We went to the the butchery of Nagy Géza, which looked liked any house from the outside. After about 80 visits to small-scale producers in Romania, the one thing they have in common is that they are unpretentious.
Having entered, we were led to a room where three men were cutting up pig’s meat with knives. Surprisingly, they didn’t wear gloves. In fact, there was nothing that protected them them against severe cuts!. When I asked my guide about it, the man in in charge said that they only would use safety gloves if they had to. Fortunately, they hadn’t had any accidents so far.
The butchers at work
Cutting meat with razor-sharp knives, working methodically in silence, everybody knowing exactly what to do, they made it look easy, but that was because they were so good at it. One tragicomic thing about this was that there wasn’t even a first-aid kit where they were working, while the women, who were preparing food, had one!
All the premises looked clean, there were tiles on the floor and on the lower part of the walls. Likewise, the workers wore clean clothes and clean aprons.
Thighs of pigs were hanging from the ceiling and the workers were cutting them up, sorting meat and fat into plastic boxes. The skin was put in a separate box, fat in another one, the best meat was separated, while the lowest quality meat was for sausages. Separating bones and meat was done quickly and easily.
Cutting meat
They have to work hard to satisfy demand because many people like their products even though they can buy cheaper meat products from big factories.
Freshly cut meat
The boss learnt the trade from his grandfather and his brother. In fact, he was part of a family who had been butchers for generations.
Lard
Those who want to be butchers need to start when they are about 16 years old. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any apprentices at the moment. In general, adolescents don’t want to do this type of work. There is a training course for budding butchers, but it is difficult for beginners.
Now they can buy equipment like special knives in a shop nearby, but before it was difficult to get the knives they needed. Likewise, before they didn’t have a refrigerated car, but they have one now. They deliver meat products to customers within a 60km radius.
The nearest slaughterhouse is 60 to 70 km away.
There are 8 workers here and it is a family company. They want to expand it and turn a former barn into a butchery.
One of the workers work here part-time, else he works as an organist and sings in a church. The other one has small children, boy and girl, but they are too small to work here. He will try to persuade them as they get older. The wife and daughter of the boss work in the kitchen.
There is one big butchery with which they have good relations. The owner of another butchery died, one of his workers have bought it and wants to run it. Else, there are plenty of small producers, who operate illegally. They slaughter a pig and cut it up at once in an ad-hoc operation.
Before, the man in charge worked with cow and calf meat, but not any more. Now, he only works with pig’s meat and he doesn’t want to mix types of meat. He doesn’t like horse meat and he doesn’t want to work with it. Some of the villagers ask him to cut up sheep or cows, but he does it only for them and never under his brand name.
They have a smoke room for smoking their products and a cooler room for storage. They let the meat mature for a month by hanging from meat hooks in the cooler rooms. This is costly for the butcher, but good for the quality of the meat.
Suspended cold cuts
Some meat products are smoked and some are dried and smoked.
Smoked meat products
Moreover, some meat was lying in brine where the salt in the brine enters the food leading to that bacteria are killed.
Meat in brine
They make meat products like salami, bacon, black pudding, cold cuts, sausages and ham.
Before we left, the man in charge kindly served us a collection of their products. Black pudding was not for me, else it was delicious.
Attila asked me what kind of small-scale producers I would like to visit in his area, then I mentioned a bakery or a confectionery. After some phone calls, he had tracked down the confectionery of Mrs Anna Olah Nagy.
Before, the locals came to her with ingredients and asked her to make a cake, but often it wasn’t enough and she had to add some. Moreover, they didn’t pay since they had brought the ingredients, but she got tired of it. One day she set up a sign on the gate that cakes were for sale and people started buying them.
She learnt baking from her mother and grandmother, who still helps a lot even though she’s 92 years old.
When we visited her, she was making a cake with pig’s fat called Hájas tészta. The finished cake resembles Danish pastry with its airy consistency.
Inside a cakes called Hájas tészta
She flattened the dough with a rolling pin and hit it with the same utensil.
Rolling the doughHitting the dough with a rolling pin
Next, she put fat on the dough and spread it out over the whole surface.
Putting pig’s fat on the dough
She folded the dough in a certain way, folding it on the long sides, then on the short ones until she had made a block of dough.
Folding the dough
Finally, she put the fat on top of the dough and put it in a plastic bag, letting it rest for about 20 minutes.
She would do the same three times and it takes 4-5 hours to make this cake.
Fortunately, she was making two of this cake on the same day so we didn’t have to wait long before she did the same procedure again. Then, small bumps appeared on the surface and she told my guide that it was a sign of quality.
There should be two weddings in the weekend and 60 kg of cakes was required for each wedding.
This is her only job and she’s working at home.
When she makes cakes for weddings, etc. she starts on Tuesdays or Wednesdays and finishes on time on Friday or Saturday.
She showed us a cake with marzipan flowers. In fact, she makes marzipan and shapes it into flowers.
A finished cake
She also makes cookies and cakes without orders and advertises them on her facebook page and people are coming to her confectionery to buy them. There is also a small shop with products from small-scale producers in this area and it’s possible to buy her products there.
She has two children, one son in Switzerland and a daughter in high school. She helps her mother in summer holidays.
Her family has a guesthouse in the mountains and they also have some pigs, which they slaughter for meat for themselves and their guests. They also take the fat, which is located near the stomach of the pig, and use it for making Hájas tészta.
The house is located near the main road passing through the village of Ghimes-Fáget near the Antal guesthouse.
Before we left, she generously gave us a lot of the cakes she had been making earlier in the day.
I went back for another stay at Attila’s farm. The children had grown a lot since last time and a small girl had been born since last time I was there.
The kitchen garden near their house had potatoes ready for picking and a man with a horse should plow the potato field, but he didn’t arrive.
In the evening, I followed Attila to a pasture where some cows and calves were grazing. All of them came when he called, the calves jumping and running, being playful and full of energy. He had bought two calves from Tirol and they should be more robust against diseases than the local cattle.
Playful calves
The cows went inside the building where Attila chained their necks, gave them cereals in a bucket, tied the tail to the hind leg, cleaned the udders with water and milked a small amount from each udder into a metal cup. Later, the contents would be given to the pigs.
Milking a cow
Next, he milked the rest into another bucket, pouring the contents through a filter into a stainless steel container each time he had finished milking a cow. Thereafter, he did the same procedure with the other ones.
Milking a cow
The cows were busy eating the cereals while being milked, even licking the bucket when it was empty. When all the cows had been milked, he let them out. In fact, they would stay outside all night inside an enclosure. The next day, they would be allowed to go other pastures.
Next, we went back again to a place where he had a bull to which he gave hay. Then, he entered the pigsty where he fed 4 pigs cereals, potatoes and pumpkins from the kitchen garden. Finally, he let them out such that he could clean it. Like the calves, the pigs also seemed very content when they were let out, running inside the courtyard.
Going for food
There were three types of potatoes, one red and two light brown or beige. They didn’t use any pesticides, but it had rained a lot and there was blight on some of them. Anyway, two of the potato types were good, while the third one was not good. The potatoes with blight would be given to the pigs.
On our way back, a horse was pulling a log being aided by a man who was using a tool to loosen the log, while another one was leading the horse.
A horse pulling a log
After sunset, I followed Attila’s family up on a hill above the village, listening for rutting deer. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear any deer, but Attila did. Obviously, his listening is better than mine.
The next day, his father’s cows were used as beasts of burden. He brought them to the kitchen garden and attached a yoke to their necks such that they had to stay side by side, added a piece of rope to be able to pull them and attached a plow to the yoke. Then, Attila led the cows and his father was plowing, everything at walking pace.
Plowing a field by means of cows
Using a mixture of encouraging commands and light strikes with a stick, Attila made the cows pull the plow, seemingly a very easy task for them, as potatoes were continually being exposed by the plow. When they reached the end of the field, his father detached the plow and Attila made them turn 180 degrees, making them ready for another round. The whole process was repeated until all the fields had been plowed.
Plowing a field
At last, Attila and his father were picking the potatoes by hand, sorting the big ones for eating, the middle ones as seed potatoes and the bad and small ones for the pigs. The amount of potatoes were enough for their families and the guesthouse.
Picking potatoes
Next year, the field with lucerne would be replaced by a potato field and vice versa and maize would be planted along the length of the potato field, like this year.
Various vegetables lying on the sides of the fields seemed to be irresistible to the cows, which ate whatever they could get with relish. Actually, they were always trying to eat whenever it was possible, in particular one of them.
When the plowing had been done, the cows were attached to some farm equipment and they were fed withered maize and turnips growing along the potato field. The hungry cow looked very content as it was eating the maize.
A hungry cow
Inside the courtyard of Attila’s family, a couple of ducks were roaming freely and a rooster was crowing from morning till evening inside the chicken coop.
It has to be mentioned that this village is acoustically interesting. During my short stay, in addition to the happenings described above, I could also hear people mowing hay, grinding their scythes, horses pulling wagons, cows being let out to graze in the morning, ravens, etc. I would like to come back and do field recordings. In the meantime, it’s possible to listen to these ones.
We arrived at about 6 in the morning in pitch darkness at this farm. Somehow we met Jonas, who we followed into the barn where he fed the kids, while a big male was in a separate place. Next, we entered the dairy where a young local man was milking the goats.
The goats moved up a short ramp where they could only turn left to the milking machines. Each goat found its place and started eating fodder. Next, a metal bar was lowered over the necks of all of them. The worker attached pumping devices to the udders and started the milking machine. After some time, the oldest goat at 10 years old, was trampling to show that she didn’t have any more milk.
When the udders of the goats were empty, some transparent plastic containers through which the milk was passing also turned empty. Then, the worker removed the pumping devices and hung them up on a railing. Then, he opened a gate such that the goats could walk down another ramp, next he closed a door such that they couldn’t return. The same procedure was redone until all the goats had been milked.
After he had finished the milking, he emptied the remaining milk in a hose into a container with the rest of the milk. Next, he rinsed all the equipment and carried the container to the dairy. There, Jonas poured the milk into a stainless steel container, turned on heat and waited till it reached about 40°C. Next, he added liquid mould, rennet and a liquid which increased yield. That is, it turned more milk into cheese. Thereafter, we went for breakfast.
The companies, which are producing milking machines, didn’t want to give Jonas a quote. One company had a subsidiary in Bucharest and they sent him a quote, but they didn’t want to come here. In the end, he connected all mains electricity and plumbing himself to the dairy. Finally, the company was willing to send two technicians to his place and assemble the milking machinery.
He brought goats from Belgium, but it was very difficult to get them registered by the local vets, although inspecting goats is easier than cows. In the end, he had to bring the vets to his place and bring them back again when they were finished.
