The delights of Alpine cheese-making

I went on the most delightful visit recently to a farm in the Swiss Alps. Usually, when I think of a farm, I think of ploughed fields, combine harvesters, and rows and rows of sad-looking animals in dark, warehouse-like sheds. I certainly don't think of the mountainous idyll that it turned out to be.

After an hour's drive through the ondulating Swiss mountains, which looked to be lifted straight out of an oil painting, covered in lush green grass and patches of pine forest, we drove up a bumpy dirt road, at the end of which was a little house perched on the mountainside, with nothing but sloping meadows and pine trees as far as the eye could see.

The farmer and his wife greeted us with open arms and great joy at the prospect of guests, and showed us to the tables that they had prepared on the terrace, as if feeding a large group of people were the most leisurely of activities (although considering their daily routine, which they later talked us through, it probably was the most leisurely thing they had done all day). We sat down to the most delectable homemade soup, fresh bread and cheese made with the milk of the very cows that were chewing their cud in a shed not two metres from where we were sitting.

The soup was served in special handade wooden bowls with traditional wooden ladles, and as we ate, the farmer explained the tradition of knocking the ladle against the bowl to “salute” it and thank it for the soup. Then he explained their work to us.

“I studied for four years to be an electrician,” he said, “but then I decided that I didn’t want to be an electrician after all. So I went back to the beginning again and studied agriculture instead. I took over the farm from my father.

‘Daddy,’ I told him, ‘the future is organic’.

‘You are crazy, my boy,’ he told me.

But I really believed it, so my wife and I started our organic farm. And now we are very successful.

“You know, when we were studying agriculture, they were always teaching us how to maximise yield, how to use pesticides, how to make as much profit as possible. But they never taught us about organic farming.

“See those flowers growing in the grass over there?” he continued. “Those are weeds. The cows must not eat them or they will get sick. But because we farm organically, I cannot put pesticides on them. But,” he said, reaching for a scythe hanging on the wall, “God gave me two arms. And so every two or three days, I –” and he swung the scythe dramatically.

“And what do you think this is?” he asked, seizing another odd-looking contraption not unlike an oversized tuning fork.

“A spear!” suggested someone.

“A probe!” shouted someone else.

The farmer shook his head.

“See those yellow flowers?” he pointed at the mountainside. “Those ones, if you cut them, they grow back very quickly. And the cows must not eat them. It makes their blood too liquid and they get very sick. So I take this –” and he demonstrated thrusting the two prongs of the contraption into the earth “– and I remove the plant at the root.” He gave a knowing smile. “If you put pesticide on those plants, you have to do it three times a year. But you take out the root by hand, and it is gone forever. Now I go and get you another kind of cheese. A cheese that is one year old. Somebody wants more bread?”

The farmer’s wife is a herbologist and treats their animals herself when they are sick, using plants growing around the house. When any of their neighbours get ill (“neighbours” meaning the family living two mountains away and another family up at the top of the mountain, accessible only by cable car, you understand), she goes to them and shows them which of the plants growing on their doorstep they can use to cure them.

“In the winter,” the farmer told us, having brought us more bread and cheese, “I keep my cows down in the village. Then in the summer I bring them up here. In the summer they eat the grass on the mountains here. In the winter I don't buy food for them – soya or cereals – because produce a very special cheese and the cows have to eat only Alpine grass. So in the summer, I harvest grass in the village, and I dry it and store it for the cows to eat in the winter. Last winter was very bad,” he said, shaking his head at the memory. “Everything was covered in snow for six months. Six months!”

And then it was time to go and look at the cows.

The cows, 35 of them, were in a shed adjoining the house, their tails tied to the ceiling to keep them out of harm’s way.

“This one,” said the farmer, proudly pointing at one cow lying down and staring at the wall, “had a baby yesterday. She is a new mother.”

“Do you let the calves feed from their mother?” someone asked.

“No,” said the farmer. “Because then the cow only gives enough milk for her baby and none for us. We take the calf away as soon as it is born. We milk the cow and give its milk to the calf, but because we are milking her, she produces more.”

“But doesn’t she miss her baby?” someone asked.

“No,” said the farmer. “The first day she looks for it, but when she doesn’t find it, she forgets about it.”

“Are the cows inseminated naturally?” asked one lady very delicately.

The farmer grinned and beckoned towards the back of the shed. Everyone pushed through to look at the cow that he was pointing at. It had a ring through its nose. It was a bull.

“This,” the farmer declared proudly, “is the father of all next season’s calves! We have to choose him carefully, and it is a very difficult job, because it is not easy to find this pure breed of cow, Simmental.  And every year or two we have to choose a new bull, because it is good to change the genetics every generation or two. We choose the lucky bull according to his parent’s strength, their size and their resistance to disease, and his mother’s milk production. This bull is two years old.”

Two years old and already a hulk! Incredible to think that such a monster can grow in just two years. He looked very tranquil as he sat there chewing his cud and staring at the wall, much more so than you would if you had been chosen out of all your brothers not be sent to the great blue yonder but rather to sow your seed and ensure the production of the next generation of calves.

