How Sheep Changed my Life

How Sheep Cheese changed my life

I never thought something as ‘benign’ as cheese could have the power to change my life. Yet here I am, in a lifestyle completely different from what I had ever envisioned, all because of cheese.

Not just any cheese, you see.

Sheep cheese.

I grew up in a middle class homeschool family in small town America, eating the conventional Standard American Diet (or the ‘Sad’ diet as I now refer to it.) Fat was bad and flavor wasn’t much better. But then something remarkable happened - I signed up for a short term mission trip to Romania, and the next year went back and stayed for seven months volunteering at a small private orphanage. While I lived overseas, I ate the food the locals ate. The orphanage had a private chef, and the daughter of the orphanage director would take me out shopping with her and we’d eat from the little kiosks on street corners.

It was at one of these Kiosks that my life changed - because it was there that I ate my first Placinta with Branza and Smuntuna.  Translation, a potato pie with cheese and sour cream. Except this wasn’t a pie like those of us in North America usually think of when we say ‘pie.’ They took mashed potatoes, wrapped them in pizza dough, flattened them with a rolling pin, fried it lightly in oil, smeared sour cream on top with a teensy bit of crushed garlic and grated the most phenomenal cheese on top that I had ever had in my entire life.

I was in gastric heaven.

When I returned home, I cobbled together how to make the delightful snack from ingredients I could find in our local grocery stores. I found everything I needed except for the cheese. Nothing I tasted could compare to that sweet, tangy, delectable cheese. And the cheese was the part that just made the whole thing work.

Finally I found a little Russian grocery store which sold imported Eastern European cheeses, and the owner let me try samples. I finally found what I was looking for! Overjoyed, I asked the name of the cheese, which of course had no English equivalent that I could understand.

“Well you see, this is a special cheese to the mountains of Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine. So it is hard to translate into English because it is very special. You must have the right pastures, and only special people can make it as it is very hard to make.”

What is so hard about it? I asked.

“It comes from the sheeps. And only special people can get milk from a sheep.” The owner replied… as if everyone should clearly know this.

I decided right then and there that someday I would become one of those special people who gets milk from sheep, and makes the most delicious cheese in the world …. As a garnish for my potato pancakes.

One might argue that I could simply continue patronizing the little Russian grocery store and not have to upend my entire life by milking sheep. And for a time that’s exactly what I did. However, eventually I moved away, and no where else sold that particular kind of sheep cheese. Being a researcher at heart, I started looking into how that cheese was made. Not only is it unique in the fact that it comes from the milk of sheep, but its actually a byproduct of the Romanian cheesemaking process. What I was enjoying was a soft kind of ricotta made from leftover whey protein when the cheese Kashkaval was made.

Kashkaval is the sheep milk equivalent of cheddar. Sheep’s milk does not like to be handled as much as cow’s milk, and so one can’t really make a ‘sheep milk cheddar’ very well due to different enzymatic and fat globule properties. Kashkaval is a very hands-on cheese that requires stretching and forming slowly after being reheated in its own whey.

Even with the gentler handling, a lot of the milk protein is lost in the whey, and so the thrifty Romanian shepherds will boil the whey, let the protein rise to the top, and then will skim it off and place it in cheesecloth to then hang from rafters to let all the whey drip out over the course of a few days.

It is a rather involved process that takes a lot of old-world patience. Not conducive to factory food or factory farming.

I realized as I did my homework that in order to get that cheese for my potato pancakes, I would need to do one of two things: move back to Romania and befriend some shepherds, or acquire my own flock of dairy sheep.

Since by this point I was married and dealing with chronic health issues with both myself and my husband, moving overseas wasn’t very feasible. That left acquiring my own flock.

Mother’s day 2020 we brought home two Border Leicester sheep - a breed that was available locally and my research indicated had historically been milked. By the end of 2020 we had a hodgepodge of breeds ranging from dairy crossbreeds to critically endangered Gulf Coast Native sheep. We bred all of them and spring of 2021 I began milking them.

Each breed had a unique lactation time, fat content, and amount of milk. Being a person who likes to talk about whatever odd thing I’m involved in at the moment, I shared on social media what I was doing. I also hand sheared my sheep that spring and picked up my childhood hobby of spinning and knitting. I impressed my husband by finding a pattern for a Star Wars themed sweater and made it for him. I salvaged some sheep milk that had been left out of the refrigerator by accident and made sheep milk soap, which friends then asked if they could buy. Before I knew it, my life was fully immersed with sheep. And I mean really immersed with sheep. When folks asked me how I was, I answered how the sheep were. When people asked me what was new, I responded about the latest breakthrough I was having with wool processing. No longer did I wonder about Hollywood drama - I obsessed over the best minerals to feed my sheep to keep their body condition up through their whole lactation.

Selling soap turned out to be a viable side business, and I began traveling to homesteading shows and trying to sell soap and yarn I spun. Folks visiting my booth tended to be more interested in asking me how I milked sheep than buying my wares, and eventually my husband and I realized that we had stumbled upon a niche that no one else was really talking about. We decided we needed to proactively get the word out about sheep milk, and landed a book contract… the same day that we discovered to our amazement that we were pregnant!

