T13 Making Cheese Mongolian Style

One of the places we stopped to visit was a family that runs a dairy operation. They have about 40 cows which they milk twice a day each. They use the milk to make cheese, “curd”, yogurt, and adik. All of this is sold to other families in the valley

Step 1. Milk the cow. I’ll say more about this in a bit.

2. They put most of the milk into either their refrigerator or their freezer, both of which run off a gas powered generator in the yard. You can see in the picture that some of the milk has already rimmed the top of their container from what they collected the day before. They poured this into a large bowl set on the kind of little stove you find everywhere in Mongolia, covered it with a flat lid, and waited very patiently until it came to a boil.

3. While we were waiting on the milk, they brought out the usual hospitality – fried bread, butter, and vodka. When asked about the vodka, they brought out a still. You can see more about that on last Monday’s post. They showed the still around, then placed it on top of the bowl of milk, then placed a bowl of fried bread on top of that to show how it could all be stacked up if they wanted to.

4. After all that milarky the milk had come to a boil and was ready for the yogurt. Yeah, they didn’t do a cheese culture, but relied on the sourness of the yogurt to the do curdling.

5. A few minutes later you could see the separation of curds and whey.

6. The bowl was then moved to a special stand. Notice how high the flames in the stove.

7. Everything in the bowl was transferred to a cloth covered bucket for separation of the curds and whey.

8. The whey is kept for making vodka while the curds make the cheese. They were held until the dripping stops then 9. with the cloth still over them they were put on a board placed across the original bowl. The cloth is very carefully folded just so.

10. Then pressed.

11. Right after the cheese was set to press, our hostess put on her coat and went out to milk the cows. When asked, she said the coat was nothing special. She always wore that one when milking.

12. A quick hand wash, then you’ve already seen the milking

13. Once the milking was done, we came back in and the cloth was removed from the cheese. I had hoped we’d get a taste, but apparently it still needed some time to solidify.