He has 14 milking goats and 8 small ones, which were born this year. In addition, he had slaughtered 2 male goats. He thinks 24 goats would be enough since the milking machine can accommodate 12 goats only.
Jonas told us that the goats stop producing milk in winter and they start producing milk again about 1 March. He’s using this period to work as a freelance engineer on ships, being well paid and saving money for the rest of the year.
He spent the summer haymaking, doing manual mowing only and he took part in all stages of it because buying hay isn’t an option.
The hillsides above the farm have lots of flowers and they smell like an organic, herbal tea shop. This is good for the goats because they are what they eat and, of course, for the cheese. He mowed the grass on the hills above the house, put it on tarpaulins and pulled it down to the house, making haystacks, else he would have to hire a horse, driver and cart and freight it here.
Several farmers are mowing grass to receive subsidies although they have no animals and they throw away the grass.
Before it was easy to mow someone’s land where he left 2/3 to the owner and took 1/3 himself, but not any more.
Some owners come to him and ask him to mow the land and pay him for the work, but he needs workers. It’s simply too much work for one person. Since fewer people work the land, lots of hay is not cut any more.
Many people between 20 and 50 work abroad, doing work, which Western Europeans don’t want. This means that Jonas has problems getting workers to help him.
Some local people earn a lot of money in Western Europe, then come back and spend it, but they don’t want to work here.
When Jonas and his wife Katalin first came to Mircurea Ciuc, he looked for an engineering job, but none was available. Since he had always liked goats, he decided to be a goat farmer instead. First, he had to ask his neighbours within a radius of 100 m if they would accept that he started a goat farm and all of them accepted, but only one could sign his name. Jonas had to sign for the rest.
However, he can’t get a subsidy if the land is not registered. That is, he needs to prove that he’s the owner of the land. The land around Mircurea Ciuc was registered during the communist period, but the Gyimes valley was ignored.
As described here, lots of land was divided among family members into small plots before the communist period.
Jonas told us the following regarding registering of land:
⦁ When a surveyor appears in a village, he is often surrounded by those who are most greedy.
⦁ Some people claim they own land they don’t own when the surveyor appears. Many people are illiterate and are easy to fool.
⦁ A quick survey method had to be abandoned because so many “smart” people were claiming land from their neighbours. In addition, if one sibling stayed at home and the other ones were away, he could claim all the land as his.
⦁ People who work at the land registry in Bucharest work very slowly regarding registering land in the Hungarian-speaking part of the country.
⦁ Lots of land has been registered in the Romanian-speaking part.
⦁ The Romanian government was imposed by the EU to register all land within 2018, but many parts of the Hungarian-speaking land are still not registered. The Romanian government wants to register uninhabited land in order to increase quickly the amount of registered land, but it won’t help people where they live. Unfortunately, registering land where people live is more time-consuming.
⦁ Jonas and 5-6 other farmers have formed an association to speed up registering of their land.
After breakfast, we went back to the dairy where a young local woman was cleaning and working as an assistant for Jonas. He transferred the curds to porous plastic buckets by opening a valve at the base of the stainless steel container and letting the contents flow out. Next, he laid the buckets on a metal table with a hole through which the whey could escape.
He added dried nettle to the curds in the two porous buckets and mixed it thoroughly with his hands. Next, he added peppers to two other porous buckets and mixed it with the curds again.
After he had mixed the curds with dried herbs, he added more curd and mixed everything again. Thereafter, he put on lids on all the buckets and put pressure on them. Later, he would release the pressure and turn the buckets upside down. Next, he would lay the cheeses in salt water. The day after, he would put them in a cool room for maturing.
While Jonas was making cheese, the young woman was making ricotta. When he had removed all the curds from the stainless steel container, he emptied the remaining whey into a kettle. By heating it, white flakes of curd started appearing on the surface of the whey after some time. When there was enough curd on the surface, she used a sieve with a handle to lift it up and put it in a perforated plastic basket, letting the remaining whey flow out and the ricotta remain.
When she wasn’t making cheese or ricotta, she was cleaning and after both making cheese and ricotta was finished, she cleaned everything, which had been used.
As regards making soft cheese, Jonas told us that some whey should stay in the curd, the cheese should be laid on a metal grid, it should be turned upside down twice daily. White mould should start appearing on the surface of the cheese after 2-3 days. If not, it is probably not suitable for human consumption.
One of his cheeses was full of small holes resembling somewhat a Swiss cheese. I asked him why it looked like that and he said that it was something the goats were eating.
Jonas told us that demand is larger than supply. He delivers his cheeses to a vegetarian restaurant in Mircurea Ciuc and to a burger place in the same town.
According to Jonas, city people think cow farmers are better than goat farmers.
He told us that EU funds are much easier to get for big farms, but very difficult for small ones because there is a lot of paperwork, which has to be filled out. Big farms can pay someone to do it, but it’s not possible for small ones.
One day, inspectors, who were extremely meticulous, came to him without warning, but they couldn’t find anything apart from some paperwork, which had to be finished within a certain time.
They asked him the usual question: where does the water come from? From the hills above the farm. He had to provide a water sample, a milk sample, a bottle sample and a cheese sample to them. Everything was analysed and found to be ok. In the end, he asked them why they did it and they gave him a white lie. He said he didn’t believe them and finally they admitted that envious people in the village had sent them. He almost gave up the farm after the inspection. Fortunately, he’s still raising goats and making goat’s cheese.
The local high school wants to send pupils to local companies for practise because they are tired of reading and sitting in a classroom. Only Trifolium Kajo, the ski slope and the dairy can employ young people, though.
Jonas had two adolescents here and he tried to teach them about his farm, asking them questions about the dairy to test if they had learnt their lessons. He also let them drive a small tractor.
There should be a cheese conference in Bucharest the week after our visit. While there, he would present his problems in public.
His cheeses are not bio-certified products, but they are good enough. There is too much paperwork to get them certified as organic products.
Jonas and Katalin accept and accommodate volunteers from WWOOF Romania as described here.
A wwoofer from Belgium was present and a couple from Australia would arrive later. Now, he needs help with building work, before he needed help for mowing.
He also said that he had bought a house not far away from the farm. He wanted to rent it out and he had hired a carpenter to refurbish it. Unfortunately, only one German family had staid there this summer.
The house is on registered land and it has space for 9 people. He had kept an old apple tree near the house although the carpenter wanted to cut it because he said it was in the way when he was working. He showed us the house too and it looked very modern inside.
Surprisingly, he was refurbishing the barn himself as if he hadn’t enough to do before.
For those who want peace and quiet, lovely scenery and good hiking terrain, it should be an excellent choice.
Last but not least, he always wore a hat during our last visit, while this time he showed us what was remaining of his unruly hair!
Driving past the village of Zoltán and passing a muddy road, we arrived at the property of Gergely László and his wife. Inside a fence, they had beehives, an orchard, a pond, a chicken coop and a small house. The property was 3/2 hectares and 5-6 dogs were protecting it against bears.
Upon entering the property, we were met by all the dogs, next we were invited to join Mr Gergely to his 8-sided pavilion, which was located next to a pond being replenished by water falling down from a wooden chute. Herbs were hanging from the ceiling and they would be turned into herbal teas when time was due.
While my guide was speaking with Mr Gergely, I noticed a slingshot lying on the table. It was used for scaring away frogs and toads, which were eating fish in the pond.
The Gergely couple bought the land, which was a vegetable garden in communist times, 4 years ago and they had to pay for a survey of 20 hectares to get the property registered. In fact, they paid more for the survey than for the land. The water flowing into the pond came from two wells located 600 m from the pond. Both of them contain large pieces of concrete and they are camouflaged in order to avoid sabotage.
Many years ago, a friend tried to convince him to be a beekeeper, but he resisted for several years. Next, he got one beehive as a gift and found that he liked beekeeping. Then, his friend made him receive 27 more beehives. He collaborated with him and learnt from him and other beekeepers, but now his friend is ill.
The first 3 years were very difficult and he had to ask for help often, but he gradually learnt how to do it. After many years of beekeeping, 6 of them as a professional, he can easily survive 30-50 bee stings, but he has to protect his face.
The beekeeping is family-driven: husband, wife, and 2 daughters. He does most of the work, but everyone extracts honey.
Originally both husband and wife were forest engineers with their own timber business, but it didn’t pay off, being heavily influenced by the price of timber. Moreover, an Austrian timber company built a big sawmill nearby and out-competed small producers.
This is the first year they only sell honey, while before they were selling timber and honey.
After a while, Mr Gergely let us see him inspect his beehives. He only used a hood with netting to protect his face, while we had protection for our upper bodies. While he was showing his beehives, opening some of them, he went on talking about beekeeping.
Mr Gergely has 100 beehives here and 130 close to forests, 30-50 km from here and they would be brought home soon. The mobile bees are released near or on meadows from July to autumn and they can pollinate any type of flower. He needs one person to help him load and unload the beehives and he has to go twice to fetch the beehives because there is too little space in his car.
There were a lot of empty racks, but they would be filled with the mobile beehives.
The season starts in Feb-March, April when the bees start collecting pollen, mainly from flowers, depending on the vegetation in the area. This year, they had been collecting a lot of pollen from linden, but not so much from acacia and rapeseed.
2019 was a bad year for beekeepers in this area because of a cold, rainy spring, but the rest of the year had been good so far.
He sells minimum 2000 kg and maximum 7000 kg of honey a year. He always wants to ensure quality. His golden rule is to apply no additives and no sugar.
He says that beekeeping is not an exact science, you need experience and attention to detail and you have to accommodate all situations.
He has mounted a scale below some random beehives in order to measure how much honey the bees are producing, while all other weights are estimates. There may be more, the same or less than the ones which are weighed.
Experienced beekeepers have 200 beehives, 100 stationary and 100 mobile. After some time, they have to make the mobile bees stronger by means of the stationary ones.
Pesticides are a problem and the beekeepers want the government to enforce a ban on pesticides for rapeseed when the flowers are blooming, but they aren’t listened to.
He has a dilemma regarding the consistency of the honey: in about 1 of 40 jars, the honey crystallises , while the others stay liquid and he doesn’t know why. Those who want to know more about honey crystallisation can watch this video.
He feeds sugar and water to the bees in winter, but they are also eating honey in order to survive.
Varroa causes problems for the bees and he treats them with medicine. If it doesn’t work, they make herbal teas for the bees.
The bees are stealing from each other, strong bees from weak ones. He’s trying to minimise the problem by using a small opening in the weak beehives.
Honeydew is a valuable type of honey, but he hasn’t been able to make it.
