I’m so glad I decided to wait.

I’ve been wanting to write about cheese made in this country, since, oh, about 1977. At the time, I was running a five hundred square foot Cheese Shop at the base of Nob Hill in San Francisco. Every day I’d lug hundreds of pounds of really good cheese out of the walk-in and up onto the wooden counter, into great stacks and little piles.

Newly devoted to the joys of rice flour rubbed Teleme and four year-old Wisconsin cheddar, I wanted to know, and taste, more.

Just a year into my retail foods career, I’d gossiped about every import I could discover, while finding it impossible to locate locally made mozzarella. Out there somewhere (okay, in France) Laura Chenel was learning to make goat cheese, while the rest of the culture was on the verge of a decade of morbid butterfat fear.

Boy how things have changed. My list of American cheesemakers has just recently topped five hundred.  There’s certainly something good locally or at least regionally, from coast to coast and, well, California is now knee deep in bocanccini.

For the last year and a half, between consulting work, I’ve been traveling coast to coast and everywhere in between visiting farms and talking to cheese makers. I’m working on a book about this personal passion for Simon and Schuster. It was due last fall, but so much has been and is currently emerging, and I have so many places to visit and so much to learn, that I had to keep going. At some point I’m just going to have to stop and turn the thing in, but for now I can’t resist sharing some stories and spreading the word about some old favorites and new developments.

While I’ve crammed as much information and contact material into this issue as space would allow, this is really the story of some talented and courageous people who work every day to preserve what a lot of us feel are important ways of life, while creating remarkable and delicious cheeses. I guess I’m on a bit of a crusade to help.

Although there’s a lot that’s exciting to report, it’s no secret that dairy farming is far from secure. Even before the threat of hoof and mouth and the specter of mad cow, many families have been barely getting by. Some of the newer cheeses actually come from people who have turned to cheese making as a way to guarantee a higher and consistent price for their milk. It can help save the farm, or at least improve daily life.

Way up near the Canadian border (which we almost crossed after a missed turn) in Highgate, Vermont, Dawn Morin-Boucher is making a stellar cheese she calls Green Mountain Blue that is helping to preserve a farm that her husband’s family has been working for twelve generations. They came from France with General Champlain and raised crops that fed his troops. Not long ago, Dawn and her husband Daniel, along with brother Dennis and his family, took over the farm from mom and dad.

So, Daniel takes care of the herd and Dennis tends to the fields. In order to support all three households, husband and cows have to produce three million pounds of milk a year. Talk about 24/7. But, once Dawn gets to her annual goal of about 50,000 one-pound wheels, pleasantly reminiscent of a forme d-ambert, they’ll only need a third of the previous fluid milk total. She’s won awards, and she’s halfway there.

Out into the fields

For me so much of this is about visiting the farms, hearing family tales, learning from some very hard working people, being amused by some amazing critters, and getting to spend a little time out in a world I’d only read about. I always travel with my collaborator, Scott Mitchell, whose moving photographs tell stories of their own. Mindful of the rigors of farming, we try to keep our stays to an hour or two, but it’s difficult at times.

On that same Vermont trip, we stopped by Lazy Lady Farm, in Westfield, where Laini Fondiller makes so many different kinds of really good goat’s milk cheeses that I could barely keep track. Little disks, pyramids, wheels, she reminded me why those small chevres come in so many different shapes - why not? Determined to broaden her scope, she’d just bought a cow, who, nervous from the truck trip in, jumped a six foot fence and made away. It was the current crisis when we arrived. Suddenly, the phone rang. “Far out. They found my cow!” she hollered into the mobile phone in her left hand, while she kept making cheese with the right.

Before digging deeper into what’s new out there that’s worth a nibble, a word about artisanally made cheeses. If they’re good, they’re better than anything. Complex, subtle, fragile, magic. But, oh how much it takes to get it there. More than one really talented cheesemaker has told me about how much bad cheese they made until they got it right.

