curdnerd

away we go

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:43:58 GMT

Friday has long been my day off the farm, when I drive the market van in to Union Square at dawn, and then go forth into the city for a day of wound-licking and recreation: two hours of qi gong therapy for my sore and aching corporeal self, followed by a spiritually restorative lunch and a beer ior three with friends.

Now that I'm pretty much healed from all of my various agrigenic hurts and pains.of the past few years (really, I'm ok!), I've been replacing the body-work therapy with a film or two, and I'm pleased to report that there are some good ones running in the local bijou nowadays.

For example, when I saw that a cheese-loving union Square regular had a new film, I just had to repay her patronage in kind.

So, I went and saw "away we go", which is a quirky, thoughtful, laughing-out-loud funny film, which deals with some pretty serious stuff without seething its characters in self-pity, and affording both the protagonists and the audience, well, redemption.

Especially those of my friends who are 30-ish and have yet to spawn (nearly all of my lj friends, I think!), you'll get a hoot out of this film. And, with your help, Maggie will be able to keep buying my cheese!

Fri, 08 May 2009 02:01:09 GMT

My life doesn't totally suck. this is what I've been up to these past days:

My testimony at a NJ lesgislative hearing

Fri, 08 May 2009 01:29:07 GMT

Chairman, Senator, Secretary, and members of the committee:

My wife and I are dairy farmers in Vernon, in Sussex County, on the "rooftop of New Jersey". We pasture just under one hundred cattle, and produce fine artisanal cheeses from their raw milk. Our cheeses have been served at Drumthwacket, the White House, fine restaurants, US embassies around the world, and more to the point, at the dinner tables of voters and taxpayers all over this state of my birth. We are fully licensed and inspected by the NJ Department of Health and Senior Services, and enjoy a healthy and productive relationship with our regulators.

Nina and I are not even remotely interested in selling raw milk, as it is worth a great deal more to us made into cheese than any sensible person would consider paying for fluid milk. So, our comments here can be considered to be those of informed consumers, and not merely the punditry of industry insiders.

First of all, Nina and I do indeed drink the milk of our cows, on a daily basis. We consider it to be the safest food available to us, as we are quite aware of every aspect of its production. Of course, most consumers don't have the luxury of such a posteriori knowledge of their foods' provenance, but neither do they have sore backs and skinned knuckles that come with the luxury!

Depending on which anthropologist you ask, you'll be told that humans have been drinking the milk of ruminants for somewhere between five and fifteen millenia. The cow has been called "the foster mother of the human race", and we must recognize that the cow, the sheep, the yak, and goat have been our co-evolutionists.

The earliest words written by human hands are the cuneiform clay tablets of the Kingdom of Ur, in 2800 BC, in what is now Iraq--and guess what they record? The dairy records of the king's herds of cattle: how much milk, how much butter, how many calves.

If the members of the committee were to visit our farm (and we do hope that they will!), they might be lucky enough to witness a new calf being brought into the herd by its mother: the other cows come and circle around the new little one, and each in turn gives a sniff and a lick, and then a moo towards the proud mother. They are welcoming the new calf to the social community, and associating its odor with the face of the mother. The mother then goes off to fill her belly, while the others keep an eye out for their new relative. Nina and I like to think of this as "No Calf Left Behind', without the mandatory testing, and fully funded!

Any one who has witnessed this ritual can see how it is the origin of our folk dance, as is evidenced by the fact that all of the human cultures who have developed circular folk dances are descended from pastoral cultures: the Celts, Semites, Balkan, Latin, to name a few. And, because the cows do the dance as part of their evolved means of survival in the perilous open savannah, it follows logically that WE LEARNED IT FROM THEM!

My point here is simply this: drinking milk right from the cow is part of our human heritage, an expression of an ancient relationship that helped to define us as the humans that we have become. While the State may have an interest in regulating the sale of raw milk, and perhaps setting standards to protect the health and well-being of the people, an outright ban on the sale of raw milk is denying a basic and ancient human right.