1 kg jars of honey are very popular and they are selling all of them.
In case of a cold February and a mild March, the bees stay with their young rather than going to the outer frames with honey, keeping the young warm. That is, the grown-up bees prefer to starve to death in order to protect their young.
We also walked around the orchard and the kitchen garden. They were growing fruit trees like apple, plum, pear and quince together with raspberry, mulberry, tomatoes and others. Besides, they are growing rapeseed, acacia, lime and sunflower.
Mr Gergely’s wife fed the poultry and the rabbits during our visit.
He’s fed up with city life, he wants to be self-sufficient and live here and get water from a well. However, he has no mains electricity. The area, being surrounded by fields, is quiet and peaceful and there are no neighbours nearby.
They have a house in the village and they want to sell it. Regarding electricity, they can get get mains or use solar power with batteries, which must be changed every 6-7 years. Mains electricity is more convenient, but it has a high initial investment.
Their eldest daughter studies to be a vet. She gets offers to work abroad, but she wants to come home and help her father. The other daughter goes to high school.
Mr Dániel Tibor is apparently being a well-known man in Romania, having been on national TV and having visits from Prince Charles yearly!
In the past, they ran a guesthouse, but it was too much work. They bought their first cow 25 years ago, then they had 6-7 and now they have 18, 14 of which are giving milk, producing 100- 150 litres of milk a day. 8-10 years ago, the local county council arranged a cheese-making course and they both attended it. In fact, they had been experimenting with cheese-making before the course. Mr Dániel said that they learnt little at the course, but some theory was useful. Moreover, it was necessary to practise cheese-making outside the course. Now, they rise at 4 in the morning, milking the cows morning and evening and they are doing everything themselves. They make 22 types of milk products, some of which include:
⦁ cheese with pumpkin seeds
⦁ cheese with cumin
⦁ smoked cheese
⦁ cheese with mould
⦁ cheese with charcoal
⦁ fresh white cheese
⦁ cottage cheese
⦁ yogurt
In fact, Mr Dániel and his wife have developed their own palette and they are very proud that they can sell most of their cheese.
In addition to selling cheese to customers in Romania, they also export cheese to Israel and a contact person organises the export.
The Dániel couple has one son, who is 25 years old and he’s working in an agricultural council, helping farmers. He hasn’t decided if he wants to continue their work because he’s busy with his own work.
They are in touch with Mr Fülöp and they think he has too much to do like doubling the number of cattle in just 2 years.
Visiting the Dániel couple early in the morning, we were invited into their kitchen where they had prepared a wide variety of cheese. While we were tasting the cheeses, Mr Dániel talked about their farm. Having tasted a wide selection of cheeses, all I can say is that it’s a pity the Dániel couple live so far away from me, meaning that I won’t taste their cheeses for some time. Anyway, it’s perfectly understandable that their cheeses are so popular because they were just delicious.
The dairy was located in the kitchen in the basement and the storeroom for cheese was located nearby.
After the cheese-tasting, we went outside to have a look at the cows, but to my surprise they were all inside a barn. On my question of why, I was told that it was because of bears, the nearest good pasture was 12km away and the cows could get hurt walking there. There was another pasture nearby, but the quality was low.
I’ve been to farms like Eiker farmhouse dairy where the cows were free to go outside or stay inside, but most of them stayed inside. Maybe farmers have been breeding animals, which require little exercise? Maybe the cattle which was too energetic wasn’t allowed to breed? However, transhumance, meaning man bringing animals to the mountains in summer and to the valleys in winter, has been practised for millennia worldwide and there are certainly both hills and valleys in this area. Anyway, even cows which are outside, like at the Milk mine, hardly get any exercise. They just walk from the barn to the pasture and back again, a walk which requires a couple of minutes. Else, they go grazing or lie down, ruminating.
The likely explanation for the delicious cheeses are what the cows are eating. For instance, Mr Fülöp said that the buffaloes needed to eat hay in winter in order to produce good milk.
During our visit, we could see that Mr Dániel’s wife was heating aubergines in a wood-fired oven and she had picked a lot of rose hip. Her husband accompanies her when she’s picking herbs because of bears. In addition to selling cheese, they also make jams and herbal teas for sale.
In general, the biggest problem is to get workers because so many have emigrated. Unfortunately, this is a problem for many of the producers we have visited.
We followed Mr Dániel a short distance from where we could see a big pile of hay required for one year’s consumption. While outside, we could see that the farm was surrounded by steep hillsides and deciduous forests and we could see rolling hills on the other side of the village.
Mr Dániel plans to apply for a grant to make work on the fields more easy, but more mechanisation can only contribute a little to work on the farm.
My guide and I went back to the sheepfold in the Tarcău mountains, doing our last trip in reverse. Passing the Gyimes valley, turning left a a crossroads, we passed lots of houses whose properties extended up to a deep river valley. Turning left again, we drove along a creek and we passed several bodies of water together with more creeks. Arriving at the place we were last time, which my guide knew we had to pass, we could see one shepherd guarding a flock of sheep. Going further, we passed more creeks and former river beds, which showed that lots of water had been flowing there. At least, there should be enough water in this place.
Since there was no mobile phone coverage, my guide stopped the car after some time, then we started walking towards a hut with a big flock of sheep nearby.
Approaching the flock of sheep, we were met by several guarding dogs, which obviously didn’t like our presence. Anyway, their job is to protect the sheep against anyone who wants to hurt them, meaning that they were just doing what they were supposed to. All of the shepherds we met last time seemed to have been replaced by new ones.
Fortunately, my guide spoke with the shepherds and told them about why we were there, that is revisiting the sheepfold and talk to the couple who were managing it, the shepherds quietened down the guarding dogs.
The shepherds told my guide that the Borosan couple, who were managing the sheepfold, would be returning in about an hour. After about 4 hours, a horse and cart with a driver and one man walking were approaching the sheepfold. It was Gabor Borosan and his son, both of whom would help with bringing the animals to the lowlands the next day. They would start in the morning and arrive in the evening. The son of Mr Borosan told my guide that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to run the sheepfold and his father said that he had two more years before he could be a pensioner. In the meantime, he had to have something to do, but he was unsure if he would want to return to the sheepfold. Earlier, he had been enthusiastic about going to the sheepfold in spring, but tired in autumn. It seemed like he had to wait till next year before he would decide what to do.
The shepherds had moved house some hundred metres and they had even set up a new one. The old house was inhabited by some other shepherds, who would also bring back their animals the day after. Another reason for bringing back the sheep, in particular, was that they were fond of mushrooms and they could strike out on their own into the forest, searching for mushrooms.
Next, sitting on a hill above the sheep, the dogs let us in peace. Actually, this area consists of wide and rolling hills, which are covered by grass where ruminants like cows, sheep and goats keep them open, while spruce trees are growing more or less everywhere else. Being next to the sheep, it was possible to hear them cutting the grass with their teeth, moving continuously because the remaining green grass was very short. In addition, the bells of the sheep made a soothing sound, which made it a very peaceful, pleasant and harmonic experience. Some ravens were flying over us, making their characteristic sounds. In such pretty and quiet surroundings, it was easy to forget about the rest of the world.
When the sheep were grazing down in the valley, some of them were moving at walking pace, while others hardly moved or were lying on the ground, supposedly ruminating. This led to that the sheep and a few goats spread out over a large area, say 300 m times 100 m. The shepherds had to ensure that the sheep kept together, which mostly seemed to go smoothly, but sometimes they whistled and even shouted to make all sheep stay with the fold.
At around 1 p.m. all of us went for lunch, presumably not necessary to guard the sheep all of the time. We were given delicious home-made ricotta by the shepherds and we had enough to to eat. Actually, it was too much and I gave some of it to one of the guarding dogs, which ate it in one go. Thereafter, it seemed like both the shepherds and the dogs were resting, the shepherds inside their hut and the dogs spread like white dots on the meadows. Finally, one of the shepherds, maybe the second-in-command, ordered a shepherd to tend to the flock.
A dog lay down on the ground and a shepherd stroked its chest with his foot and I suppose this is the most caress the dogs can get. They are guarding dogs and live a very hard life.
The shepherds hadn’t noticed any bears, but wolves had been close and one sheep had been taken by them. In addition, two of the shepherds had been attacked by bears and one of them had survived because he had 10 guarding dogs and his brother to chase away the bear.
We didn’t see any cows this time, but last time they were roaming freely, only coming home to be milked in the evening.
Just before we should go, Mr Borosan offered me to stay another night at the sheepfold. Not having brought warm clothes nor a torch or a sleeping bag, being surrounded by hostile dogs and being the only person who couldn’t speak neither Romanian nor Hungarian, made it an unpalatable choice.
Besides, milking of the animals had already stopped, making it less desirable to stay another night. Next day, the shepherds would bring back all their animals, about 500 sheep and 70 cows. Apart from any animal which was limping, all the other ones would be walking for about 10 hours to get home. After having come down to the lowlands, they would walk along country roads back home. Next, the day after, the owners of the animals would reclaim them as we saw on our way back from the sheepfold when we passed two groups, each with two sheep, which they were bringing home. The shepherds told my guide that it was common to let the animals stay outside on fields in the lowlands for about a month, next they would be brought inside barns.
On the way back, the flock of sheep we passed in the morning and the shepherd were still where the Borosan sheepfold was located two years ago, else there were several meadows, but no grazing animals apart from a horse. Several wooden buildings were in various states of decay.
Just like last time, young people don’t want to be shepherds and it’s easy to imagine that all the meadows will turn into forests in the foreseeable future.
Mr Jánó had back problems due to office work and he needed a change. 4 years ago, he decided to do something practical, setting up an apple press and growing blackberries and raspberries. His company is legal, taking no shortcuts and he’s expanding his business gradually. Last year there was a record apple harvest, but not so good this year. In fact, when we arrived on a Saturday, there were only two sacks of apples, which were waiting to be turned into apple juice.
Upon arrival, two young men or boys from a local school were also present. They were doing practise at the apple press, getting away from the classroom.
5 different types of juice without any preservatives or additives are produced at this combined fruit and vegetable press:
70% apple, 19,5% parsley, 10% celery, 0.5% lemongrass
90% apple, 10% ginger
90% apple, 10% sea buckthorn
85% apple, 15% pears
55% apple 35% beetroot carrot
All of them are, in general stored, in a 3 litres bag-in-box, but they also sell bottled juice. There’s a storeroom in the cellar where Mr Jánó stores blackberry wine made from his own blackberries.
