How to Make a Local Cooler

By Karamagi Akiiki Ednah

After the training by CorFilac over how to make traditional cheese making, I realized that actually one doesn’t have to pay the exorbitant prices for aged cheese sold in the supermarkets. For just a hundred grams, one has to part with atleast UG. SHS 2,500. This is quite high for the rural person, and even for many urban dwellers. This doesn’t matter where one is from, rural or urban, as long as you have milk, a coagulating agent and a cooler, you can make your own cheese.

Now where it gets complex is the need for the cooler or fridge. Not all rural areas in Uganda have electricity. As a matter of fact, in the rural areas, electiricty is refined to mainly the urban sections of the rural settings and this is worrying should a farmer want to make cheese at home for either subsistence or commercial production. The challenge then is how the farmer can access a cooler or a fridge; which incidentally is a dire necessity in ageing cheese?

This challenge set me googling on the Internet, and see what I found …

How to Make a Cooler from ordinary materials.

Foods that are kept at warm temperatures are a favorite places for bacteria to grow. Remember to keep foods from the refrigerator or freezer cold.If you don’t have a cooler, you can make your own

You will need: –
 Two different sizes of sturdy cardboard boxes with lids
 Newspaper
 Ice in plastic bags

To make it, follow the steps below
Step 1 Place one inch of crumpled newspaper on the largest of the bottom box
Step 2 Place the smaller box inside the larger box. Fix the sides of the box with tightly crumpled newspaper
Step 3 Place the food in tightly closed plastic containers or plastic bags inside the smaller box. Pack ice in the small box close to the plastic bags/containers in the smaller box and close the lids.
Step 4 Place ½ inch of tightly crumpled newspaper on the top of the closed smaller box, close the lid of the larger box

Below are some pictures i got from the article that you can use in an attempt to make the “cooler”

To me this could be a creative way to the beginning of making a home made cooler for the rural areas though it comes along with need to invest in the ice cubes. Now incidentally, these are very cheap and they can be afforded. A farmer could have a long term arrangement with the businessmen that have fridges and gets a daily supply at a lower cost. Or better still, i remember during the Cheese making course, we were priviledged to visit a farmer that makes cheese from sheeps’ milk and he had this arrangement where he made payements using cheese. Perhaps, the farmers could copy a similar payment mode.

When it comes to cheese making, one needs a permanent cooling structure. This is because the ageing process can take one to twelve months. Suppose one constructed one out of baked clay, covered it with layers and layers of baked earth and placed the structure on a cemented floor that has no access to sunlight or heat? I narrow down to this because while growing up my mother used to store drinking water in a baked pot and keep it on the cement. She said that this always kept the water cold and fresh. Can a similar well planned setting be used for the traditional coolers?

Guess we just have to try it out …

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