a lot of goat milk and the finished product feels wonderful and your friends and family will enjoy receiving it as gifts.

Cart Training Your Goat

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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

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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

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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.

Hard Cheese

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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.

One pic for the day

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Good morning everyone! I was sure surprised and happy about the Super Bowl! I normally could care less and I don’t follow football at all, but it was so neat to see how excited people were in New Orleans and what a positive boost it gave them. And they won!

Anyway, this is AJ and most of the girls and wethers. He does chores for me and keeps my yard from turning into a jungle of weeds in the summer. This winter I haven’t had to haul water most of the time because he does it. He lives next door.

I’m distracted and excited because we are going to build a barn! Advice is welcome, I have just started thinking about it, and it will take quite a while to do it, but it’s really exciting. A milking room!

Have a wonderful day!