The boys opened the sacks with apples and emptied them into a bathtub with water. Next, they stirred the apples to get rid of dust, then scooped them up by means of a perforated tool and laid them in a container with a hole at its base. Next, they pushed the apples into a funnel, which led to a machine that crushed the apples, letting the pulp end up in a big box below the fruit crusher.
There were two apple presses driven by water pressure. A big tank with hoses, one to each press, provided water to the the presses and served as a reservoir when compression of the apples were finished. When fruits should be compressed, water was pumped into two rubber balloons, expanding their volume. When compression was finished, water was pumped out again.
Before compression could begin, perforated metal cylinders were laid around each rubber balloon. A cloth was laid inside the cylinder and the pulp was laid inside the cloth.
One boy put the cloth around the pulp and packed it tightly on the top, then he put on a lid and attached it tightly. Next, he applied water pressure and apple juice started flowing out of the press, being collected in a gutter at the base of the metal cylinder and passing through a filter into a container from which it was pumped into another container. From there, it was pumped into a pasteuriser where the juice was heated to 82.5C. After having been cooled i a heat exchanger, it was pumped through a flowmeter where the owner filled up bag-in-boxes, 3 litres in each.
When the pressing of the pulp was finished, either of the boys disassembled the press. Next, both of them lifted the pulp inside the cloth and put in a wheelbarrow. Thereafter, they removed the cloth and rinsed all the parts of the press.
A lot of pulp and liquid was falling on the floor and either of the boys was scraping the floors often, pushing it into drains in the floors. They also sprinkled the floor quite often.
The work was repeated until l the almost all of the apples had been compressed. When the wheelbarrow was full, one of the workers brought the wheelbarrow to the combined blackberry and raspberry orchard and emptied the contents on the ground. Before, Mr Jánó gave the pulp to farmers, but now he uses it as compost in his orchard. After about 2 years, it is turned into soil.
After some time, a family arrived with about 100kg of grapes. Then, the boys put a grape machine on top of a huge bucket. Next, they poured the grapes into the machine which crushed the grapes. When it was finished, they carried the the pulp inside and poured it into the apple press. Mixing it with the remaining apple pulp, they made a combined apple and grape juice, which the family could bring back soon afterwards.
Sandor Szilveszter is a young chocolate maker. He likes chocolate and his parents gave him chocolate. He worked in a multicultural chocolate factory in the UK and he saved money in order to go to a workshop for chocolate-making. While being there, he got a passion for it from the instructor. He can call the chocolate factory in the UK for advice.
He was in Hungary and France, visiting chocolate factories and some of the people working there gave him advice on how to make chocolate. He lives at home, having the first floor for himself and he makes a living from making and selling chocolate. He said that it provided a good opportunity for his creativity, making chocolates and packages.
Like Galffis, he makes personalised chocolates for companies, weddings, anniversaries, etc.
During our visit, a machine was mixing liquid chocolate by letting a wheel somehow lift it upward from a vessel (maybe because of adhesion), then letting it fall down through a chute back to the same vessel, forming an infinite loop. This machine is called a chocolate tempering machine and it is used for making the chocolate crisp and smooth.
He put a small plastic bowl below where the liquid chocolate was falling down and filled it partly up. Next, he poured its contents onto his marble workbench where he used two spatulas to pick it up and put it back in order to avoid crystallisation.
When the still liquid chocolate had got the consistency he wanted, he poured it into two adjacent moulds, then he hit it against the workbench in order to get rid of bubbles and make it fill all voids. Finally, he put dried fruits on the surface of the chocolate and put the chocolate in a freezer.
For those who want to know more about crystallisation in chocolate and even more, can watch this video.
He has a lot of chocolate types, like a lactose free chocolate, red chocolate with strawberries, chocolate with mint and lemon and chocolate with garlic and onion, Christmas chocolates with oranges and nuts, etc. Naturally, he has white, milk and dark chocolate.
He has many wishes like going to markets with his chocolates, making chocolate with brandy, focusing on development, expanding his business and preparing a big inventory for Christmas.
From Easter to summer is a quiet period, meaning he can do experiments. Instead, from September to Christmas he’s selling much. His products are mostly used as gifts.
In the village of Ciumani, we visited the local tourist office where a young woman was working. She obligingly showed us the way to the Jánosi bakery, which was run by a woman called Jánosi Veronika.
15 years ago, her husband died when he was 50, she was alone with two children, girl and boy, and she needed to survive and provide for the children. She was a housewife and she knew how to make bread. Luckily, she owned some potato fields, but she needed help with picking the potatoes. In return, she gave the workers homemade bread with potatoes and they liked it.
Her mother and grandmother gave her recipes and she started a bakery in the middle of the village. She had a small oven and she made bread twice a week. Now, they are making bread every day except Sundays.
During our visit, she used a pizza paddle to take out breads from the wood-fired oven, next she laid them on a bench where 2 women were knocking and scraping the crust of the freshly made breads in order to get rid of the burnt parts.
The guide from the tourist office told us that customers arrive when the bread is just made and several arrived during our short visit. Besides Mrs Jánosi has customers from the village and even customers from nearby villages.
The ingredients of the bread are wheat flour, water, yeast, salt and potatoes and the bread remains fresh because of the potatoes. We were given fresh bread with homemade jam and it was delicious!
When we were enjoying the fresh bread, the workers started making a cake called Hájas tészta, which is made by flattening the dough, apply pig’s fat evenly on the surface, fold the dough, apply another even layer of fat and fold the dough again. Bake it in an oven and add plum jam after it has finished. By doing the folding together with compressing several times, the finished result resembles the consistency of a Danish pastry.
Afterwards, they made gombóc, which is a Hungarian plum dumpling. My local guide gave me the following spoken recipe: make a cut in a plum and remove the seed, fill it with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar, put it on a small piece of flat dough, fold the dough around the plum, put it in boiling water and take it out again.
The workers start making dough at 3 in the morning and they can go home at 10 in the morning, but this day, they were working longer. All the workers are in family and Mrs Jánosi’s son and daughter-in-law will take over the bakery in some time.
Mrs Jánosi prefers quality and not quantity and I suppose that philosophy will govern the bakery with the new owners too.
We were passing through the village of Suseni, looking for a specific house number when we found it. It looked like an ordinary brick house with a fence along the road. It certainly didn’t look like a farm at all from the road. We entered the property and an elderly man showed us where we could find the owner of the farm, Mr Bányász József.
He invited us inside the kitchen where he served us cheese and coffee. Before, he called himself an artificial farmer because he was only talking about agriculture, trying to convince everyone to be a farmer. He was told to stop talking and start working himself as one. He spent 5 years convincing himself that he could be a farmer and now he’s a full-time farmer. 5 years ago, he was a director of an association, he quit, people told him he was stupid and he lost prestige because people prefer money to a lowly life as a farmer. Anyway, after 5 years as a farmer, he thinks it’s a good life.
He calls the farm The milk mine because he’s mining the farmer’s life, trying to show others how farmers who treat their animals and their land well are working.
Mr Bányász is a thinking farmer and here are his statements:
His main objective is to live as his great-grandparents would have lived if they were living now.
He’s trying to live as closely as possible to nature.
He and his family are not reinventing things, and they try to conserve as much as they can.
He considers the domestic animals as partners, not just subjects. If they are ill, he feels ill too. He tries to understand them, how they are thinking, always trying to help them. He wants others to think of animals like he does. He emphasizes that the domestic animals ARE his partners.
Unfortunately, most farmers look at domestic animals as a way to make money and not as partners. You don’t just keep animals, you also need to know all aspects of animal husbandry.
He says you can’t buy life quality.
He’s not looking for profit, just to have enough to survive.
He’s getting inspiration from traditions.
His way of thinking is different from the other family members.
He says art is pain and a farmer’s life is hard.
He considers art, dance, folklore as a higher form of hardship. For outsiders, folk dance is just dance, but the performers give out pain through dance.
He’s making “simple” cheese, and he would like to know more about milk chemistry, bacteria etc. He would study more if he were young.
He doesn’t go to markets, you must come to him and talk to him, if he likes you, he will sell you cheese, if not, he won’t. He has a stable customer base. He gets emails from Bucharest from people who want to buy his cheese. He replies that they have to come here and talk to him first.
His mission is to tell everybody what needs to be done.
He’s talking sincerely about living in harmony with nature.
He thinks nature doesn’t have enough resources and we need to consume less.
The whole family is trying to be independent, producing as much as possible for themselves like vegetables, fruits, bread, milk and cheese.
He’s bartering cheese for vegetable oil, sugar, salt, etc.
He’s eating meat from animals, he hasn’t resolved yet how to treat them as partners and eating them, it’s a compromise.
He doesn’t want to be a vegetarian, but he’s reflecting on it. Pigs, chickens, hens and turkeys have been slaughtered here. Male cattle have been sent to the slaughterhouse, but never dairy cows. He sells male calves to others, which is not a solution. Instead, he leaves the problem to others.
Dairy cows live their natural life and are buried here.
He doesn’t like the agricultural system in Romania, but he doesn’t work against it.
After having presented his thoughts and opinions, he invited us to have a look at the farm.
This farm has an extension of 15 hectares.
There are 3 generations living in the same house and all the family members are working on the farm except his son. He will graduate as an agricultural engineer soon, but he doesn’t want to run the farm as his father. He needs more money, but maybe he will change his mind with time.
They have good quality livestock and they have 9 cows of which 5 are milked. The cows produce 180-200 litres of milk per day, giving about 10 kg of cheese.
We went inside a barn where there was the milking place for the cows. While the cows are eating from a trough, a chain is placed above their necks. Next, they are milked by a machine and the milk is pumped to the dairy adjacent to the milking place.
During our visit, calves were eating freely from the trough, while a one week old calf was living in a separate place.
The cows are inside at night, lying on hay next to the milking place.
Next, we went to the dairy where a worker called Tamás was making cheese. In fact, he was pulling a mass of curds out of a copper tank by means of a porous cloth, then he put it in a wooden mould.
We were also shown the cool storeroom where the cheeses marked with the date of production were maturing on wooden shelves. In addition, there was a saltwater bath for the small cheeses. By letting them stay in brine, the salt kills bacteria, adds taste to the cheese and aids in expelling whey.
Next, we went down towards the meadow below the houses. We passed a big wooden structure, which had been designed by students at a local university and built by local people, but it was still missing roof and walls. It would be turned into a community hall next year.
There were some hay cylinders inside the wooden structure, but Mr Bányász said they are expensive. His father-in-law prefers haystacks, which they can make themselves. Actually, we passed two big haystacks on our way to the meadow.
The meadow which belonged to this farm were surrounded by other meadows, while we could see the village in the distance. Scattered trees were growing and the daughter of Mr Bányász followed us, telling my guide that there was ground water below the meadow for both the trees and the cows.
