Day 8 of our visit to Norway. We began the day with breakfast at our farm, 29/2 Aurland, where we were served with local produce – fresh milk, fruit and cheeses. Seriously good.
Then we met our guide, Britte Marie for the day’s activity which involved a hike up to a pasture farm, known as Leim, followed by lunch.
The pasture farm hangs precariously off a hill along the side of the gorge. That’s the farmhouse up in the distance.
The owner, a lovely lady, keeps 73 goats which she milks twice a day. Here she is with some of her goats in an image I found on the net:
The milk is used to make cheese during the months of July and August each year, and she sells the cheese over the course of September – December at various local markets. During the rest of the year, the goats are kept in a barn further down the hill and their milk is sold to a dairy.
She produces Norwegian brown cheese from the whey. This is the main specialty product. The curds are used to make traditional soft and hard white cheeses, which in the old days were considered the inferior product and only consumed at home. Things have changed today!
The brown cheese is made by a process which involves boiling the whey for about 15 hours stirring it throughout the process until it caramelises – it has a particularly unique sweet flavour unlike any other cheeses I’ve tasted. At the farm she has some assistance with this using electric machinery. Once a year, she moves the goats up to an even higher pasture farm some 2 hours hike away and spends a week there making cheeses entirely by hand on a wood fire! Incredibly hard work which leaves you completely awe struck in terms of her dedication and resilience. In the photo above, you can just see the brown cheese on the bottom shelf in foldable wooden mounds. But I’ve got way ahead of myself, so let me back track a little!
It was a drizzly day today but this had its own special ambience. The hike to the pasture farm was one hour up a very steep hill (about 360m I found out later), so we definitely earned our lunch! Here are some photos on the way up.
We passed the ubiquitous Norwegian waterfall on the way – and apparently it’s been the driest year since 1937!
There were some very sweet, docile goats there to meet us when we arrived.
Some more small tour groups arrived after us, and we enjoyed lunch and the views together.
That’s the brown cheese on the table in the forefront. Traditionally its shaved off the block and spread on a pancake, topped with strawberry jam and rolled up.
We also had some goat salami from Leim’s goats – it’s made and smoked at a separate facility – so delicious that we bought one to take back home to Munich.
After lunch it was a slow hike back down, where we stopped to admire some of the wood cabins, both old and new.
This was followed by a visit to town, to meet some craftspeople, including a lovely glass blower at Rein Glass – who amazingly operates a glass blowing facility on her own.
We also visited a shoemaker and a baker. All strong and independent women. which is an interesting phenomenon in itself! And finally, a quick visit to the local Lutheran Church. Simple in its decoration with the exception of the elaborate organ!
It was a great day and we managed to mostly avoid the rain at the right times, experiencing some aspects of local life that otherwise wouldn’t have opened up to us!
