[upbeat folk music]
[milk splashing]
- Inga: As the whey drains off the curd,
I use my hands to pull the curd into two different sections.
We call these our slabs.
Then we cut those slabs into tinier pieces.
[knife scraping]
Over the course of the next few hours,
we stack those pieces one on top of each other.
And I continue doing this
until I can stack them four to five stacks high.
What it does is it gets as much moisture out of that cheese
as we can.
The weight of the cheese actually will push the whey
out of that slab,
so it becomes a little bit drier.
And that's really what we're looking for.
This is called the cheddaring process.
Once our slabs have reached the correct pH,
it's time for milling.
[upbeat music]
We use a traditional British-style peg mill.
The peg mill's a little bit different.
When we process through our slabs,
they come out a little bit shaggier
than your traditional Wisconsin cheese curds.
But these curds are perfect for the clothbound cheddar
that we do here on the farm.
Once our slabs are all put through the mill,
it's time for salting.
We add the salt in three different applications,
allowing enough time in between
to have the salt really absorb into those curds,
and having any excess whey also expel
from the rest of the curds.
As I'm salting the curds,
my father begins to dress the molds with cheesecloth
to get them prepared for me to fill them.
The final step in our cheesemaking
is putting the curds into the molds.
We call our molds truckles
because they're in a cylinder shape.
Once I put the lids on the molds,
then it's time for the truckles to go into the press,
where they'll stay under high pressure for 24 hours.
[press hissing]
When the truckles are under pressure,
it's gonna expel even more of the liquid from those curds.
And in this process, the curds, they're gonna knit together
and become one wheel of cheese.
[upbeat folk music]