She works very hard, she has studied photography and likes applied arts, she wants to go abroad and have time for herself and she wants to study more. Her brother wants to work here with workers and modern machines.
When we went out on the meadow, we passed one cow which was alone. Going further, we met the rest of the cows, which apparently liked to stay together.
There is a hierarchy among the cows, they are pushing each other, even using their horns. One cow was dehorned because she was hurting the other ones. One cow had scars because she wanted to advance in the hierarchy, but didn’t succeed.
The cows had been born on this meadow, they could be outside all year if they wanted to, but they could also go inside if they preferred and they were milked in the morning and the evening.
The cows are made pregnant with artificial insemination. There is a catalogue with bulls and Mr Bányász selects the bull which is most suited to each cow.
On our way back to the house, we passed a yard with poultry and a turkey, a very common sight in Transilvania.
We entered the café of Galffis chocolate and asked the salesclerk to tell Mr Galffi that we had arrived for our appointment. While waiting, we could have a look at his café, where customers could have any coffee or tea they wanted together with all the standard chocolates made by Galffis. We could also watch videos from various exclusive resorts together with relaxing music.
Anyway, when Mr Galffi arrived, he was immediately available for an interview. Starting with the videos, they were generic for making people relax and groups of customers or companies can have workshops in the café. He uses his last name together with an s at the end, which interestingly signifies genitive in both Norwegian and Hungarian.
10 years ago, he worked for his father’s company, but he didn’t like it and he wanted to make a living from chocolate. He did this by buying cocoa by means of his salary and making chocolate at night. Next, he started selling chocolate on a Friday and on Sunday he had five times as much money as much as when he started on Friday. He reinvested the money in chocolate-making, quit his job and started making chocolate full time.
He’s a self-made man, he did all by himself in the beginning and he started from nothing. His motto is that if you have something good, someone will want to buy it.
Although he had hardly any money when he started, his attitude was that all problems are solvable, he needed to find the persons who wanted to buy his product and he needed to know how to make it. In order to learn how to make, sell and serve chocolate, he visited chocolate manufacturers.
Actually, he set himself three targets before founding a chocolate company:
1. Know the history of chocolate, where does it come from and where is it going?
2. How to make it.
3. How to sell it.
When he started selling his chocolate, his customers liked it, but they thought it was too expensive. In order to counteract their opinion, he has kept the same price for 10 years, selling more chocolate with time because he’s able to produce more.
Mr Galffi is both an artist and a director and he designs chocolates with labels for anyone as long as they are willing to buy a minimum amount of 50 kg of the special chocolate. He thinks chocolate is more than food and he wants to create feelings like: the taste of cold, sunshine, forests, Hargitha county, tourism, Romania, clean air in Transilvania or whatever his customers might prefer. In addition to designing chocolates, he’s designing labels and packages on his computer in his office about 5 minutes walk from the café.
He’s got an order from the Romanian government for which he’s making a special design. During our visit in his factory, we could see special designs for a telecom conference in Budapest, Bosch Engineering Center, Danubius Health Spa Resort and World Championships in Budapest. I must admit that I think this is pretty impressive for a young man of about 30 years of age!
Now he has 7 employees, he opened this café in 2019 and it was designed by himself and a colleague. The company has a flat organisation where everyone can do everything and the director can replace everyone (one at a time) in time of need.
All the chocolate made by this company is natural and no additives are used. He buys dried berries from producers and he uses a lot of them on his chocolates. He buys cocoa from importing companies because his company is too small to buy direct.
His company produces white, milk and dark chocolate with a cocoa content from 35% to nearly 100%.
In addition to designing chocolate, labels and packages, a lot of time is spent talking to his customers. He didn’t say anything about directing the company, though and I forgot to ask about it.
We also visited his factory, but since we arrived in the afternoon, there was no chocolate production, only a female employee who was packing chocolate.
The café is located next to a rather busy road and there is space for customers both inside and outside. Moreover, there is parking space for some cars.
I really hope he will succeed in going on designing chocolates, labels and packages, enriching the world at the same time.
We had to go early in the morning to be able to meet Mr Fülöp in the village of Székelydálya (H)/Daia (RO) at 7 in the morning. We were waiting for him when he arrived in his car, blinked the headlights and turned back to where he came from. Driving more or less offroad, we arrived at a shed where some buffaloes were waiting patiently outside a wooden shed, while others were being milked.
He was given some buffaloes by people who gave up raising them. Some of them had been roaming freely and never been milked. Before milking them, they tied the hind leg to a pole and the tail to the hind leg and let their calves stay with them to calm them down. Moreover, they were given an injection of a muscle relaxant to loosen their muscles.
Before milking, they were rinsing the udders with water, next the buffaloes were milked by hand. When they had finished milking, they carried the bucket to a container with a filter and poured the milk through the filter.
Each buffalo had to be followed to the milking space, even those that had been milked before.
The calves resided in a separate pen and they were led one by one to their mothers when being milked. Since each buffalo looked quite different from everyone else, Mr Fülöp and a worker knew which calf belonged to which buffalo.
The milking place consisted of a shed, it was located above the village and it was surrounded by rolling meadows and a few trees.
In addition to Mr Fülöp, the worker and two adolescents were milking the buffaloes, each of them sitting on wooden chairs. An audio recording of the milking and a dissatisfied buffalo can be heard here.
It seemed like the men always used force to get the buffaloes to stand where they needed in order to be milked, while the youths obtained the same without. It may have been because the young ones got the buffaloes, which had been milked before and were used to being milked, while the men were milking the buffaloes which hadn’t been milked before and were semi-wild.
There was an electrical fence surrounding the buffaloes and small groups of horses and some buffaloes, which may have been too young to produce milk, were grazing outside the fence.
A suckling calf kept suckling even when its mother lay down on the ground.
Some of the buffaloes were ruminating, moving their lower jaw sideways continuously.
When all the buffaloes had been milked, they were let out with their calves and they could go wherever they wanted, but they seemed to prefer to stay in the area.
Next, we followed Mr Fülöp back to the village where the worker got off at his place and the youths, actually his eldest children, presumably went home for breakfast. Next, he went to an abandoned building where his family had a small dairy. There, he emptied the fresh milk in a copper container and turned on a natural gas heater in order to heat the milk to about 40°C.
Having made the necessary preparations, he could present himself. He started studying theology in 1997 and he did youth work for the bishop. He had been a Presbyterian priest for 13 years. His wife is Hungarian and they have 5 kids, two of whom were milking the buffaloes. The three eldest were home-schooled, while the fourth child went to school and the fifth one was a baby. It’s a small community, but it can’t support a priest and his family. Anyway, it’s a good place for their children to grow up. 80-90% are Hungarian-speaking and there is an 800 year old church in the village. He has chosen this lifestyle because he likes it.
It was love at first sight, not necessarily requited, when he saw buffaloes for the first time and he started raising them 12 years ago. A friend from Hungary wanted to milk them and a local man had 50 buffaloes for sale. He worked as an interpreter for his friend and he was given some buffaloes at the sale. Later, he bought 10 buffaloes, which had been milked and he was given some buffaloes by people, who didn’t want them any more. They hadn’t been milked before, they had calves and he was paying the former owner 1kg of cheese per day.
Hay is best for the buffaloes to make good milk and 500 cylinders of hay are ready for the winter. The buffaloes are hardy animals and they can stay outside all year, but he will let them stay in a former communist building this winter.
Regarding cheese-making, he first took out some litres of milk and put it in a container above a separator and separated the milk into sour cream and skimmed milk. Finally, he poured the skimmed milk back into the copper container.
He told my guide that it was a cheese-making course in 2007 nearby and his wife attended the course and he learnt cheese-making from her. He also said that his wife was better at cheese-making than him, but she was attending to their baby.
There is a Hungarian association for cheese-making and its members are making trips abroad to cheese producers. Once they went to Italy in order to learn how to make their own bacteria culture. In addition, a Hungarian cheese-maker lives near his wife’s birthplace and they can ask him for advice, likewise a Swiss cheese-maker.
When the milk was heating up, he went out and brought back buffalo yogurt for use as a bacteria culture, mixed it with soured milk in a tub, stirred it and poured it back in the copper container. As described here, adding soured milk to the fresh milk leads to two beneficial characteristics:
· preventing growth of unwanted bacteria.
· contribute to maturing the cheese and developing taste.
Adding yogurt obtained from the same buffaloes as the fresh milk was necessary in order to make the milk start curdling.
After some time, when the temperature of the milk was as wanted, he added rennet to the warm milk in order for it to curdle or coagulate such that it would form a gel after about 45 minutes. Next he was heating the milk, stirring it by hand, turning off the heat, stirring, reheating, stirring, turning off heat, manually controlling the temperature until he was satisfied.
Then, he applied a metal tool, which is called a harp, to divide the gel into curds and whey. Next, he put his arms in the cheese vat and started collecting the curds in one big mass.
He collected it, put a cloth around it and lifted it up and put it in a perforated plastic container, compressed it manually and put a weight on it, making the whey flowing out of a hole into a plastic container.
During the cheese-making, he told my guide that he wanted to replace the shed with a barn next year, the land has water sources for the animals, even in dry times, he wanted to buy milking machines next year and expand the dairy, no pasteurisation was necessary because the milk was turned into cheese within 2 hours, he felt at home in this village, there were always lots of work to do, he could sell more than 40 kg of cheese at a local market and some of the calves would be sold later.
When we arrived at the dairy, there was one kettle full of soured milk and another one with sour cream. Now, he brought the last one to his workbench and used a sieve to scoop up pieces of sour cream.
Having already covered a plastic crate with a porous cloth, he left the pieces of sour cream in the crate. He repeated this procedure until the kettle was empty. In this way, he made cream cheese.
Finally, he let us taste various cheeses with or without herbs and various stages of maturity. It was a delicious way of ending a pleasant and interesting visit.
For reference, I have been to farms with buffaloes and they have been described here and here. The Romanian buffalo is described here and here.
On the way to Mr Bálint’s house, a black bear was crossing the road slowly in front of us. However, when we passed the place where it had crossed the road, we couldn’t see it. Anyway, both my guides told me that bears have caused lots of problems for people in the countryside, killing domestic animals. Unfortunately, there is no compensation for the loss of one and bears are protected against hunting.
Having arrived, my guide told Mr Bálint about the bear and he told him that it was a bear which was well-known to the villagers.
Although we arrived in the evening, both mother in her seventies and son in his fifties were busy working, preparing products for going to a market in Budapest. Actually, there would be 2 events the coming weekend, one with a honey producer/beekeeper and another one with his mother.
