Cheese Tour part two...

Picking up where I left off way back when...
(don't be confused, this is from November 10th not October 26th. I started it then and thought I could change the date but it wouldn't let me)

The next cheese farm we went to was Dancing Ewe Farm - the cheesemaker studied in Italy and they make a variety of Italian cheeses from sheep and cow milk. The farm buildings themselves are beautiful as well, with a Tuscan kind of feel.

outside view

Inside the cheese room, this is the giant tank they make cheese in with a lovely skylight overhead

Another view of the cheese room, looking the other way - this shows the beautiful local Granville slate that lines the floor and walls of the cheese room.

and a few of their cute little sheep freshly shorn


Next we went to the Argyle Cheese Farmer, a dairy farm. My mother-in-law also enjoyed this farm because her mother was a teacher in Argyle, and one of the farmers actually had her for a teacher! I didn't get any good photos, but here's a shot of the fresh yogurt we bought.

Trevor said it was very tasty! (he's the vanilla yogurt fan, I like plain)

We had a lunch break at a very yummy little Adirondack decorated diner. Cheap, good, breakfast all day on Sunday. But I can't remember what it was called or which town it was in.
But they also had super cheap maple syrup for sale! And my lovely inlaws bought us a half gallon. This part of New York is very close to Vermont (close like the diner had those travel maps for all Vermont towns instead of New York), so they sell "Vermont" maple syrup. I use the quotes because the waitress told us that the syrup all comes from New York trees, it is just boiled in Vermont. So I guess its six of one, half a dozen of the other with that.

The last cheese farm we made it to was Sweet Spring Farm. It is a nubian goat farm!

big nubian goat

baby nubian goats

They had super yummy chevre (soft goat cheese) for a very reasonable price.

(by the way I come from a weird family with both a sister and mother who don't like goat cheese. Or foot cheese as my sister calls it. freaks.) ;-)


On the way home we met up with this guy, who is taking this horse drawn "house" across the country (annoying cars behind him all along the way) ;-). He started in New Hampshire and he's in Ohio right now.

"Gromit, that's it! Cheese! We'll go somewhere where there's cheese!"

Today we took my inlaws on a driving tour of small cheese farms in a county about an hour north of us, near Vermont. There were six cheese farms that you could visit and we managed to make it to five of them.

We started at Gillis Acres Farm in Greenwich, a goat farm.

These little cuties are Alpine goats. We talked to the farmer about the cheese process, saw the equipment and the baby goats (the milking goats were in a different barn), and tasted all the cheese!

We decided to get the Alpine Queen which is similar to a gruyere.

Next we went to 3-Corner Field Farm in Shushan, a sheep farm. This was the first time I ever had to wash my shoes on the way in to a farm!

On the way in the gate, they have disinfectant buckets and scrub brushes and ask you to disinfect to protect the "bio security" of the farm. This farm is also all about sustainability, they have water pumps that do not use any fossil fuels, and solar panels on the barns for the refrigeration and milking/cheese making equipment.

Here's one of their cute sheep dogs taking a little break from his work...
And, here's the cheese we picked out. This is a smoked artisanal sheep's milk cheese and it is heavenly. It's also $22.50 a pound so we only got about a quarter pound.

This is getting long so I'm going to break it up into two posts...