But let's be clear about the safety of raw milk: A few years back, the top food safety expert from the US FDA testified by affidavit at a hearing such as this in the Ohio state assembly. One can assume that such an august federal official would have access to the best epidemiological data. He goes on for a few dozen pages, citing all the supposed dangers associated with raw milk. The most striking aspect of his testimony is the paucity of actual victims: most of the cases that he cites, when you drill down with Google into the primary sources, were in fact nothing more than a positive reading on a fast screening test, many of which were subsequently found to be false positives when the more accurate, slower lab tests were done. Nearly all of the cases cited were victimless: nobody got sick. The case can be made that the manicure industry has a much, much worse safety record than the raw milk industry!

Which brings us the next point: there are risks associated with every sort of action; any one of us could have been run down by a bus while crossing the street to come to this hearing today. We all make daily choices of risk and benefit, based on our own perceptions of both. The State has an interest in protecting its citizens from untoward risk, and therefore we have rules, regulations, enforcement, courts. The state also can reduce personal risk by helping individuals make more informed choices by providing better data: nutrition labels, tobacco warnings, PSAs encouraging good hygiene, and so forth.

We as a society have decided to permit a wide range of potentially dangerous activities and behaviors, including smoking, drinking, firearms, golf, and yes, manicures. For some reason, many years ago, for reasons that may have been more political than scientific, our state decided to forbid the sale of the milk of our foster mothers, and now we have the opportunity to correct that mistake. Let's hope that we will consider the big picture, measured in millenia, not quarterly corporate 10k filings, and decide to restore to New Jerseyans a basic and ancient human right.

Bobolink Media Blitz

Mon, 04 May 2009 23:11:47 GMT

Nina and I just spend three lovely days in front of the lenses of a TV crew from France. Three days of being "on" is indeed a tiring stint, but the crew were truly lovely to work with, and the show looks like a really, really nice production. (pardon the vagueness, I'll provide more details about the show once I clear it with the froggies.)

Just before the French crew arrived, our baker's brother's friends shot this "Swine flu PSA" at the farm.

During all of this, I shot a few stills myself, with the ole' blackberry: I'll put them on on flickr later, and embed them here.....

nina roosterbane

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 23:22:38 GMT

nina roosterbane
Originally uploaded by curdnerds

Nina is a woman of many talents: she can sing, dance, cook, make babies, run a business, educate complicated children, and more.

But she's also pretty good at disassembling roosters: not bad for a woman with all of her teeth!

We'll all have chicken and dumplings when she comes, when she comes...

What Body of Water Are You?

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:48:38 GMT

You Are a Bay

You are a blissful, peaceful person. Some might call you spiritual.
You are easy-going and tranquil. You take solace in life's sweet moments.

You are sentimental and open-hearted. You love many people, places, and things.
You try to live an enlightened life. You are benevolent, noble, and intuitive.

What Body of Water Are You?

Bobolink Calving Season

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:33:35 GMT

It's been a pretty good season so far: we're milking nineteen cows, with number twenty expected "soon". That's probably about the halfway mark for this season.

Jonathan and Cesare 2/28/98

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 01:08:05 GMT

Jonathan and Cesare 2/28/98
Originally uploaded by curdnerds

Look what I found on my morning walk: an hours-old calf! He was born with a bit of a neuro delay: he couldn't walk or find his mother's teats, so an intervention was in order.

We carried him to the barn, got him dried off and warmed up, then taught him how to suck.

By mid-afternoon, he was standing on his own, and momma had him all cleaned up.

Which is stranger: liposuction or lipodiesel?

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:08:55 GMT

I'm thinking that, while lipodiesel will get all the press attention, liposuction is much, much more bizarre, macabre and nauseating.

Surgeon uses human fat to run his cars

Health department raids liposuction clinic as doctor leaves for South America

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles
Friday, 26 December 2008
Alan Bittner has been accused of removing too much fat from three patients

A leading Beverly Hills plastic surgeon claims to have found an environmentally friendly way to combine two of America's great obsessions – after converting his 4x4 to run on fat removed from clients during liposuction operations.

Alan Bittner, who founded a high-profile clinic on Rodeo Drive, the Bond Street of Los Angeles, claims to be able to power both his Ford Explorer and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator on biofuel converted from excess flesh from human tums, bums and thighs. "The vast majority of my patients request that I use their fat for fuel – and I have more fat than I can use," he says. "Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly, but they get to take part in saving the Earth."

Dr Bittner made his claim in a posting on the internet site lipodiesel.com, adding that he has performed roughly 7,000 liposuction operations, and that a gallon of human fat will produce roughly the same quantity of biofuel.

