Norway: Exploring the dairying, cheese, and milk fermentation traditions.

And the shifting focus and methods of my project.

A Norwegian Red Cow and aesthetically pleasing fence at Braskerudsætra, the first stop of my Norway cheese tour.

I am going to shift the process of my Substack postings.  Expect to see more frequent, perhaps shorter posts that are chapters in a longer saga.  I am going to send the full version of some these to paid subscribers only.  After debating the ethics of this for over a year, I have decided that it is morally acceptable to provide paid content.  I believe in freely sharing the information that has been openly shared with me, but these words are my craft, and I am ok with asking for enough of a return on these linguistic carvings to fund my work. I may also start on other crowdfunding platforms, such as Patreon.

The house at the first Sæter I am staying at, with a living roof, and gorgeous interior that holds many wood antiques.

I also want to be more transparent about my sources of funding.  When I began this work four years ago in Mongolia, it was funded solely through money earned working as a cheesemaker or farm hand.  My last journey of 16 months was kickstarted with a moderate sum gifted to me.  I then began crowd funding through this platform, accepting donations, and getting paid small amounts for speaking online, making video content, and eventually received a scholarship, the DZTA.  Returning to the United States this January, I began the Sour Milk School, which has allowed me to stack enough cheese in the cellar to travel for another round of 7 - 8 months.

The barn where the cows are milked. They stay outdoors the rest of the day and night, and come back on their own for milking and treats.

This first stage in Norway is being hosted by an organization called Norsk Gardsost, who are covering my travel costs, and setting up a schedule of visits for me.  It is because of their assistance that I have seen so much this first week.  I will give back to them and the makers I visit content I am creating, and help spread the word about their work.  I am also seeking to publish articles from my time here.  I hope to work with similar organizations in other countries, so if you have suggestions of such groups who may be interested in hosting me, please let me know. I want to offer workshops, assist cheesemakers, and do speaking events while in these places. My top ten list of places I’d like to visit, in no apparent order (other than Turkey and Romania being highly likely):

1. Turkey

2. Romania

3. Bosnia/Herzegovina

4. Kyrgyzstan

5. Iran

6. Jordan

7. Slovakia

8. Greece

9. Brazil

10. Mexico

I also intend to revisit a few places again, such as Georgia, Mongolia, and Albania. France is also an obvious must, but for now I’d rather focus on the less studied regions. There are many other places I’d love to visit not on the list, including regions with deep dairying traditions that I haven’t researched yet, such as east Africa. I would rather not list nation-states, as I am more interesting in bioregionalism and cultural identification. But out of convience, that is the classification I have used.

Roy ladling the hot curd that will become pultost.

So I have various streams of income, and I hope to grow the revenue from this platform, which allows me to speak from the heart, to share my experiences with few constraints, to blend the technical info with cultural observations, culinary exploration, and philosophical speculation.  I heartily thank everyone who as contributed to my project, it has allowed me to grow from a scruffy dude with a dirty backpack and a dream, to a semi-legit but still rough-around-the-edges cheese researcher.  I understand if you can’t or choose not to contribute, and hope you can still get a lot from these posts.  Support and capital come in many forms, and your words and moral support mean a great deal.  I dont think i would be doing this if there was not such a enthusiastic audience that hungrily eats up this trail of lactic crumbs I am dropping, leading into the dark tangled forest of cheese trees, cream rivers, and butter bushes.

Telemark cattle: one of the heritage breeds of Norway.

What makes a cheese a cheese?  I thought I knew. Now I am seeing things that challenge my definitions.  And that is a good thing.  Assumptions are made to be questioned.  This is how knowledge can grow, philosophies evolve.  For me, rigidly fixed values and convictions are dangerous.  Certainty is the enemy.  What I do believe in firmly is challenging these, keeping my mind open to the possibility that the story is not complete, that there are always more pieces to the puzzle.

Sour, rennetless, skim milk cheeses: Pultost (upper right) and Skjørost. These relate to butter making, a food I am obviously fond of.

I am finding that the puzzle is actually a 3 dimensional globe, with whole continents that I had only a cursory understanding of. As I travel and talk to people around the world, the map elaborates and I find not a flat surface but a convoluted landscape of mountains, ravines, wide valleys, and more tight hollows and caverns than I could ever hope to explore in 100 lifetimes. Full understanding is not the point. Continually being overwhelmed by the infinite possible directions milk can go, by the ingenuity of humans to adapt to the places they live with livestock, that is the point.

Roy making Pultost, one of the endangered Norwegian cheeses I will focus on.

One week in Norway has led to these heady speculations.  I’ve never had so many revelations, seen so many new dairy foods, in such a short time.  The milk food traditions here are vast and represent a highly technical understanding of milk chemistry, enveloped in folk knowledge.  The approaches reminds me of Mongolia, where a single milking is often divided into many foods.  Milk is dissected, and made into a range of products with various shelf lives and culinary applications.  Sometimes these are reassembled in dishes of complex textural layers.  Like a crispy rye flatbread, smeared in butter, with a piece of pudgy white cheese and berry jam on top. Or sour cream mixed with the fresh curds of a skim milk cheese, making something resembling American cottage cheese, but elevated.  There is also a many branched family tree of milk confections made by reducing whey and adding various things, combining milks, or even mixing cheese chunks into a caramel like block.

The intricate, hand made copper kettle, and wood mold being packed with Brunost, a Caramel like “cheese”.

So thanks for keeping your antennae in the air as the Sour Milk Circus continues its broadcast. Tune in next week for more from my time at Braskerudsætra, where these photos were taken.  Please comment below about what I have shared here, and how you feel about this content and my evolving approach to documenting the intersection of traditions that is represented in the array of milk foods found on this planet.  Takk for maten.