We had healed some of those chronic conditions enough through healthy living - raising our own eggs, meat, and milk and working outside and getting exercise - that our body’s felt comfortable enough to reproduce. Whenever folks compliment our son for his health, vitality and intelligence, we smile and say “Yeah, it’s because of sheep milk.”

The book has sold amazingly well, and led to traveling and speaking engagements. I’ve met folks from all over the world due to writing the book and researching dairy sheep. One of the most fascinating doors it opened was while I was gathering photos for the book. I wanted to depict some of the Romanian shepherds who made the cheese that started me on this whole journey - but they are almost an unreached people group and live very remotely. Through social media I discovered a Romanian photographer, who happened to be good friends with a nomadic shepherd. We are now all friends and I was able to acquire some stunning photographs of both cheesemaking and Romanian shepherds. You can see the photographer’s work on Instagram at @mihnea_turcu. I also chat with shepherds around the world and exchange recipes, talk about animal husbandry, share wool processing methods, and enjoy a friendship that is unique to shepherds. We have a hard lifestyle that isn’t vogue - and we milk an obscure animal. Wool isn’t super popular and yet we incorporate it into our daily fashion - or use it in our gardens and animal bedding.

Learning how to work with sheep has taught me more about myself than any self help book or therapy ever could. It has forced me into new levels of self awareness and emotional management, because sheep pick up on their shepherds mood. I have to be more cognizant of my limitations - I can’t overexert myself on things that will effect my ability to tend the sheep and see to their needs. Sheep being a more hands on livestock than other animals, they require regular and consistent interactions from their shepherds. Negligence can lead to health issues and death.

Life is very different from what I thought it would be as a young adult traveling the world and saving children from disaster by working at an orphanage. It is much quieter and at times, lonelier. But if it weren’t for the sheep, my personal quality of life wouldn’t be the same. I don’t know if I would be a mother, and I know for a fact I would be much sicker. While raw cow and goat milk boasts definite health properties, sheep milk has unique traits to offer as a health food. The higher fat and mineral content were essential for my body to go through pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. When I wasn’t able to drink at least a quart of sheeps milk per day during that season, I viscerally felt it.

Between the book and the baby, I wasn’t able to dive as quickly into my own sheep cheese making journey as I originally thought I would be able to. But I’ve eventually moved back into that space, and this year I can’t wait til my ewes freshen and I once again am able to play with the milk they generously give and explore cheeses like kashkaval, branza, telemea, sirene, etc.

Cheese from scratch is always delicious. Sheep milk cheese, however, is in my opinion, the delicacy of delicacies. Sheep milk is known as ‘the champagne of milk,’ and the cheese ought to be ‘the chocolate cake of all cheeses.’ I hope you get the opportunity to try both someday. It just may change your life like it did mine.

Recipe:

Since I extolled the virtue of this dish so profoundly in my article, I figured it would be a good idea to give you the opportunity to make it yourself. Obviously the best cheese to use would be sheep milk branza. But if you can’t get any, a feta or dry ricotta will be a nice stand-in. This is also a great recipe to use leftover mashed potatoes in. I will typically make far more mashed potatoes for dinner than I know we can eat, and will save some of the water I boiled them in as well. The next day I’ll make placinta’s with it.

Ingredients:

4 1/2 Cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp yeast

1 tsp sugar

1 cup lukewarm water (I use the water I boiled the potatoes in when making the mashed potatoes)

2 cups mashed potatoes

2-3 tablespoons cooking fat - Romanians use sunflower seed oil now, but I prefer to use lard or ghee, which is probably what they used traditionally.

A few cloves Minced garlic

1-2 Tablespoons butter

1/4 cup sour cream

Kashkaval or branza cheese - or any other cheese that sounds delicious to you. Feta or dry ricotta are good choices but the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Method:

~Mix the first three ingredients in a large bowl. Slowly add the warm potato-water. You can use a spoon but the Romanians who taught me all said it tastes better when you mix it by hand.

~Once the dough is fully mixed, knead for about ten minutes, until it stops sticking to your hand and the side of the bowl. Then cover with a cloth and let rise for about an hour, or until its doubled in size.

~ Knead the dough briefly to warm it up again, and then divide into ten equally sized balls. Roll into flat pancakes. Divide the potatoes into ten equal portions, and place in the center of the dough pancakes.

~ Take the edges of the pancakes and place over the mashed potatoes so that the potatoes are fully encased by dough. Then take your rolling pin and roll the balls so that they are flat again. Do this carefully so that potatoes don’t peek out from the dough - you want the potatoes fully covered. Let the pancakes rest for about 10 minutes.

~ Heat 1/3 of the cooking oil/fat in the skillet and place the pancake gently in the skillet. Cook on each side for about 3 minutes, or until they turn golden brown.

~While still warm, spread some butter over the pancake, sprinkle some of the minced garlic on top of that.

~Keep the rest of the placintas warm in the oven while the last cook. Right before serving, spread with sour cream and sprinkle with cheese.

These are delicious but quite filling - and designed to keep peasant countrymen fed during full days of work. All that to say, eat them slowly. They expand once they are in your stomach! Bon appetite!