And large production cheese can be quite good too. We’re talking Emmenthal, Gruyere, parmesan, all made in large quantities—not always by hand—and they rock. Grafton makes a whole lot of cheddar in Vermont. Roth Kase’s Grand Cru of Wisconsin is brilliant at 60,000 pounds a month.

Truth is, if we properly identify first rate larger production cheeses and give them due, small production jewels, at the very top level, will be worth even more.

So, here’s what I hope will be a useful update on what cheese nuts, chefs, restaurants, hotels, caterers, food shops, and mail-order folk might sell and enjoy.

Cheese Gets Fresh

When I was growing up in L. A., my grandparents usually had a pretty swell houses (that they’d renovated) in the Hollywood Hills. What they always had was fresh cheese. Cottage in big curds, dry pot cheese for Grandma’s baking, or another, creamier fresh cheese we just called “fresh cheese”.

Turns out, fromage blanc, otherwise known as simply made fresh cheese (usually skim milk and  little culture), and its cousins, crème fraiche (basically, thickened cream that’s t it’s best slathered over almost anything) and quark (most often whole milk, culture and a few enzymes), a slightly tangy European breakfast tradition, which can be also be made nearly of completely fat free, are turning up everywhere, as my excessive sidebar will show.  I had it slathered on black bread every morning during my first trip to Berlin in ’78.

It comes in cow, goat and sheep.  Many of them are peppered or herbed or soaked in oil. Let’s face it, while Laura Chenel pioneered award-winning aged goat things, she like many others, pays the rent by turning fresh milk into a good taste, quick sales and a regular relationship with customers.

Sue Connelly and Peggy Smith at Cowgirl Creamery have won awards with their fresh cheeses, often on public view through the glass wall of their cheesemaking room at the side of their charming market Tomales Bay Foods in Point Reyes Station, California.

The News is Blues

I know I’m impatient but it seems like it’s been a long while since this country produced some really good blues. Maytag, from the family that fluff dries so well, has been the major standard bearer since the early 80’s. It still deserves praise, but now there are others to tout as well.

I’m pleased to herald the return of a personal favorite. Oregon Blue, from The Rogue River factory, was, for many years, made by the father of someone I consider a legend. Ig Vella makes, among others, amazing Dry Jack, Asiago, raw milk cheddar and a half dry Jack called Mezza Secco that he started making again recently after a pause of nearly fifty years, all this, just off the square in downtown Sonoma. When his dad passed away a few years ago, Oregon production stopped.  Not long ago Ig bought the factory from the estate and installed young cheesemaker Kelly Norton. Made from raw, unhomogenized milk, this creamy, foil wrapped wheel I sold so much of in the 70’s is available once again.

Then there’s Paula Lambert, generally considered the queen of Texas cheesemaking. Her Dallas Mozzarella Cheese Company has been making its namesake, as well as a host of tortas and other cow and goat’s milk specialties for years. Now she’s added a fairly unique and tasty semi-soft, exterior mould blue called Deep Elum Blue, named for the old part of her town where musical blues greats made serious sounds too many years ago. Ellum, of course, is a hybrid version, that multi-syllable verbalization of anything southern, of a common tree.

Old Friends and long traditions

Like many others, Jules Wesselink was tired of the uncertainties of dairy farming. He turned to the family he’d left in Holland to learn to make Boere Kaas, another name for the cheese equivalent of estate bottled goods.  His cows on his farm for making his cheese, in Winchester, CA.  Local health laws are strict and expensive, but he found a perfectly legal short cut.  Jules started by installing a couple (now four) of refrigerated trucks, without the driver’s cabs, on slab cement out back.  You should see the contraptions he’s rigged (pardon the trucking pun) for pressing and rolling his wares.

At last count he was making a half a dozen versions of the cheese - with cumin, with peppers -  and held to various ages.  The super aged is world class.  In fact, when he shipped a few wheels to the “old country” for judging, he got higher scores than the rest of his fourth generation cheesemaking family.