Scientists say there is no reason why human fat cannot be turned into biofuel, since it contains triglycerides which are no different from those found in waste animal fats that are already being used for the same purpose. However the discovery left medical regulators unimpressed. Using human medical waste to power vehicles (or indeed for any other commercial purpose) is largely illegal, and Dr Bittner's clinic has been raided by California Health Department officials. The magazine Forbes says that Dr Bittner's ability to create what he calls "lipodiesel" first came to light in lawsuits filed by several former patients, who recently accused him of allowing his girlfriend and assistant, who were both unlicensed, to carry out intricate operations.

A gallon of "lipodiesel" will give motorists roughly the same mileage as they would get from regular diesel, the magazine added. At present, most biofuel is made from a mixture of specially grown corn, and left-over beef or pork products.

Sadly, Dr Bittner is no longer around to bask in his new-found fame. His practice in Beverly Hills suddenly closed shortly after last month's raid, and he is believed to have moved to South America.

Lawyers representing several former patients are currently attempting to track him down. One of them, Andrew Besser, claims Dr Bittner's unlicensed girlfriend removed too much fat from his three clients, leaving them horribly disfigured. Dozens of other patients have complained to the State Medical Board, he added.

Dr Bittner's lawyer is yet to comment. A notice on his website claims that the doctor is currently living in Colombia.

babkarisen

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 22:52:36 GMT

babkarisen
Originally uploaded by curdnerds

Two days after being hit by a car, Babka has risen! She's doing a fine job of tripod-walking. In fact, she just tried to follow Nina and Jacob on their afternoon walk--we convinced her to come back a rest some more.

Her left rear leg is still pretty sore, but she seems to have much, most or all of here neurological capabilities there.

Tomorrow she'll go back to the vet to have her surgical drains removed, and hopefully she'll be back to normal, more or less, soon.

"Babka, you good dog!"
--"a-ffirmative!"

Babka, risen

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 20:53:09 GMT

Yipee! Babka just stood up and walked into the kitchen, tripod-style.she strode over to me, looking uncomfortable but proud.

She seems to have some use of her leg, but we might not know if there's neuro damage for another few days.

Babka's mishap

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 03:31:07 GMT

Babka got hit by a car today: She's alive, no fractures or obvious internal injuries, just some severe lacerations to her rear legs.

Nina and I were both off the farm: Tobias and Dom got her to the vet, followed by the driver who hit her.

The vet examined her, took X+rays, stitched her up. The driver presented her credit card and covered the fees, which was greatly appreciated.

Babka is now at home, lying on her Tibetan rug, looking pretty uncomfortable . She was able to produce a sadly meager tail-wag just now, and had a few sips of water with her doggie-Advil.

We'll know in a few days if there's any neuro defecit.

Phew!

neither rain nor snow nor...

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:02:26 GMT

...Will keep me from making my appointed rounds, which include Union Square Greenmarket in the morning, laden with untuous cheese, and thence to d.b.a Brooklyn (N. 7th bet Berry and Wyethe) in the evening. Where I'll be serving up cheese and homemade charcuterie to match Ray's best beers.

How's that for a run-on sentence?

Other good news: I figured out how to clean my Blackberry's sticky trackball, which was no doubt full of whey, or worse.

Sneak previews of forthcoming events

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:28:39 GMT

Here's a bit of advance notice, but please note that the details are not quite gelled yet:

Cheese, Charcuterie, and Beer tasting at the newly opened DBA/Brooklyn

Once again, Jonathan will be teaming up with his good friend Ray Deter, beer maven and owner of two of the nation's best places to drink beer, for a pairing of fine artisanal foods with excellent artisanal beers and ales.

The event is a celebration of the recent opening of Ray's newest venue, DBA Brooklyn, 113 north 7th st (bet Berry & Wythe, L train to Bedford Ave).

The tasting will be on Friday, December 19th, 7-10 pm, and is open to the public. Because yelling "free beer!" on the Internets seems like a really bad idea, we will collect a $5 donation from all participants, to be donated to the Labyrinth Dance Theater, a 501(c)3 arts organization

On a somewhat related note, another forthcoming event:
Nina's Film Debut!