They produce 34 types of jams and 18 types of syrups and the son was putting a large selection of jams on top of a freezer.
She started making products and going to markets in 2009 and he joined her in 2010.
While the son was preparing jams, his mother was preparing zacuscă (RO)/zakuszka (H), a vegetable spread, stirring a red liquid in a kettle on a wood-fired oven with a wooden spoon. The red liquid consisted of smashed beans, aubergine, paprika, onion, salt, pepper, sugar and honey. In fact, there were tubs with mashed beans and eggplant/aubergine, a basket with peppers and a cardboard box with paprika nearby.
They were both working from morning till night in order to get everything ready. However, all their neighbours were also preparing for winter, making jams, syrups, spreads and so on.
In addition to selling farm produce at markets, Mr Bálint has all the required documentation for selling their products in shops.
They have 7000 raspberry bushes inside the village and they have walnut trees inside a 2 hectares plantation. Outside the village, they have an orchard surrounded by a 2.5m fence. Fortunately, they didn’t have any problems with bears.
Like most people in countryside in Transylvania, they also had a chicken coop with various hen races. Surprisingly, a dog was staying with the poultry. Two chickens, one small and one big were living on the lawn under an upside-down basket.
The property was adjacent to the village church and one of the walls of the church formed a wall for the property of this family as well.
Last, but not least, they were collecting herbs, which they would dry and sell at markets.
When we entered the courtyard of Mrs Vass’ property, we were almost immediately invited into her kitchen where she served us home-made apple cake, but which she called apples with cake. The unavoidable pálinka and coffee were of course also served.
While we were able to eat so much apple cake as we wanted, Mrs Vass told my guide about how she ended up being a farmer. Initially, both she and her husband had full-time jobs, but they were also part-time farmers producing for themselves and their animals and they brought their children to the fields. They gradually expanded and both they and her mother sold farm produce on Saturdays. She worked in a bank and quit 2 years ago becoming a full-time farmer,while her husband worked in a factory. The breakout occurred because of the local council, which organised monthly events where they got lots of help. Before they quit their jobs, they went there 2 times a year, but now they are going there monthly.
There is a lot of hard and wonderful work and it’s become a lifestyle. Their sons are now 25 years old and they will soon graduate as agricultural engineers.
There was a plum festival in the village 3 weeks ago and a 85 year old woman who was always working was stirring the plum must, a job which takes 14 hours to make good jam. Now, she’s dead.
They have 4 cows, 2 stay in the village and 2 are in the mountains. They will come back in October. I suppose they pay a fee to some shepherds to bring their animals with them like we experienced at a sheepfold in the Tarcău mountains.
Having introduced themselves, we were invited outside to to see their products. Although exaggerating, it seemed there were berries, fruits and vegetables in all sorts of places, together with glasses of jam and bottles of syrup.
Big plastic milk churns, having a volume of about 50 litres, were almost filled to the brim with vegetables, various plastic containers were full of blueberries, apples and so on. In the middle of the courtyard, there was a big metal tank with an apparently homemade machine, which was stirring a boiling mixture of fruits. Next, Mrs Vass emptied a tub with de-seeded plums into the mixture. My guide told me that she was making plum jam. One tub was full of tomatoes and another was almost full of red peppers, while two aubergines were being heated on an open gas flame. In fact, they are growing more than 20 types of fruits and vegetables, selling a little of everything.
A young woman, who we were told was a relative and who was studying in Budapest, was de-seeding plums by hand. Only family members are working at this farm and they aren’t able to produce more.
When we had apparently seen all their products, we were invited to go with father and son in their car, first to get an overview of the village, next to go to the family’s orchard. Having crossed rather rough and steep roads, we could the see the village surrounded by meadows and forests. Next, we went up various steep roads to get to the orchard, which was surrounded by a high electrical fence because bears like to enter the orchard. In fact, Mrs Vass’ husband used to stay in the orchard from dusk till dawn and he had a radio turned on, pretending that there were several people inside.
We passed lots of apple trees in the orchard, but they also had some plum trees, 700 all in all. The plums were sweet like honey! They were also growing vegetables. Actually, it was a tranquil, secluded and lovely place and we were invited to eat as much apples and plums as we wanted.
This autumn had been dry and it was a good harvest for plums and apples, but not so good for grapes, apricots, blackcurrant and raspberry.
Since they have cows, they have to do haymaking, but they are also collecting herbs for making herbal tea at the same time.
When we came back to the house, Mrs Vass invited us to have lunch with them, but I felt embarrassed getting so much and returning so little that I asked my guide to say no thank you. Later, I met a young woman who told me that this was common among Szekler people!
At least, we were offered several glasses of jam, which I accepted with relish.
We went to Pálinka Jamy where Jamy derives from the first names of the children of the family, in the town of Odorheiu Secuiesc where we were met by the owner, Rezső Szőcs. He told us that their company was located in a house from 1918 and it was founded in 2005. Having a large veranda, a well-lit cellar with tanks containing various types of fruit mash and the ground floor with an office, the distillery, a tasting room and a packing room, all seemed clean and newly refurbished. It’s a family-run company, that is, it’s run by Mr Rezső and his wife, while their children go to school.
His grandmother was the boss in the family and she stayed for 48 hours in the distillery, controlling the pálinka to prevent mixing by the distillery workers. His father used old technology to make pálinka and he didn’t enter any competitions.
Mr Rezső told us that brandy was forbidden in communist times, but people made it anyway. However, it was of low quality and people kept everything. Unfortunately, the tradition has continued such that people still use poor-quality fruit for making pálinka. Instead, they use the best fruit for pálinka in order to show everyone that they make high quality pálinka.
Since this town is located in the Hungarian-speaking part of Romania, Mr Rezső and his family are part of Szekler society, who is characterised by knowledgeable, hardworking people, never giving up, a sense of honour and Hungarian spirit.
Having sort of grown up with pálinka, Mr Rezső wanted to start his own distillery. Both he and his wife have attended distillery courses. They met a designer, who’s selling stoves and boilers for distilleries, in Hungary at one of the courses. Helping them helps him too and they can call him when they need help. They have visited many distilleries in order to learn more and they have bought a new automated distillery from Kothe destillationstechnik in Germany.
We were first shown the cellar where there was equipment for rinsing fruit and berries and de-seeding fruits like cherries and plums. Upon arrival, all the fruits and berries are rinsed to get rid of dust and impurities, but also natural yeasts to be able to control fermentation themselves. Unfortunately, he has to pay for the complete weight of the fruits even though he has no use for the seeds.
When the fruits and berries arrive at the distillery, they have to stay in the shade because they are fragile and fermentation will start in the sun.
They need 30-40 tons of fruits annually, it’s a good region for growing fruit, but it’s difficult to get enough berries.
They want to give the residues to farm animals, but the farmers say no. So far, they have used it as compost, instead.
In the next room, there were several stainless steel tanks. Mr Rezső told us that they had bought them second-hand from a dairy and they used them for fermenting the fruits and berries.
During our visit, he showed us how he stirred mashes of cherry, raspberry and Williams pear. All the mashes would ferment slowly at 10-15°C and he didn’t add any sugar.
He uses native varieties of apples, removing the seeds and using the pulp for making pálinka. He’s also using Cornelian cherry, which after having been de-seeded, are crushed and the mash is pumped into stainless steel containers.
In fact, this distillery buys up 32 types of berries and fruits in all and they are producing 17 types of brandy.
They are recording regularly the state of the mash, date, temperature, degrees Brix , etc. They use taste and smell to decide if the fermentation has finished and they measure degrees Brix, which is a measure of the sugar content of an aqueous solution, by inserting a small amount of the mash to be tested in a hand-held measuring instrument through which one can look.
This video shows how cherries are picked by hand, transported to the distillery, rinsed, de-seeded, fermented, pumped to the distillery and turned into pálinka. For reference, another Romanian distiller is described here. When the mash has fermented enough, it’s pumped up to the distillery where it is heated to 78 °C and the resulting vapour is made to pass a heat exchanger, which condenses the vapour into liquid and ending up in a bucket. They carry the bucket to the next room where they pour the contents into a stainless steel container. The initial alcohol level is 90%, but by adding tap water, they lower it to 42%. A short video showing distillation in a simplified way is shown here.
When we had been shown the distillery and the production room, the labels, the bottles and their medals, it was time to start tasting their products.
While being offered pálinka when one visits someone in Transilvania is like being offered coffee in my country, the tasting was way different from what I’ve been used to. In the first case, we are offered homemade pálinka, which is poured into a shot glass until it’s full. Next, it’s expected that we drink all of it in one go. Instead, Mr Rezső used tulip glasses made for pálinka and he just served a tiny amount in each glass. Finally, we were not expected to swallow all in one go. Instead, we should taste it and enjoy it slowly.
Mr Rezső talked a lot about pálinka competitions and the first time they entered a competition with a plum pálinka, they didn’t win anything. However, they have won a silver medal for another plum brandy and they had won several medals from Quintessence.
We were told that they work very hard to win medals at the competitions, but that they consider their competitors as friends. A friendly competition, in other words.
Like all pálinka distilleries, they are only making pálinka in autumn when fresh fruits and berries are available. The rest of the year they are marketing their products.
After having tasted several of their pálinkas, among them raspberry and plum, it was time to say thank you and goodbye.
Although the Norwegian government is funding the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, containing seeds from all over the world, the country itself is more or less totally dependent on importing vegetable seeds. However, two Dutch men, Jasper Kroon and Tom Boersma, founded a seed shop called Solhatt in 2011. Before describing the company, a short history of seed production and control will be presented.
Short history
At the beginning of the 1800s, the first seed shops were founded in the Netherlands and France. Increased knowledge of inheritance and systematic breeding led to that new plant varieties, which had a much higher yield than ones made by farmers, were developed. Slowly, but surely, new plant varieties were replacing the old ones. The first Norwegian seed shop was established by Johan Olsen in Oslo in 1833.
Before the seed shops were founded, farmers produced seeds themselves or they exchanged seeds with their neighbours, making their harvests adapted to local conditions, but also having a large genetic variation.
Seed controls were founded across Europe in the late 1800s in order to secure high quality seeds for farmers. There was a lot of cheating with seeds, which wouldn’t germinate, but also seeds which were mixed with seeds for other plant varieties or was of low quality in any other way.
The first seed control in Norway was founded by Bastian Larsen at the agricultural school at Haug in Vardal in 1884, but it was taken over by the Royal Norwegian Society for Development in 1889 and next by the Norwegian state in 1898. A private seed control company, called Kristiania Frøkontroll (Christiania Seed Control), was founded in 1887, while it was nationalised in 1899. and renamed to Statens Frøkontroll (Seed Control of the State).