“Do you see the horns of that cow?” said the farmer, pointing to a cow with twisted horns. “Do you see how they do not go straight up? That is because of the moon.”

“Because of the moon?” everybody murmured, baffled.

“Yes,” he said. “When the horns start growing, I tie them so that they grow into the right shape. And you must take the tie off when the moon is like this –” he drew a horseshoe shape in the air “– and  then the horns will grow up. But I did that cow before I knew about the moon. I took off the tie when the moon was full and the horns grew crooked.”

He pointed at a cow which certainly did have very crooked horns.

“I had one cow and the horn was so twisted that it grew into her face.”

Poor cow.

“What do you do with the cows when they stop giving milk?” somebody asked. 

“When a cow gets old,” replied the farmer, “I take her to my friend who is a butcher.”
“Ah,” said everybody, disappointed. The farmer shook his head sadly. 
“I drive her myself to his house,” he said lovingly. “I hold her – I put my hand on her – and I say, 'Thank you for– Thank you for everything'.”

It was a lovely moment. I don't eat meat, but I think I would if all animals died knowing themselves to be so loved.

And then into the kitchen so we could learn about cheese-making.

“Every morning,” the farmer told us, “I wake up at 4:30. I milk the cows and I put the milk together with yesterday evening’s milk in this pot. It is 1000 litres.”

When you are used to picturing milk one litre at a time as you buy it from the supermarket, it’s hard to picture a thousand litres of milk. This is a thousand-litre pot.

 

“I leave the milk for a few hours, until the cream rises to the top,” said the farmer. “Then I take the cream off the top with this.” He indicated the colander-like object hanging on the pot handle.”

“You cream the milk!” shouted somebody proudly, showing off their knowledge of technical terminology.

“Yes,” the farmer agreed. “I cream the milk. Then I put in lactic ferment.”

He pointed at the pile of firewood next to the pot.

“I heat the milk over a wood fire,” he said. “These pieces of wood are small because they heat up more quickly. I know how many pieces of wood to put and how long to let them burn to arrive at precisely the right temperature. Then I put rennet.”

There was a brief flurry while everybody tried to work out what rennet was.

“It comes from the stomach of a cow,” explained the farmer, when everyone was listening to him again. “We buy it in a bottle, but my grandfather used a piece of dried cow intestine. He kept it hanging up and he used to cut off a piece and put it in the milk.”

Everybody groaned.

“After some hours,” continued the farmer “the milk is like yoghurt. I take my guitar –” he seized an apparatus that resembled a television aerial “– and I use it to break the milk into pieces.” He demonstrated running the aerial through the pot.   

“Then I put it on the fire again until it separates into a solid part at the bottom and a liquid part at the top.”

“Curds and whey! Curds and whey!” shouted somebody excitedly.

“What is curds and whey?” asks somebody else, bemused.

The farmer momentarily left the general confusion and returned shortly afterwards with a cloth on a stick.

“Then I wash my hands and arms very well,” he said. “With cold water. Very cold! Three degrees!”

He chuckled. He raised the cloth on the stick.

“My assistant holds the end of this cloth and I take the other end. And I dive into the pot and I pull the cloth through the liquid."

"Is that why you have such big muscles?" somebody asked, amused. 

"No," said the farmer. "These muscles are from digging up the weeds outside. With the cloth I take out some of the curds from the bottom of the pot. I have to make sure I take out the same amount every time so that the cheeses are the same size. Then I drain the curds and put them in a mould and in a press.”

“Those are the cheeses from yesterday,” he said, indicating the press behind him. “This afternoon they will be removed to make space for today’s cheeses. They are stored for between six months and a year, and they must be oiled, salted and turned regularly.”

He beamed. “Now we go and see my goats!”

The goats live in a straw-lined space in the lower level of the house, although they are free to wander around outside if they wish. The kids follow their mothers around, but also go off and play together. We watched two of them playing with large sheets of plastic, jumping on it and running back and forth over it, delighting in the crackling noise it made.

“Do you use the goats for milk?” somebody asked.

“No,” replied the farmer coldly. “They are only for meat.”

And then it was on to the pigs. There were pink ones and black ones, and they lived in a little clearing in the forest.

“See that pig there?” said the farmer, pointing to a fat pink pig lying on its back with its legs sticking up in the air, its back leg occasionally twitching. “It is working very hard.”

Everybody sniggered.

“It is!” insisted the farmer. “It is making meat. These pigs make very good meat.”

He went to the fence and tried to call the pigs so we could see them up close, but they weren't interested. They were too busy making meat. So he opened a barrel at the gate of the enclosure, and suddenly five pigs were trotting towards the gate with great enthusiasm. He placed something resembling chicken feed on a tree stump, and the pigs squabbled over it, two of them trying to attack each other as a third scoffed the food.

“See that pipe?” said the farmer, pointing to a hosepipe leading into a trough. “We send the whey that is left from the cheese down that pipe. It is very good for the pigs.”

And then the visit was over and we returned to the farmhouse, where, all fired up by the delight of organic Alpine farming, everybody bought pieces of cheese to take home.