The premiere showing of a dance film titled "Dark Angel", by Labyrinth Dance Theater, will take place in NYC on Monday evening, December 29th. The supporting cast includes Bobolink's own Angel, Nina White, shown here in Angelic Purple (Nina made the angel costumes, too!).

The event will include a reception, including Bobolink's breads and cheeses, Finnish Vodka, Ales from Brooklyn Brewery, and other delectations. There will also be a silent auction including a number of unusual culinary and musical items.

To see the trailer, learn more about the event and to order tickets, please click here.

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:18:58 GMT

The problems facing the world are not the result of a lack of solutions, rather a lack of leadership.

Doesn't it seem that, just this week, the transitional government has just sent the lame ducks to the back of the bus?

Genghis Kahn

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:20:44 GMT

With the herd tucked into the winter pasture until March, the salami and prosciutti hanging and the bacon smoking, my mind returns to reading and, hopefully, writing.

I just finished "Genghis Kahn and the making of the Modern World", by Weatherford.

If you haven't read it, you ought to, really.

Tomorrow shall find me in NYC, and probably free for.lunch, and thence to dba.

Scotland

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 01:57:42 GMT

Now that we've saved the world, Nina and I are taking Paulie and Tobias to Scotland for New Year's. Any suggestions, or am I getting to Scotland before thee?

End of grazing season, beginning of salumi season

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:07:18 GMT

On Sunday, I stopped milking 30 cows, to let them "dry up" and have a break before winter sets in. We'll keep milking six late-calving cows through the winter, most likely, unless they start to lose too much body fat: it really depends on what sort of winter we have, which is anyone's guess.

So, until calving begins in earnest in March, I've got only about 40 litres (call it ten gallons) of milk to play with each day. The good news is that milking 36 cows was taking upwards of two hours, but it's done in less than an hour, now that we're six (thank you Steeleye Span).

The bad news is, once again, I'm a cheesemaker with very little cheese to make, which makes me sad.

So, to cheer myself up each fall, after I dry off the cows, I ship the whey-slurping pigs to the abattoir, and begin making cured pork. This is a very, very old farm economy, and also the reason that ham and cheese pretty much co-evolved.

So, last Wednesday, we rounded up out last two winter-farrowed pigs, the other five having gone "on holiday" in early October. These guys (one guy and one gal, for all that it matters) were born in February, of an old English breed called the Gloucester Old Spot. I got them in early April, when they were cute little just-weaned spotted piggies weighing all of 35 lbs each, cute little huggable piggies.

After digging our garden for us in the spring, they spent the summer foraging in the pig pasture, gorging on whey, stale Bobolink bread, weeds, roots, grubs, table scraps, garden waste, mice, unlucky chickens, and the odd dead cow.

By mid-summer, they were big, ugly pigs.

By early October, they were getting so big that I worried that they'd not fit in the scalding tub at the end of the season. So, we shipped five to the abattoir, keeping just two for salumi season, and bought five summer-farrowed pigs, Old Spot -Tamworth crosses. The five hogs yielded 1,000 lbs of pork, which is very, very good, especially considering that the feed bill was zero, or perhaps less than zero, since it would have cost me $250 to have the dead cow "disposed of properly", in the county landfill.

Back to the last two pigs: with a truck coming on Thursday morning to bring them to the abattoir, we herded the two behemoths into the calf barn and put them in a box stall, to await their Big Ride at sunrise.

A few minutes later, there were two pigs running down Meadowburn Road. They had gotten their snouts under the box stall door and pried it off its hinges, then did the same to the barn door and the barnyard fence. A pig's snout is its digging tool, and a pig's neck is soild muscle, especially a FIVE HUNDRED POUND pig. Yes, these little 24 inch high puppies were about 2/3 the weight of a small cow.

Next, we herded them into the old chicken barn, which has hefty doors, and I called the trucker and asked if he could come by this evening instead of in the early morning, since I was reasonably sure that they wouldn't be able to bust out of a steel horse trailer..

I then grabbed four pallets, a box of ten-inch timber-screws and a hefty drill, and did a Bugs bunny-style barricade on the inside doors of the chicken barn. Not leaving anything to chance, I also grabbed a chair, a flashlight and a good book (Gengis Kahn and the making of the modern world by Jack Weathersford), and spent two hours guarding two pigs and kicking them lovingly in the snout whenever they tried to disassemble the barricade.

