Baked Ziti with Sausage
One of our good friends Jeffrey Schmalz of Silverbrook Farm said
Hi Barbara, I made this Ziti using your curd instead of the Ricotta. Boy was it good! I didn’t bother with all the layers, I just poured the mixture in, put half a jar of tomato sauce on top. Jeff
Here’s a link to the recipe on AllRecipes.com.
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Walking the Land
As much as we talk about farms and the value of the small farmer, nothing beats actually getting on the land with the farmer. Working in this business, though, means a lot of time NOT on the land.
This past week, Karl and I spent many hours working on the floor plan of the new cheese house for the home farm. There’s a neat new cloud-computing program called Gliffy that will let you size rooms, drag and drop them, change a floorplan completely, try alternative flows, and then share the floor plans with others on line. Cheesemaking demands several precise environments, and our recipes have even more. So we’ve been having a great creative time figuring out the synergies between rooms that need many air exchanges and rooms that need low air exchange. That’s before you get to temperature, humidity, milk and cheese movement, and equipment movement, cycling through the wash room. And then there’s the staff movement, and the visitor movement. It’s just fascinating.
Then we backed into where the new barn needed to go. We’re taking the current, but obsolete barn for chilling, packing and shipping, as well as some office space. The new barn for the cows, we hope, will have voluntary milking systems that the ladies walk into when they need milking and their computer-chip collars give them permission. The cows are under much less stress, energy usage is substantially lower, and the quality and quantity of milk is better if it is all designed optimally. So the barn needs to be behind the cheese house to minimize piping from the milking parlors to the bulk tanks and be most efficient. We got it on paper, or rather on Gliffy, and it all looked like it would work. But, would it work on the somewhat rolling land? The barn needs to be on the flatest land possible for pretty obvious reasons. The cows need to be able to access pasture from as many sides as possible without large grade changes. Even a good topo map is not as reliable as actually getting on the land.
At 4:30 on that pretty dark afternoon, we scooted up to the farm with fingers crossed. We tape-measured the cheesehouse footprint, stepped off another 10 feet or so for margin of error, and paced off the barn. It was perfect. The design had pushed the barn into perhaps the best spot on the whole 120 acres.
I’ll tell you, being on the land with Karl, who has walked that farm since he could toddle, in the cold and wind and coming darkness, and seeing that barn appear before our very eyes, is something I will never forget. He really is a very quiet man, but I could see the vision in his eyes as well.
Then we looked at each other and chuckled. There’s a long way to travel between vision and reality. Right now, we have no idea how we’re going to get there. But we know that we are…going to get there.
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The possibilities of clouds.
No, we haven’t opened the Westport Rivers sparkling wine yet. But we are excited about what Karl is doing these days. He’s been playing with a dairy product that is very popular in France and we think he’s got it! The new baby is called des Nuages, which means Clouds. It’s a lactic cheese that is soft and unmolded. So the moisture content is higher than with Hannahbells, and it has the texture of cottage cheese. The similarity ends there! Des Nuages (Clouds) is divine. A chef friend of ours calls it “renaissance ricotta.” It is an artisanal curd made from our girls’ milk of course.
We first played with des Nuages a few weeks before Thanksgiving. We wanted to stuff our Thanksgiving turkey with it, so we tried it out by stuffing a chicken. Man oh man…the des Nuages baked up like a ricotta, capturing all the aroma and flavor of the juices from the chicken, and the chicken itself was moist–just the way we always hope the turkey will be. So we used it on Thanksgiving Day stuffing the turkey. The turkey did not take longer to cook (interesting…), and was quite moist. Meanwhile, we pulled the cooked des Nuages out and served it with bruschetta as one of the hors d’s. At dinner, our guests went back in the kitchen to get the rest of it on their plates. Made Leo, the chief cook of our family, look like a superstar. But then, he is.
The reason we named Karl’s new creation Clouds: the chefs we’ve given samples to have been limited only by their creativity! One has stuffed quail with des Nuages, two have made gnocchi, another has used it in a soup, you get the picture. We remember lying on the grass watching clouds take different shapes. The same thing is happening with this artisanal curd. What else could we name it?
We plan to bring the des Nuages (Clouds) out for chefs and caterers first so we can use the great distributors who are working with us. If it continues to work for them, we’ll create a retail package and label and get it in the stores. Meanwhile, we’ll be selling it by the half-gallon, which is 3.5 pounds, more than most consumers need. If you’re interested, email or call me/us.
Happy, Happy New Year!
Barbara
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2010 is gonna be exciting!
As the holidays slide past and our shipping is out the door for 2009, we’re taking some of the extra time to turn our focus back to the planning of the new cheesehouse facility on the farm.
For several months we have been working with Payette, architect group extraordinaire, and continue to be delighted by their interest in our very unusual project. Payette, led by our Westport neighbor Jim Collins, is a Boston firm that loves creating prototypical structures. I’d say they’ve sure got that with our project! We are combining the retrofit of the existing barn, a new barn, and the new cheesehouse in our plan for a “net zero energy” project–relying on sun, wind, groundwater, and manure to provide all of our energy.
As far as we’ve been able to determine, Shy Brothers may be the first facility of this type in the U.S. Several farms have led the way by using wind turbines or manure management as a retrofit of their existing facilities (Karl and his brothers have two 10kw turbines), and there’s a Platinum LEED cheese house in Canada. It looks like we’re the first ones, however, to pull all the needs of the farm and cheese buildings together with design and integrate all of the four on-site energy resources to supply the facility’s needs–net zero energy.
Several of our friends have asked, of course, why we are doing this…Don’t we have our hands full enough with building the cheese business? The answer is yes, but it’s all of a piece. How can we hope to exemplify the future of a small dairy farm with our head in the sand by ignoring true sustainability? Also, strictly from a business standpoint, the energy requirements of our cheese making are huge, and that energy is not free. We believe that in the long run, what we’re doing will be a smart business move.
And, important to us is the idea that we can prove this can be done. Of course it can! We hope to show how we solved the challenges as a team. Peter Vieira with Payette has just been terrific. He’s just sent us the first “on-paper” block diagram of rooms and their environments. Karl, Leo, and I will pour over it Saturday and meet with Peter on line Monday using a program that will let us pass the pointer as well conference call.
More on our other team members and progress later.
Meanwhile, we hope your New Year is safe, fun, and yummy!
Barbara
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Wine And Beer Pairings
We’ve had a grand time pairing our cheeses with local beers and wines, and wanted to share our discoveries. You can order from the winery and brewery websites, or pair with your own wines and beers in your locale!
The CLASSIC cheeses pair very well with Rosé, Rkatsiteli, and some Chardonnay, and are excellent with Pilsner beers.
The SHALLOT Hannahbells are divine with sparkling wines and Champagnes, Rose’, Chardonnay, as well as with Lager, Pilsner, and Pale Ale.
ROSEMARY Hannahbells are good with Reisling and Rkatsiteli wines, and Pale Ale.
Yummy LAVENDER was the most exciting pairing (1 plus 1 made 10!) with Rose’, excellent with Reisling, Rkatsiteli and Blanc de Noir sparkling wine. Lavender was also yummy with Lager, Pilsner (**!) and the Pale Ale.
The Chipotle was good with Chardonnay, but was best with Pale Ale.
These beers and wines can be found at Westport Rivers and Buzzards Bay Brewery, over the hill and across the river from our farm!
We had a dollop of clouds on our chili last night – divine! We’ll never eat plain chili again!