Nowadays, seed control is done by Såvarelaboratoriet and Mattilsynet in Norway. Såvarelaboratoriet perform analysis of seeds in order to find the germination rate, the cleanliness and any infectious diseases of the seeds.
As the 1800s progressed, farmers in Norway started importing more and more vegetable seeds from the Netherlands and the UK. However, during the First World War, all imports of seeds were abruptly stopped, and the Norwegian government founded a committee for breeding seeds and the greatest production took place in the 1920s when various heirloom varieties were developed. In the 1930s, seed production was decreasing again. After the Second World War, the quality of the seeds was variable and the supply was uneven, making import of seeds more important. During the 1970s and 80s, seeds from abroad were cheaper than Norwegian ones such that farmers preferred to buy imported seeds instead.
F.C Schübeler, a professor at the Botanical garden in Christiania, published a book on seed production in Norway in 1889. Being a predecessor of Solhatt, he sent seeds to farmers who, in return, gave feedback on how good the seeds were.
The Royal Norwegian Society for Development founded a farm for testing and breeding seeds for meadows, lawns, but also seeds for root vegetables and various vegetables, at Hellerud in 1950. Due to reorganisation, the farm was closed down in 2001.
Speaking of seeds, it’s impossible to avoid mentioning the Russian and Soviet agronomist, botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who collected seeds from many countries and who headed the Institute of Plant Industry from 1924 to 1936. In 1940, he was arrested for allegedly wrecking Soviet agriculture and he died of hunger in 1943. His co-workers at The Institute of Plant Industry preserved the seed bank through the 28-month Siege of Leningrad and in an act of incredible self-sacrifice, they refused to eat the seeds. Nine of them had died at the end of the siege in the spring of 1944.
According to Jasper Kroon, the Vavilov Institute still has seeds from the Nordic countries, but they are not well documented.
Origin of select vegetables
Having covered very briefly how seeds have been produced and controlled in the past, it’s also necessary to know where the seeds of vegetables come from. This will only cover a few of the vegetables being grown in Norway, but readers are encouraged to seek out more information elsewhere.
All the cereals and vegetables we are eating come from domesticated plant varieties because ancient peoples needed something to eat.
Wild peas ripen over a long period of time, they grow near the ground and seeds arise all over the plant and peapods shatter on maturity. Ancient peoples, living in the Fertile Crescent about 11,000 years ago, domesticated wild peas by selecting those that had a soft shell and ripened during the wet season.
The Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin discovered that the predecessors of cabbage, which were cultivated in the 1620s, were growing wild in the Swedish countryside.
The company
In 2011, both Tom and Jasper were working as organic gardeners in Norway when they were asked to take over a small company called Biofrø, which was importing and selling seeds for biodynamic agriculture. Having accepted the offer, they wanted to expand the company by selling to hobby gardeners. They started with selling seeds from Bingenheimer Saatgutin Germany, but they gradually expanded their product range by selling seeds from other seed shops and various garden tools and books on gardening. Next, they hired a piece of land on the farmAlm Østre, which is located in Stange. There, they grow organic vegetables practising a 5-year crop rotation. They started selling organic seeds produced in Norway from 2015.
Instead of selling hybrid F1-seeds, Tom and Jasper wanted to produce and sell seeds from heirloom vegetables. F1 hybrid seeds are produced by large companies and those who grow seeds from them have to buy seeds from them yearly. Instead, by growing heirloom varieties, the growers themselves can extract seeds and plant them the next season. Thus, Solhatt is maintaining a tradition which has been applied for tens of milllennia.
As regards pollination of the plants, seed producers need to keep plants which can pollinate each other far apart, amounting to at least 100 metres.
In 2012, when Solhatt started growing cabbage, rutabaga and peas using seeds from NordGen, none of the seeds were being used. If it hadn’t been for Solhatt, they would probably have disappeared.
Speaking from experience, I can attest to that many vegetables and fruits bought from supermarkets and almost certainly made by F1 hybrids, don’t taste anything, removing the pleasure of eating.
In addition, all seeds sold by Solhatt will give new plants that resemble their parent plants and these properties will be led on to future generations.
The seeds produced by Solhatt have been selected among those plants, which have been most resistant against diseases and weeds, requiring least nutrients and giving a good and even harvest. In addition, the plants should be as nutritious as possible, taste good and flower late in the season. The last property ensures that the child plant is as big as possible before it starts flowering. Finally, the seeds should be able to be stored without degradation for some years, but they should be used within 12 years, else the germination rate will decrease.
Interbreeding of the plants have to be done over 6 to 8 generations before the harvest is more or less stable. Jasper said that most of the seeds aren’t suited for seed production and only a very few are approved for production. In addition, some plants are perennials like chives and they are grown on a field the first year, thereafter the seeds are extracted and sown in a greenhouse the next year. Then, interbreeding for 6-8 generations entails 12-16 years before, hopefully, the seeds are ready for certification and finally production. All the seeds made by Solhatt have been approved for sale by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority.
Another feature of seed production is that seeds from seed banks often aren’t documented well and the germination rate of the seeds are quite low when they are planted. The seeds have to wake up somehow and this takes several generations.
The field at Alm Østre is open land, but Solhatt also grow vegetables in greenhouses and they work in partnership with other seed producers, 7 in all. Some of them are presented here.
In autumn, it’s time for harvesting seeds. Next, the seeds have to be cleaned by various means, like using a sieve, a berry winnower and even an air separator. After the seeds have been cleaned and controlled, they are put in small paper bags and put in boxes at the premises of Solhatt, ready for sale.
Jasper and Tom want to invite cooks and anyone who is working with food to discover if there is a market for their products. As of now, only a chosen few buy vegetables form farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture, food festivals and so on. They think there is a market for 2-3 types of rutabaga and white turnip.
Let’s hope that Solhatt will expand and get many more customers. They are the only ones in Norway who produce organic vegetable seeds as a profession and they are keeping alive an age-old activity, which may die out.
Quotation from Edda: If you have elder, honey and cabbage, the doctor will be a poor man.
The Latin name Sambucus for elderberry is purportedly derived from a Greek string instrument, which was called sambuca and was made from elder wood.
My first encounter with elderberry was at a farmers’ market in Drammen where we could sample elderflower juice, making me buy a bottle. Ever since I have bought bottles of elderflower juice occasionally since they are quite dear, but the taste is delicious. Next, having found that someone needed money for planting elderberries on a field in Bø in Telemark on the crowdfunding site culturaflokk, I donated so much that I could have a guided visit with the owner Mie Dahlmann Jensen on her farm.
We met at the chuch in Bø from where it was a short drive to a field near Moland farm where 400 elderberry saplings had been planted in 2017. Before, the field had been used for organic growing of oats and grass for 20 years and it was ideal for growing elderberries. During my visit, I could see some of the saplings, some of which had the same height as the surrounding grass due to a drought which have lasted more or less continuously since May 2018. Unfortunately, this makes it more difficult to make the elderberries growing, but Mie remains optimistic.
She told me that roe deer were free to enter the field, but they didn’t like the elders. In addition, there were brown rats nearby, but by planting garlic around the saplings, they stayed away. Really brilliant to fight them with plants and not poison!
Next, we went to Akkerhaugen where Mie has planted 160 elders in cooperation with Rinde farm. Three rows of elders were located among rows of apple trees and all cultivation was organic. Sitting in the sun, drinking elderflower juice and eating strawberries with sour cream was a very nice experience, contributing to making slow pix worthwhile and enjoyable.
The owner of Rinde farm cuts grass around the elderberries and apply fertiliser to them since they require a large amount of nitrogen in order to thrive.
Mie has her first memories from her native Denmark where she hid behind elders when she was playing hide-and-seek with other children. As an adult, she had been to farms where elderflower juice was being produced and after having moved to Norway and working at the local agricultural office, she contacted Innovation Norway and local apple farmers regarding cultivation of elders. Since everyone was positive, she founded her company Hyllest in 2013 and this year is the fifth anniversary. Hyllest is a Norwegian pun on hyll, which means elder, while hyllest means homage. That is, Hyllest is a homage to hyll.
Harvest of elderflowers is done in June and July, always manually and always early in the morning until about 10 in the morning when all dew has evaporated. In addition to domestic elderflowers, Mie also picks elderflowers from wild elders, which have “escaped” from various nurseries and gardens. Having collected elderflowers for up to a month, Mie turns them into juice at Epleblomsten, a local apple press. She has developed her own way of doing it, but she is aided by the workers at Epleblomsten with the production. Fortunately, this occurs so early that no other activity takes place at the apple press such that all attention can be turned to the elder flowers.
After having bottled the elderflower juice, it is distributed to various well-assorted shops and it is sold at farmers’ markets. A nice addition to elderflower juice is beer with a taste of elderflower since a brewery called Eiker ølfabrikk started making beer with elderflower syrup this year.
Finally, it remains to wish Mie good luck with persuading more Norwegians to start drinking elderflower juice, which apparently is little known for now.
Since Mie invited everyone to join the harvest on a Saturday morning in June, I returned this year. Having arrived before 8, the air was filled with birdsong and the pleasant smell of the elderflowers. Rows of apple trees were standing next to the elderflower bushes, but the apples had to mature for a few months more before they could be harvested.
Some of the elderflower shoots had blossomed, while the other ones were perhaps waiting for warmer weather. The shoots looked like light green pinheads, while the flowers had white and light yellow petals.
Picking the elderflowers was done by cutting the stem below the flowers by the thumbnail, then putting them in an open plastic box. Some of the flowers were growing on branches high above us, but it was easy to bend them down such that we could reach the flowers.
While we were harvesting the elderflowers, Mie walked around with a spray, applying a mixture of soap and vegetable oil on insects which formed black clusters on the branches.
Having harvested the flowers for about 1 hour, we had harvested all the flowers, which had blossomed. Then, it was time to enjoy a delicious breakfast next to the elderflower trees and drinking elderflower juice. A really pleasant experience in beautiful surroundings.
Here is some information on how to grow and care for an elderberry bush.
Økologisk Buskerud recently arranged a visit to Økologisk spesialkorn in Sigdal in order to have a look at their flour mill. In fact, this was a very good way of complementing a visit to the same area almost 2 years before and documented here.
Being in late April, the farmers hadn’t even started seeding their fields, but the flour mill and the adjacent flour shop was open. Unfortunately, the flour mill wasn’t operating, but this was as expected since it’s used in autumn when the grain harvest has finished.
Obviously, bread has been a part of our diet for thousands of years and this article shows that people in the Middle East were making flour 14,000 years ago.