I've never spent much time indoors with pigs before: it's not very pleasant. They grunt, belch, and fart pretty much continuously.

By 7 pm, they were on the truck and headed to meet their destiny.

Today, I drove down to the abattoir in my white market van and brought home some of the most truly spectacular pork I've ever seen: rich, dark, deeply marbled chops, oh yes, and some big shoulder roasts, ground pork, ribs, also leaf lard, fatback, livers, kidney, trotters, taails, two heads, four jowls, and four tearfully beautiful hindquarters cut for prosciutto (well, almost...) and four huge, long, thick meaty bellies cut for bacon, kind of. Also, as requested, there was a box of neck meat (oh those necks!) and fatback chunked out for me to salt down and make into lactic salumi.

So, as the sun was setting and a glorious moon was rising, I salted down the following in Jean-Louis' dry cure:

four bacons at 16 to 21 lbs each
four prosciutti at 32-36 lbs each
42 lbs of lean meat and 14 lbs of fat for lactic salumi
another 14 lbs of fatback for lardo

Darn, I forgot to salt the jowls....oh well.

Tomorrow will be Salumi Making Day at Bobolink, if anyone wants to come and help peel garlic, grind spices, feed the grinder or stuff the salamis, c'mon over!

The bacon will be ready to eat by early December, the salumi by winter solstice, but the prosciutti won't be ready until Valentine's Day.

The other big news yesterday

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:37:38 GMT

IMG00127
Originally uploaded by curdnerds

Yesterday morning, on a very big Election Day, a heifer calf was born at Bobolink Dairy.

Cricket, a Dutch Belted cow recently purchased from a friend in Pennsylvania, delivered a cute, chubby little calf after a short labor in the barnyard.

The birth of a heifer calf is always a good thing, full of promise for the future. But this particular birth, on a mild day late in the season, was particularly joyful, as it provided a happy distraction from the gravity of the day.

Please welcome Madelyn, named in honor of the memory of Barack Obama's grandmother, one of the "quiet heroes" who have helped to rekindle American Civil Society.

Boblink in New Jersey Monthly

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 21:21:22 GMT

Hey, whaddya know, I'm the curd nerd (again!)

Lifestyle

| | | Print

The Curd Nerd

by Jody Rosen Knower
Posted September 10, 2008

Back to nurture: Jonathan White (with wife Nina) makes cheese with hormone-free milk from Bobolink’s own breed of cow, the Bobolink Black.

Photo by Pily Quintanilla

The Bobolink Black

Photo by Pily Quintanilla

Bounty: A display of Bobolink cheese and breads.

Photo by Pily Quintanilla

Ex-engineer Jonathan White eschews technology to make cheese that “expresses the nature of the grass and the cow.”

Stepping over a barbed-wire fence, then an electrified one, Jonathan White crosses a muddy pasture to check on his charges. There’s Nadia, poor dear, often lost since her mother died, and Wilbur, a gentle soul. Nearby are Ernestine, the one they call Harry Houdini, and a very pregnant, not-so-little Little Sally. All seem content. White clicks his tongue in greeting, eliciting a low moooo.

Amid this tranquil scene, White’s practiced eye notices anything amiss. “That one there is a little too skinny,” he observes. Another needs a bigger collar.

White’s affection for his animals is unmistakable—and well known. “He really is on a first-name basis with all of them,” says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Happy cows are White’s partners in cheese making. Instead of confining his cows in stalls and stuffing them full of corn and hormones, White turns them loose to amble in the pastures, feasting on grass. “Cheese expresses the nature of the grass and the nature of the cow,” he says. “Stress shows up in milk as off flavors. My mandate is to figure out the best possible cheese that can be made from the sun, the rain, the grass, and the cows.”

In Vernon, at the northern tip of Sussex County, on a rented 200-acre farm they call Bobolink Dairy for the ground-nesting bird that frequents the pastures, White and his wife, Nina, make superb raw-milk cheeses and artisan breads, and raise whey-fed pork, 100-percent grass-fed beef, and suckled veal. They even make their own cows—crossing Ireland’s ancient Kerrys, a hardy breed with a long lifespan, with Jerseys, Guernseys, and other common dairy cows to create their Bobolink Black grazers.

