American Cheese Spreads in Italy

How’s this for culinary chutzpah? An upstart cheese maker from the United States flies into Italy to hawk his New York wares in the motherland of mozzarella, Parmesan, provolone and ricotta.

Jonathan White’s business card brashly proclaims his ambition: “setting back the dairy industry 100 years.” He wants to show Americans, and anybody else who needs a demonstration, that there’s plenty more to cheese than a gummy processed slice stuck on top of a hamburger patty.

White’s musky goat’s-milk Cheddar, aged seven months, and Muscoot, a cow’s-milk cheese so pungent, he said, that some American chefs would have thrown it out months ago, were among the hits of the Slow Food Salone del Gusto food fair held this month in the northern Italian city of Turin.

“To have an American cheese maker in Europe selling well--well, it’s magic,” marveled Lothar Tubbesing, a friend and chef at Lachswehr restaurant in Luebeck, Germany.

White, 42, was the only American among 300 exhibitors of artisanal cheese, salami, vinegar, olive oil and other fine food products at the fair. For Slow Food, a grass-roots movement that claims members in 35 countries, these products are all treasures to be savored and defended against what the movement’s followers call “the onslaught of supermarket culture.”

White’s stand, decorated with a large American flag, drew thousands of people curious to know what cheese from the United States, the mecca of fast food, could possibly taste like.

In Italy, after all, they’ve been making cheese for 3,000 years. The Romans gave cheese to their legions, believing it made foot soldiers stronger.

In five days, White, who already ships his cheeses to the White House, sliced and handed out 300 pounds of his creations, from the soft, mild Taconic, made of cooked curds of cow’s milk, to the powerful and slightly runny Muscoot. The names, as well as the cheeses, are White’s inventions.

“Pretty good” to “excellent” were the verdicts of a random sampling of Italians. The reception, White said, was so encouraging that his Egg Farm Dairy in Peekskill, N.Y., about 40 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, could be selling as much cheese in Europe next year as in the United States.

Already, the U.S. dairy ships small quantities to Germany and Italy and is negotiating distribution in Britain, Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

“I think the Europeans have gotten inspiration from what I do,” White said. “We Americans have always been the evil empire as far as food quality is concerned. When they see my cheeses, it gives them hope. Because like it or not, they know that what we’re doing now in America is their future.”

On Oct. 1, Egg Farm Dairy increased production capacity tenfold and now can turn out a ton of butter and up to 1 1/2 tons of cheese a day. White had 10 employees when he left for Europe, and two more were hired in his absence.

It is sweet vindication for the dairy’s creator, who gave up a career in engineering in 1993 to try to earn a living in New York’s bucolic Hudson Valley as a cheese maker.

“Three times a day we get to vote for what type of world we live in,” he told one group of Italians. “So every time you sit at the table, remember to choose wisely, because it’s your future.”

And this talk about setting back the dairy industry by a century? White explains that this means reviving traditions that were steamrollered as the big dairy companies strove to get bigger and tastes became more uniform.

The reason U.S. Cheddar is typically orange, White notes as an example, has nothing to do with flavor. In the 19th century, the fledgling cheese industry in Wisconsin started adding annatto, a natural and flavorless dye from Brazil, to give their product a golden color. Over the decades, so much dye came to be used that American Cheddar sometimes is the same color as a Halloween pumpkin. White doesn’t use dye.

Like most of the people who showed up to display their products at the Turin show, White is passionately vocal about food and its role in a full, rich life. At a serious sit-down tasting session that teamed up half a dozen beers from U.S. microbreweries with his cheeses, the garrulous and wisecracking American urged a largely Italian audience to take two minutes to savor the flavor of each cheese on the palate.

Formaggio, White joked, ought to be eaten adagio.

One of his opinions could be heresy in a traditional wine-and-cheese country like Italy. White contends that beer and cheese make a better taste match than wine and cheese. Italians, who got to make up their own minds at the tasting session, nibbled on the U.S.-made cheeses and sipped beers that included California’s Sudwerk, German-style Oktoberfest lager from Davis and Star Brew 1444, a wheat beer made in Larkspur, Calif.

“This cheese is good,” commented Fabrizio Bonato, owner of a hotel and restaurant in the Udine area of northeastern Italy. “But I think you can already find similar cheese in Italy, in small towns around Sorrento for example.”

In the 1970s, when traveling through Europe, White fell in love with the cheese available in the small towns of Portugal and Spain. Back home in Hoboken, N.J., White tried his own hand at cheese-making, but he used milk he bought at the grocery store and was disappointed with the results.

In 1989 came the turning point. A friend, jazz musician David Amram, showed up at White’s door with a couple of buckets of goat’s milk. His children were refusing to drink it, Amram said. Would White like it?

For the engineer who spent 17 years designing robotic joints and precision medical devices and performing other cutting-edge technological chores, the buckets were a revelation.

Four years later, White said, he “threw caution to the winds,” quit his engineering job and transformed his hobby of making cheese and butter into a full-time occupation.

He buys milk from farms in the Hudson Valley and has no livestock of his own. The method of pasteurization he uses, White said, is slower and more gentle than that used in big companies. At Egg Farm Dairy, milk is heated to 136 degrees for 30 minutes, instead of being zapped with 161-degree heat for 20 seconds.

“This gives me a tabula rasa on which I can introduce any bacteria I want,” he said.

The New York dairy also ripens its nine brands of cheese in a traditional way, marketing and sales manager Warren Reid explained in a telephone interview. Usually, these days, other cheese makers spray mold spores onto the surface of cheese to accelerate the ripening process and give the cheese a uniform rind.

In contrast, Reid said, an Egg Farm Dairy cheese begins to ripen by being put in a room with more mature cheeses. These send off mold spores that stick to the newcomer and start mold growing. The process is slower, but the resulting taste is deeper and more complex than what is achieved by modern industrial methods, he said.

“It’s like if you ate Brie made in the 1800s. You’d be shocked compared to what the taste is now,” Reid said. “We’re just going back to the way things used to be.”

For many in Europe, where cuisine from the New World is often thought to consist of sandwiches, gassy drinks, microwave dinners and junk food, going backward is a welcome direction. White recalled a banner that his German friend Tubbesing strung up at his stand when he brought a first set of samples--in blocks wrapped in paper and aluminum and weighing as much as 10 pounds--to Europe from the Hudson Valley last autumn.

The banner read: “If cheese like this can be made in America, then there is hope for the future.”

Egg Farm Dairy cheeses are sold at Surfas in Culver City, La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles and Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits and Cheese in Los Angeles. The dairy may also be reached directly at (800) CREAMERY or https://www.creamery.com

For more information on the Slow Food movement in the United States call (877) SLOWFOO or (877) 756-9366.

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