On-farm cheese caves,
like this one at Orb Weaver Farm in Monkton Vermont,
are where most of America's finest cheeses
are finished to a delicious, marketable state.
The explosion of artisan-made, cave-aged cheese may be the latest thing in food marketing,
but
cheese itself is nothing new. Cheese is one of humankind’s most ancient methods
of food preservation. This highly effective means of storing milk developed
under the distinctly non-high-tech conditions of carrying liquid milk in sacks
made from the rennet-rich stomachs of ruminants.
“Cheese
making is a process of preserving the solids of milk as curds. This is done by
coagulating these solids with the help of rennet enzymes, cutting it into small
pieces and then cooking and stirring to remove some of the water in the
form of whey,” explains “cheese queen” Rikki Carroll, whose New England CheesemakingSupply of South Deerfield, Massachusetts has converted thousands of ordinary
people into home cheesemakers.
The
basic principles of cheesemaking are the same whether you are making a pound or
two with a kit at home or a thousand pounds in a small-farm dairy. “With higher
production you just need bigger equipment and more storage space,” Carroll says.
Cheesemaking
can be tricky. As anyone who makes bread or beer knows, playing with molds,
bacteria and yeast is quite a balancing act. Good bacteria like B. Linens need to be encouraged to
produce a natural rind, while other bacteria like Pseudomonas fluorescens, that can turn soft cheeses bitter, need to
be avoided.
Then
there’s the milk. “All cheese used to be made with raw milk, then pasteurized milk
became the industry standard,” Carroll says. “Now ultrapasteurized milk has a
slightly longer shelf life but it breaks down the proteins and makes curd
formation more difficult.”
Aging Cheese
Once
cheese is made, it must cure or age in a cool, moist environment. Unlike fine
wines, fine cheeses generally age over the course of months, not decades. But
while wine bottles sit quietly undisturbed in their cellars, some kinds of cheese
wheels demand constant attention, including turning and washing with batches of
favorable bacteria or herbal flavorings on a daily or weekly basis.
Historically,
most cheesemakers supervise this aging process themselves at their farm or
cheesemaking premises. In European markets where a high volume of artisanal
cheese flows from farms to plate each day, affinage, or cheese aging, has
become recognized as a separate task from that of cheesemaking. Affineurs, or
people trained to oversee cheese aging operations, have developed a mystique referenced with awe in the food industry—an awe that drives the price-point of branded cave-aged cheese sky high.
Next time we'll look at whether affinage really creates higher quality cheese or if it's primarily a marketing ploy.