White, a former software engineer, and Nina, a dancer, launched Bobolink in 2002 after their earlier, well-received cheese and dairy business, based in New York State, foundered during expansion. “We ended up with some venture capital that turned out to be vulture capital,” says Nina. They moved to Vernon with their three children and launched Bobolink in 2003, quickly regaining their loyal following of chefs and gourmet shops.

Bobolink’s strong word-of-mouth (in every sense) led Anthony Bourdain to laud its delicacies in a 2005 episode of his TV series No Reservations. Now the Whites struggle to meet demand, despite making more than 500 pounds of cheese and 2,500 loaves of bread each week, all sold exclusively on the farm, at farmers’ markets, and on their website, cowsoutside.com.

At 52, White looks like a Russian peasant from a century ago. He has squinty eyes and a full beard, a mustache, and dark, thick hair, all going gray. When he speaks, however, his impassive appearance gives way. His slight eyebrows stretch toward his hairline, animating his entire face, and the words tumble out in an avalanche:

“The way I’m producing food, the energy I use is almost all solar—it’s sun and rain and grass and cows. Yet to modern dairy-science people, what I’m doing is radical. I say that confining cows and feeding them corn and growth hormones is the radical idea. What I’m doing is about as conservative an idea as you can think of.”

By not feeding his cows a high-energy, hormone-spiked diet, which would artificially boost their milk production, White avoids stressing his cows and lengthens their milk-producing lives. “If you give a cow a high-energy diet, they’ll produce three times as much milk,” he says, “but it’s not sustainable in the long run.” At commercial dairies, where cows are milked two or even three times a day, it is more efficient to keep them in stalls much of the time. White milks his cows once a day, in the morning, and lets them roam and graze the rest of the day.

“Fifty years ago, the gods of hubris took over, and we started figuring out ways to outsmart the cows and make them produce more milk than they ever needed to produce,” he says. “That involved growing high-energy crops like corn and soybeans, and feeding them corn silage and bone meal and blood meal, which of course is feeding cows to cows. So we outsmarted ourselves, and the result has been that the cow who was our partner has become our vassal.

“They’re very social animals,” he says. “But most cows never get to be social because they’re confined.” He recalls the early days at Bobolink, when he and Nina built the herd mostly by buying cows from confinement farms—the only available source.

“They’d arrive on a trailer and we’d turn ’em out in a field, and they’d kind of stand there and look around, and within a couple days they’d figure it out, what to do. They’d start foraging around and whatnot. Then as new cows would arrive, the same thing would happen, and a couple of times the old cows would actually come over and sort of circle around the new cows and moo at them and lick them [as if to say], ‘C’mon guys, follow us, you’re free now.’”

The end result of all this TLC is cheese with depth and character. One of White’s signature cheeses is named for his mentor, Jean-Louis Palladin, the late Michelin-starred French chef who encouraged him to make cheese from grass-fed milk. White’s Jean-Louis cheese has a bright, lemony flavor and comes in foot-high wheels weighing more than 20 pounds.

“I couldn’t name a little cheese after a guy like Jean-Louis,” White says. Smaller, softer, and shaped like a Camembert is creamy Baudolino, named after the title character in an Umberto Eco novel set in the twelfth century. Jean-Louis and the crumbly, somewhat tangy, slightly concave drumm (which looks like the musical instrument) also are available in what White calls “Visigothic Blue” versions. For these he uses a method attributed to the king of the Germanic invaders, in which rye bread is aged in the cheese cave until it turns moldy, then is crumbled, salted, and added to the next batch of cheese-to-be.

With each of these, as with his other cheeses, White forgoes recipes, relying instead on his palate. Other cheese makers begin with an end product in mind, adding a specific “starter bacteria” to the milk for the type of cheese being made. White simply adds day-old whey to fresh milk. This jump-starts the fermentation process and allows him to make any cheese—or even different cheeses—from any given batch. (Whey is the cloudy liquid that remains after the protein in milk forms curds. Most cheese makers discard it; White feeds it to his pigs.)

“Usually as I’m taking the whey off, I’m meditating on what I’m gonna make,” White says. “I’ll taste the whey, too, and that also tells me where I’m going.” He might have one cheese in mind, based on what the cows have been grazing or his own inclination, but often, “I discover the curd has a different idea.”

