One fine morning in early April, the Cheese Chicks caught the ferry over to Salt Spring Island to visit Moonstruck Organic Cheese. Farm owner Julia Grace took us on a tour, introduced us to their beautiful herd of pampered, purebred Jersey cows and let us watch some cheese-making in action. When we got to the cheese room they were cutting the curd for camembert. Here's what Julia had to tell us about the process:

"We take a long time to do this because Jersey milk has quite a big fat globule. It's really easy to smash the fat up and then most of it will run out in the whey and that's a loss. The curd is very fragile. Goat's milk curds, you can practically bounce it off the floor, but our curd is very, very soft, so every time that you do a cut, you wait just a bit because it will heal a little. What you don't want is to turn it into mush. The baskets that are used for scooping camembert have lots and lots of holes and little ridges - the white mold will grow where it has access to oxygen, so the ridges just increase the amount of surface area. They're very well thought out.

"After the third pass, we let it rest and then we stir it for 20 minutes. Because Camembert is a high-moisture cheese we don't take any of the whey off, we just scoop from underneath it. For the Beddis and the feta and the semi-hard, we take the whey off down to the curd level. And then for the other cheeses it's taking it right down to the bottom of the vat, trenching and blocking and all that. We save the fresh whey for the babies. It's another way we add nutrition to their diet. There's a lot of nutrition in whey, and they just slurp it up.
"Susan, my partner, was the one who got started with the cows. And Cows are really expensive to keep, so we thought, are we going to keep cows and do something with it? We were very interested in farming and we realised there was a possibility for making a go with the cheesemaking, and I was attracted to it. I love cooking and it was just like an extension of that. So we thought, well, we've got a hit, you know, and away we go. It's good for a small operation to make different kinds of cheeses like we do. We couldn't just make blue cheeses because there's a lot of loss associated with that. It's just not a cheese that hangs around in the universe forever. And the camembert, they have a nice flow to them, it moves a lot of milk through the farm. But I think the most interesting cheeses to make are the Tomme and The White Grace and the feta. The more I make cheese... you know I wanted to make everything fancy in the book when I started and now the ones I really like are the simple, old peasant cheeses. They have the most interesting, complex flavour. An awful lot about cheese making is feel - knowing when to let it sit a minute longer... you can't confine yourself to just the strictness of the recipe. We call it the yellow thumb instead of the green thumb."

Whatever kind of thumb you need, they've got it at Moonstruck. We've been a huge fan of their cheese for years and it just makes it all the more delicious seeing first-hand how happy the cows that produce it are. And a final tip from us, if you're on the island, keep an eye out for their organic blue washed in local blackberry port. Strictly a local delicacy - it's definitely worth tracking down.

Here's a wheel of their beautiful Blossom's Blue:
And we leave you with some pictures of the herd. We completely fell in love with these girls.