Roquecave is an organic goat cheese farm that I found through WWOOF. It's appropriate that I return here to learn how to make cheese - it was Southern France where I first learned what good cheese and wine tasted like. Luckily, they give us Sunday's off, so I've got time to catch up on the blog.
I'm WWOOFing here with two other girls, a Japanese exchange student named Mayu and a woman from Catalonia named Laura. For those of you who don't know it, WWOOF is an exchange of work for room and board. I asked if I could come here to learn how to make cheese and they accepted me. We work ~25hrs a week, and they feed us and show us how they live - in this case, how to make goat cheese.
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| Laura |
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| Mayu |
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| Carole preparing lunch |
The proprietors are a couple in their 60s who host WWOOFers like me now that their children are grown. Carole and Ingo are incredibly generous and patient. They never tire of teaching the three of us about their language and their way of life. They treat us like family. We spend our days from sunup to sundown thinking about food. Because it's well into Autumn, that means making cheese every morning, harvesting and storing chestnuts, apples and saffron in the afternoon.
In between, we make and eat meals together - it's one of the things that I love about France: Meals are an event to be savored with the family. There is no eating on the run here. No exceptions.
I am also thrilled to be improving my French, which has atrophied over the decade since living abroad. Yesterday morning, I helped Ingo sell cheese at one of the two weekly markets where Roquecave sells its products, and it was with more than a little bit of pride that I answered customers' questions about the cheese that I helped make.
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| A view from Beziers, after finishing at the market |
Just a sampling of what I've learned this week:
1. How to make goat cheese
- This includes white cheese (fromage blanc), soft cheeses (fromage creameuse), ash cheeses (my personal favorite), aged goat cheese (Tommes), and yogurt.
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| The cheese making room Carole is borderline OCD making sure everything remains sanitized |
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| You must be very clean before entering the fromagerie |
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| The yogurt we made |
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| Cheese making is 30% making cheese and 70% doing the dishes |
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| Tommes aging on the shelves |
2. How to milk goats - they don't make us do this but we all wanted to learn.
- I pity these poor goats who have to put up with us novice milkers. Ingo can milk about 6 goats in the time it takes me to milk 1. I am improving though!
- Turns out goats only make milk from Spring to Fall, unlike cows that continue to produce milk year round. Modern creameries artificially induce goats milk year round by injecting hormones - who knew?
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| Milking goats takes practice |
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| The goats are happy enough. We milk while they eat |
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| The black and white cat always turns up for the milking. |
- There are so many ways to eat chestnuts! Roasted, toasted, in a sauce or tart, or in a confection . . . they're all good!
- They've taught us learned this week how to roast, peel, pasteurize, and eat chestnuts. Ingo has a machine that he fashioned from an older washing machine that does most of the hard work taking off the skins. We just do the cleanup and cooking.
- There's a running discussion about the difference between the marons and chartaignes (two different varieties of chestnuts). Everyone agrees that the marons are cultivated, sweet, large and juicy. Everyone also agrees that the chartaignes are the wild chestnuts that grow everywhere here. But there are apparently many shades inbetween and nobody seems to agree on how you definitively discern if you're looking at a maron or chartaigne.
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| Ingo instructs a guy named Guillaume who bought chestnuts from the farm and plans to resell them, roasted to people at a market |
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| Roasting our own test batch in the large fireplace |
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| Pasteurizing/Sterilizing Chestnuts |
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| Carole and Guillaume discuss how to best prepare the chestnuts, teaching us in the process |
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| Saffron flowers are pretty, aren't they? |
5. How amazing French food is made
- Meals usually consist of some fabulous but simple French dish made with purchased meat and everything else harvested from the garden. I'm taking notes.
- Because it's their specialty here, every meal has a cheese plate. It's wonderful.
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| A cheese course at every meal - I'm in paradise. |
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| The most interesting meal by far was a nettles tart |
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| Best. Pantry. Ever. |
- Yesterday afternoon, Ingo hooked up the donkeys and plowed the two long rows of potatoes in the garden for us girls to then lift from the softened earth. Several of the neighbors joined in to learn how to work with these peaceful creatures.
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7. French and Catalonia history
- Laura is a proud native Catalonian and is constantly comparing her native tongue with French, Spanish, and sometimes even Occitane. During these discussions, I often get a dual lesson in language and history for both regions. Laura told one story that I will repeat here: When she was 7 or 8 years old, there was a family from South America that moved to her town and there were several kids in her class that could not understand the newcomers [because they were speaking Spanish instead of Catalan].
- Laura and I went hiking today since it was our day off - we passed an old glacier - a deep pit where they used to store snow and ice from the winter for use in the spring and summer. There is now a cross inside it commemorating the farmers and their families laid there after the Nazis massacred everyone in the area as they pulled out of France.
- This whole region was apparently devoid of trees until the 60s when it was allowed to regenerate. (A glass factory cut down all the trees to fuel the furnaces long ago.) You would never know it to see the forests around this farm today.
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| A view from the Roquecave pastures |
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| The glacier |
8. How to take it easy. You learn to enjoy the simple pleasures here, like the sun on your face after 2 rainy days, a good meal and good conversation, the wind in the trees that are turning bright yellow and red, and the joy of finding the biggest chestnut ever under the leaves.
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| The trees and vinyards are on fire with color |
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| Plenty of chestnuts to go around |
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| The cat is enjoying the sun too - This one starts purring as soon as you touch it |
It's humbling to watch a family who has so little give so much. They work all day, every day to make a life out of this farm. Nothing is wasted. Carole and Ingo have huge hearts. On top of hosting people like me, they volunteer with children and show their neighbors how to farm and keep animals. (They've been doing this for 30 years, and other folks in the area who would like to do small farming flock to them for expertise). Carole even volunteered at a prison two days ago, showing them how to make cheese. She was in a tizzy all morning to make sure she didn't forget anything, including enough cheese for the prisoners to take some back to their cells. They also host 'neighborhood' events in this small mountain region - one neighbor taught a Yoga class on Monday and another neighbor taught traditional French dances on Thursday while 3 other neighbors alternately provided live accordion music. I think these folks enjoy the small things more because they have less. But they want for nothing.
Carole invited me to stay for another week, and I will gladly take her up on the offer.
Carole invited me to stay for another week, and I will gladly take her up on the offer.
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