From then to now, turning grain into flour has changed from a strenuous task to something done by machines driven by wind or water, but nowadays mostly by electricity and which very few people know anything about.
The company, Økologisk spesialkorn, have their own flour mill and it’s the first company in Norway, which is approved for producing, storing and selling seeds of more or less rare types of grain like emmer, einkorn, spelt, Nordic rye called svedjerug, Dala wheat (a type of wheat which has been selected by farmers for generations), a Norwegian barley called Domen and naked barley (that is, barley without hull) called Pirona.
Our guides were Anders Næss, organic farmer and former managing director of Økologisk spesialkorn, and the farmer Guttorm Tovsrud on whose land the field trial was done.
The mill was originally built by local farmers in Sigdal as a cooperative and it received grain from local farmers for many years until it was closed down. However, Økologisk spesialkorn bought it, restored the building and bought a new flour mill some years ago.
As we were told by Terje Nesje at Holli mill, there is no education for millers in Norway and Anders went to the Danish company Aurion, which is using Austrian stone flour mills, in order to learn about milling. In fact, there is an active association for millers and those who are interested in milling in Denmark.
Having entered the mill, it was obviously a building which had been made for a specific purpose although it was quite difficult to understand what at a first sight. Everything was made of wood, stairs led upwards and downwards and some machines were standing in various places. First, Anders led us to the base of the building where the flour mill had been installed. A machine with a diameter of, say, one metre, and a height of, say, one and a half metre, was the flour mill, while just above it was a tube and an open box full of grain. When the flour mill is in operation, grain from a silo is fed through this tube into the mill.
The millstones were inside the flour mill and they were not visible. As explained here: millstones come in pairs. The base or bedstone is stationary. Above the bedstone is the turning runner stone which actually does the grinding. The runner stone spins above the stationary bedstone creating the “scissoring” or grinding action of the stones. A runner stone is generally slightly concave, while the bedstone is slightly convex. This helps to channel the ground flour to the outer edges of the stones where it can be gathered up.
By Stevegray at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=728078
Just like at Holli mill, the miller at this mill also has to use hearing and sense of smell in order to get the flour as wanted. It is possible for the miller to get samples of flour during milling such that it can be felt, touched and even tasted. Lastly, the miller can monitor the current consumption of the mill. Then, by using all 5 senses, the miller can vary the distance between the millstones by means of a handle on the mill. In this way, the miller can ensure that the temperature is less than 40°C avoiding excess heat during milling.
At the base of the flour mill there was an electric motor and a tube through which the motor would force the flour upwards to the top of the mill. From there, it would fall down into a sieve with various openings such that the miller could vary the size of the particles and get a specific flour.
Anders told us that their customers didn’t like their flour in the beginning, because it was beige due to bran, and not white as it should be. The following picture shows a wheat kernel, but other types of grain look similar.
By Wheat-kernel_nutrition.svg: Jkwchuiderivative work: Jon C (talk) – Wheat-kernel_nutrition.svg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12889006
This flour mill is not heated, leading to fewer problems with animals and insects trying to eat or contaminate the flour, which is a real problem in warmer countries. The only room, which is heated, is the packing room where a certain amount of flour is let into paper bags, which are put into cardboard boxes, ready to be shipped to customers.
Last but not least, this company doesn’t mix grain in any way such that there is full traceability from each farmer, field and time of harvest.
Having finished our visit in the mill, we were invited to eat freshly made pizza. Økologisk spesialkorn has a mobile, wood-fired oven and the present managing director, Rune Menninen, was busy tending the oven and folding pieces of dough, which consisted of a mixture of emmer and spelt and had been made the day before. He flattened pieces of dough manually, put on tomato sauce, pepperoni and cheese and put it in the oven. A few minutes later, he took it out again, having made a freshly made pizza. Since there were so many visitors, about 25 in all, he had a lot to do.
I also met Guttom Tovsrud, a farmer who was owning and running the field trial described in Field trial of growing cereals.
He had been doing organic farming for 15 years, and when he started, the farmers doing conventional farming thought he would get ever smaller harvests and more weeds. Instead, it was the opposite which happened, mainly because organic matter, in particular carbon, in their fields is decreasing according to Anders Næss.
Mr Tovsrud also told us that after having grown spelt 4-5 years on the same field he practised crop rotation, replacing the spelt with clover, which will add nitrogen to the soil, an essential nutrient for plants.
During 2018 when there was a drought in Norway, he lost very little of his spelt harvest. He attributed this to the the deep roots of the spelt and the porous structure of the soil due to an abundant micro-life in the soil. In addition, spelt has a long stem, placing it farther above ground and making it more difficult for parasites to reach the grains. Interestingly, this is the same advice I got from a wine farmer in Italy. That is, he wanted to keep the canes of the grapevines at least 50 cm above ground in order to avoid parasites from the ground.
Spelt has a hard hull, which has to be removed before milling. The hard hull also leads to that spelt has to be dried slowly, else only the hull will dry, while the endosperm remains humid.
It was a great pleasure to visit somebody who work so hard to make high quality products for consumers.
This farm extends from the hill on which a castle with the same name dominates the entire valley surrounded by the elevation where the historic house of the Corsini family is located and the natural park of Maremma. It’s fair to say that this hill has served as a place for controlling the surrounding countryside and, in particular, the river Albegna where people had to cross a ford in order to pass this area.
Anyway, the Etruscans controlled this area and they may have founded a town called Caletra, which is now called Marsilia. After the Romans had defeated the Etruscans, it was called Agro Caletrano. During the early Middle ages, a monastery was built on the hill. There, pilgrims could rest on their way to Rome, the Eternal City.
A castle was built on the top of the hill in the 12th century being controlled by various powers until it was used as a military fortification during the Spanish domination from 1559 to 1713. Next, the Corsini family arrived at Marsiliana in 1760 and they constructed a fortified farm below the castle in the early 1800s. A contract from 1868 between the bank Monte dei Paschi and the Corsini family states that the property of all the surrounding terrain is transferred to the Corsini family. The local farmers worked as sharecroppers for the Corsini family until 1950 when there was a Land Reform act. Then, a large part of the land was expropriated by the state in order to give 8 to 20 hectares and a house to each farmer family.
A large part of the land covered by marshes was reclaimed by means of drainage, canals and pumps. In this way, malaria, which had been a major cause of death among the sharecroppers, disappeared completely. Thus, the Land Reform act turned the sharecroppers into farmers with their own houses and their own land. Before, they had always worked as sharecroppers, getting back only a small part of what they had cultivated. Instead, the Tenuta di Marsiliana farm have turned to raising wild boar for hunting, cultivating grapevines and renting out houses, which have been converted into apartments, to tourists.
The area of the vineyards amounts to 26 hectares. The grapevines, consisting of Petit Verdot and Cabernet Sauvignon, were planted between 1988 and 2006 and all of them are productive. The best grapes are collected manually, while the rest is collected by means of machines.
The man responsible for wine production kindly showed us the vineyards, at the same time as he explained various aspects of viticulture in a very clear way. For instance, the orientation of a vineyard should always be located east-west and never north-south in order to let the grapes receive as much sunlight as possible.
Regarding cultivating the grapevines, it is done according to a French method where the canes of the grapevines are forced to grow 50 cm above the ground.
However, this method is adapted to the climatic characteristics of French vineyards where strong winds exert strong forces on the grapevines. By keeping the grapes closer to the ground, the force of the wind will be lower. Instead, he would prefer to let the branches grow higher above the soil in order to limit various types of funghi to reach the leaves and the grapes. This area is surrounded by hills, which limit the speed of the winds reaching the vineyards. Besides, by growing the branches higher above the soil, it would be easier for workers to harvest the grapes.
Pruning is done in winter, which is called dry pruning and the second one is done in spring or early summer. This pruning is called green pruning.
In addition to pruning, leaf removal also has to be done and this consists of removing leaves around the grape clusters. The main purposes are the following:
Improve air circulation.
Increase fungicide/insecticide spray penetration.
Expose the fruit to more sunlight.
Improve flavor compounds, color, and bud fertility.
Some leaves have to remain on the shoot in order to produce carbohydrates to support vine growth, fruit development and ripening, develop overwintering reserves and to allow vine shoot and bud winter hardiness.
Since roe deer and wild boar live in the forests surrounding the vineyards, all of them are fenced off.
On the way back to the wine production, we passed a vineyard which had been harvested by means of a machine. As my guide told me, several branches had wizened leaves because the machine isn’t able to be as careful as the workers.
The wine production takes place in a huge building having an area of 1760 m2. It was constructed in 1900 by the Corsini family who used it as a storeroom for grain until the Land Reform act was enacted in the 1950s. Inside, there were arcs made by bricks, while the floor was covered by stone tiles, all of it done manually. Nowadays an agricultural cooperative rents 250 m2 for producing wines.
Like always, this wine producer lets wine mature in large tanks, but the must and grape skins from one vineyard is kept strictly away from the must and grape skins from other vineyards.
Having added yeast to the must, the fermentation starts, turning sugars into alcohol. The fermentation creates carbon dioxide which rises to the top of the must, lifting the pomace to the surface at the same time. Since this process produces heat and the yeast can’t survive above 33-34°C, the temperature has to be limited. This is done by letting cold water flow in tubes located inside the container such that the cooling is done indirectly. In fact, a control loop maintains the temperature at 25°C because it’s best for the yeast.
Some days later, a filter is placed above a container and below the valve at the base of the tank containing the must. One end of a hose is connected to a container, while the other end is connected to a pump. The top of the tank is also opened through which a hose is fed, while the other end is connected to the pump. Next, a worker opens the valve and starts the pump. Wine will flow out of the tank, passing the filter, which will stop the pomace. Instead, the must will pass unhindered and be pumped up to the top of the tank. This process provides oxygen to the must, which aids the fermentation. In addition, the must is forced to pass the pomace, which gives various good characteristics like taste and colour to the must.
When the process of fermentation stops because all the sugars have been turned into alcohol, racking is done. That is, the wine is separated from the pomace by means of gravity and transferred to another tank. Instead, the pomace is crushed once more. The resulting wine may be mixed with the original wine in order to make a blend or it may used as table wine. In any case, an oenologist decides what’s to be done in each case.
The pomace will have to be transferred to a distillery for making grappa in order to avoid fraud using the pomace to produce wine by means of chemicals, according to Italian law.
This farm has a wide selection of wines as described here: The majority of the wines are DOC or IGT.
Last but not least, there is an interesting ethnographic museum inside the castle: documents and various equipment used by people across the ages tell visitors about life and work in this place.
