Farm Life Creamery creates many products using dairy. One of their proudest and consumer favorite products is their cheese curds. Continue reading to learn about how Farm Life Creamery created some of their most popular flavors of cheese curds and other varieties of cheese.
Beginnings of the Curd
In a recent post, we talked about where we started with our cheesemaking: CHEESE CURDS! Quickest way to get to market, there was a lack of flavored curds in our market, and they were fun to introduce to potential new customers. So what next? What other varieties do we go after?
Creating New and Classic Flavors
Some of them fell into line naturally. When you make a batch of cheddar, you can package the fresh cheese curds the next day, and from the same batch, can choose to press the curds into 20 and 40-pound blocks to be aged. We age our cheddar blocks for a minimum of 3 weeks, to allow the amazing cheddar
flavor to develop. And every few batches we put some aside for longer aging. We have some 10-year-old cheddar in our cheese cave! Of course, we started flavoring our cheddar blocks. We now have about 21 flavors of cheddar block cheese and 45 flavors of curds! Some of our flavors are us searching for new things, others are by customer requests such as our horseradish block, and our Carolina Reaper!
Mozzarella was a good choice because of not seeing a locally-made mozzarella option available in our area. We call mozzarella a labor of love because we hand stretch our string cheese, and hand form fresh mozzarella balls (and it needs to be 160 degrees to do so!), as well as press blocks that are great for shredding. We’ve learned to do mozzarella in smaller batches so we can get it all stretched and formed before the ph changes to much.
Then, Chad remembered a cheese he tried once a long time ago. If you tried a cheese once, before you were a cheesemaker, and the flavor was memorable, of course you need to find the recipe now that you own a creamery! Getting a recipe for our Cotswold was not easy! But we did it, and it’s a popular choice for those wanting a very sharp flavor, seasoned with onion and chives. It’s a double Gloucester style cheese with a softer texture and lots of flavor. It is aged four months before we cut and package.
Gruyere was a great choice for us as well. Then Colby, then flavored mozzarellas like our blocks with sun dried tomato and Italian herb infusion, Italian herb style string cheese. Then Cheddar Gruyere which is a fusion on two popular cheeses and a great melter!
Perfecting Cheese Curd Flavors
We tried a batch of provolone and haven’t perfected it yet. We’ve also been the makers of some ethnic cheeses for individuals that have reached out to us to help them make some batches to get their cheese to market – one was an Indian style called Paneer, another was a 2000 year old recipe from the country of Georgia called Sulguni.
Most recently, we had a batch or our original cheddar naturally cold smoked at a local locker plant and WOW! We can’t wait to tell you more about that.