White was raised in Hoboken, where his father was a mathematics professor at Stevens Institute of Technology and his mother a homemaker and editor. White went into computer science. “I designed embedded software, a field so arcane that I could talk shop with only about 50 people on Earth,” he wrote on his homepage.

His introduction to cheese came 30 years ago, when his software career took him to London for a year. Travels through Europe acquainted White with fresh farmstead cheeses, fueling a fascination with cheese making that grew when his Putnam Valley, New York, neighbor, the composer David Amram, gave him the goat’s milk Amram’s children wouldn’t drink. Eventually, White says, “I found that my passion for food exceeded my passion for engineering.”

Though he abandoned high-tech, deep down, White admits, “You’re never an ex-engineer because it’s a way of thinking. I try to apply a sort of holistic scientific reasoning to what’s known about historical dairy farming and cheese making. I try to figure out how they did it before refrigeration and electricity and transportation. So I’m a kind of cheese archeologist or anthropologist.”

White’s methods derive from a variety of sources and cultures: pre-1920s American farming books, research on grazing practices in New Zealand, advice from Amish farmers, and the indelible experience of making cheese from yaks’ milk with Tibetan nomads in 2001.

“They’re farming the way our ancestors’ ancestors farmed in the nomad days,” he says. “I learned from them that everything I need to know about grass and cows I can learn from watching the cows, and the best farmer is like any good scientist—the most important skill is observation.”

Jody Rosen Knower grew up in Monmouth County and now lives in Los Angeles, dangerously close to a cheese shop.

Cow Stuff

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:26:51 GMT

1. Brunhilde is a grandma: her daughter Rosamund birthed a jet-black bull calf, Zeigfreid ("ziggy").

2. I have tripe in brine: about 50 lbs of honeycomb and feather tripe, from two steers. I spent Thursday afternoon cleaning it--I called Liza and left her this voicemail:"Hey there, I was cleaning tripe and I thought of you!"

Later on today, I'll be simmering the tripe for a few hours, hopefully outside, otherwise the whole house will smell like wet sheepdogs. There ought to be some tripe stew, tripe pizza, etc.

3. I also have two lovely tongues in brine, from the same steers

4. Lastly, I've got about ten lbs of beef cheek marinating in wine since Thursday.

Next week we'll have more pork, and beef as well.

Anniversary

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 23:12:20 GMT

Nina and I celebrated our 24th wedding anniversary yesterday. Yikes!

We spent an entire 24 hours off the farm, in New York city, together, and not at a farmer's market or event. My mother booked us two nights at a nice hotel in the 50s. Nina got a headstart: he headed to the city on Monday night, after teaching, and got a good long night's sleep, slept in, and spent Tuesday morning lazing around. Or so she said...

I joined her on Tuesday afternoon, after getting the cows milked and seeing to their needs. I did take time to clean up and even put on a nice suit before taking the bus in to meet her.

We had dinner at Oceana, a long-time customer. They took very very good care of us. The meal was superb: we refused to look at the menu and simply asked the chef to have his way with us. Wow.

After dinner we rushed to CSC on 13th street to see The Tempest, with Mandy Patinkin as Prospero. It's a new production, in preview, and it was really great. A nice small theater, innovative and effective stagecraft, with some music and choreography that really worked. Patinkin was amazing, without upstaging the excellent cast. The only possible criticism that we'd offer was that Caliban was maybe trying just a bit too hard.

After the theater, we caught the latter half of Blazing Saddles on the teevee. The rest of the evening is none of your business.

Today, we headed back to the farm to send our summer au pair, Jennifer, on her way back to France for her fall semester. We are now au pairless until late September, when Tania arrives. Anyone want a nice farm vacation in the next few weeks?

cow whispering

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 01:00:06 GMT

Every afternoon, after the cheese has been made and the creamery cleaned up, I walk out to where the cows are, to see how they're doing. I also open the gate to a fresh two acres of grass, where they will graze for the next 24 hours or so.
The cows always get their fresh break of pasture in the late afternoon, because that is when grass has the highest sugar content, sugar that is photosynthesized all day and will be pumped into the roots after sunset.

After six years of watching the behavior of my cows, I have worked out a pretty cool methodology. After opening the gate to the new grass, I stick my nose in the in the air and bellow out a sonorous and exclamatory "MOOOO!", with the accent on the final "o", which appears to mean "hey, ladies and gentleman, lunch is served, over here!"

