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Cheese making

As we have been explaining throughout our website, at Subaida we follow the cheese-making tradition we learned from our ancestors, making our cheeses by hand, striving for the best quality of each piece in order to offer you the best cheese of our land.

Milking of cows

The first step is to milk the cows. It takes about 8 litres of milk to make one kilo of cheese. Our milking parlour is set up for 16 cows at a time, and it takes about 20 minutes to milk them. In total one hour/hour and a half for the whole milking of the cows that are in the productive period. Milking takes place at 6:00 am and 6:00 pm every day, without a break. Milking is done with background music, which stimulates the cows and helps us to obtain a higher and better milk production.

Milk curd

We fill a special vat with freshly milked cow's milk at udder temperature. This is where the milking curd process begins, rennet is added to the milk and it is brought to a temperature of between 34 and 35 degrees. While the milk is curdling, we stir it and break it into pieces the size of chickpeas.

Fogassers

When the curdled milk is a paste, the master craftsman bags it in the fogassers, a cotton cloth, where he traps the quantity of paste he determines. A card is inserted with the farm's identification code (Subaida is number 31) and the week of the year in which it is produced (this is used to control production). The fogasser is suspended by its four corners and the folds are correctly positioned.
The cheese is then calmly placed by hand on a table to remove the whey and to give cohesion to the mass by pressing it by hand. Using a string called lligam, we roll up the ends of the fogasser and press the piece of cheese so that it continues to evacuate whey. This process lasts 12 hours.

Brine

After pressing, the piece is stripped by removing the fogasser. This is where we discover the mark left by the lligam called mamella. On the other side will be marked our code (31, plus the week in which it was made). We will then put the piece in brine for about 20 hours, which will give consistency to the crust.

Cheese maturing

The maturing process is carried out in ventilated chambers, the cheese is manually rubbed one by one several times throughout its life with a mixture of extra virgin olive oil and sweet paprika. In the cellars it will rest for a fixed period of time, this time will determine the variety of cheese: three months for semi-cured cheese, 6-8 months for cured cheese and more than a year for our jewel in the crown, aged cheese.