What follows is the thundering of 132 hooves, as about 29,000 pounds of potroast comes charging across the pasture.

I love my job!

Dad's Funeral Today

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:09:08 GMT

We buried my father today.

Over the past few days I've gotten perhaps 300 emails and calls; from my friends, colleagues, relatives and customers. One of them, from a name that I didn't recognize, said that she had read about my father's death, and his service during WW2. She herself was a Holocaust survivor, having been liberated from a Nazi death camp by US troops. She was writing to offer me condolence, and to thank me for my father's military service.

When he graduated from college in 1941, my father decided to join the newly formed "Army Air Force", who were eager for officers with technical training. With a degree in mathematics and physics and a minor in philosophy, he got an immediate commission, and was sent off to officer candidate school, which for him just happened to be at Harvard.

First they trained him to operate radar, an emerging technology which almost, but not quite, saved Pearl Harbor. After completing his radar training, the warlords decided that they needed weather forecasters more than radar jockeys, so back to school went dad. By the end of the war, other than a brief stint as a photo interpreter, he had spent most of the war pushing a pencil across an exam booklet.

After the war, he joined the Air Force Reserves, married mom, got a teaching job at Oberlin, and then Stevens Tech, where he stayed for 40 years, retiring as a full professor emeritus.

Through all of this, he went to reserve meetings once a month, where he and the rest of the NY Math & Physics Squadron had what sounded to me like boy scouts for grownups.

When he got his PhD in 1961, the reserves promoted him to Captain. When he made full professor, the Air Force made him a Major. In 1971, Richard Nixon wrote to him, and presumably 40,000 other reservists, a letter which said that Congress had mandated a reduction in the size of the active reserves. So, if he would voluntarily transfer to the Retired Reserves, he would get one last promotion, and would receive full retirement benefits for that rank when he turned 65.

Thus my father became a Lieutenant Colonel.

Back to the funeral:

My mother had told the funeral director of my father's apparent 52 years of military service, and he told her that he would request an Air Force honor guard for the burial. The director had said that they would probably send two or three airpersons to do the bit with the flag.

So today, as we rolled up to the cemetery, there was a young airman in dress uniform at full attention, about 100 ft from the freshly dug grave. As we circled the vehicles around behind the hearse, we saw another airman guarding three drill rifles laying in the grass. A corps of three airmen and three airwomen, all in their early twenties, conducted the flag-draped plain pine box into to the grave, and then folded the flag slowly, somberly, precisely, and with great care and gravitas, they presented it to my mother. The young woman, who seemed to carry the weight of many, many such ceremonies in her eyes, said "on behalf of a grateful nation I thank you for your husband's service.".

The corps then marched over to the rifles and presented a three-gun salute, and the lone airman at a distance played Taps on a bugle, long and slow and loud.

I realized that these kids, not much older than my oldest kid, had probably buried dozens or perhaps hundreds of their buddies. I wondered if this honor guard duty was part of their healing process, and wondered if it was a relief for them to be burying an old gray-haired man, with grown children and grandchildren, and not a young man with a crying mother, a young wife and little babies.

Two very different wars, two generations apart, but still, a shared sense of duty, honor, loss.

Sad news from Jonathan White

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:47:08 GMT

With both sadness for the loss and gratitude for the long time that we had together, Nina and I would like all of our friends to know that my father, Myron Edward White, passed away peacefully, early this morning. He was 88 years old, and had been married to my mother for 60 years.

Funeral services will be held on Thursday, August 21, at 11 AM, at Temple Emeth, 1666 Windsor Road, Teaneck, NJ 07666.

Dad served our country during World War Two and the Korean War, taught mathematics and computer science to several generations of engineering students, and managed to raise four kids on a professor's salary. A lifelong vocalist, he also was active in his community in both educational and musical matters. But first and foremost, he was a clear, strong and steady moral and ethical guide to his own kids, and his students, too.

In lieu of the ephemeral beauty of flowers, those who would like to make an enduring gift might consider donating to the

Myron E. White Memorial Fund
for Autism Research
at Autism Speaks

With gratitude for all the support you've given us during this difficult but inevitable passage,

Yours,

Jonathan White