California Cheese Ripens Into an Art

Sue Conley and Peggy Smith were exasperated. The proprietors of the Cowgirl Creamery here couldn’t get their signature Mt. Tam mold-ripened, triple-cream cheese to turn out right.

An unexpected mold had become anchored in the batch. No matter how many times they brushed it away, it kept coming back. So they decided to wash the unripened lot with brine to encourage the rogue mold and waited a month to see what would happen. The result was Red Hawk, a washed-rind cheese that commands nearly $20 a pound.

Named after a raptor that circles the skies above this hamlet near Tomales Bay, the accidental cheese won best in show out of 616 entries at the American Cheese Society’s Annual Conference last year. Happily in the cheese business, “you can start out trying to make one type,” Conley said, “but given your milk and your environment you get something else.”

Milk and environment have produced a lot of big cheeses for California. Red Hawk was just one of 11 California offerings awarded first-place medals at the nation’s most important cheese competition.

They spotlighted the growing importance of specialty and artisanal products to the state’s $8-billion industry, which churns out 1.8 billion pounds of mozzarella, Cheddar, Jack and hundreds of other varieties every year.

Artisanal and farmstead cheeses -- handcrafted in relatively small batches by cheese makers who do their work on or near dairy farms -- are increasingly in vogue. Blue cheese from Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Co., Gouda-style wheels produced by Pedrozo Dairy & Cheese Co. in Orland and bandage-wrapped Cheddar from Fiscalini Cheese Co. in Modesto are giving California a good name for cheese.

“It is like wine was two decades ago when California started winning the competitions in France,” said Christopher Blobaum, executive chef at Splashes restaurant at the Surf & Sand Resort in Laguna Beach.

“The cheeses from Cowgirl are like the cult Cabernets,” Blobaum said. “We are on allocation and we can’t get enough.”

Cheese isn’t new to the state. In fact, Monterey Jack was invented here in 1882 by a banker named David Jacks. Four of the world’s 10 largest cheese factories are located in the state, which next year is expected to surpass Wisconsin as the nation’s largest manufacturer of cheese.

That would put cheese in league with wine in the Golden State. It’s no surprise then that the California Milk Advisory Board, which is supported by the $4-billion dairy industry, is stealing a page from wine’s book: It has printed a “cheese country” map -- portions of Northern, Central and Southern California -- that highlights the creameries allowing tours and tasting.

There are a lot of wine and cheese parallels. Like fermenting wine, cheese making is a combination of science and art. Winemakers talk of terroir, the unique soil and microclimate of a vineyard, and how it influences the grapes and ultimately the wine. Cheese makers also now speak of terroir, in their case referring to the particular grasses consumed by grazing dairy cows and the unique microbiology and environment of their cheese-making plants.

Just as wineries market vintages from a single vineyard, cheese makers are producing single-herd cheese. Cowgirl, for example, buys all of its milk from a nearby organic dairy. And Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese relies solely on the milk from its own herd of 300 Holsteins that graze on a 700-acre farm in the salty, damp air above Tomales Bay. What’s more, Point Reyes Farmstead uses only “morning milk” and sells the herd’s afternoon production to dairy processors.

And like wine, France has been the historic yardstick by which artisanal cheese is measured, said John Winterman, who runs the cheese program at Restaurant Gary Danko in San Francisco.

Nightly sales of cheese plates at the restaurant have increased by about a third to 66 in the last two years. And where once the 16 to 20 selections hailed from France and other European countries, now as many as a third of the nightly list are Californian.

“It seems every time I place an order there is something new from California being offered,” Winterman said.

It could be a Dutch-style farm cheese called Boere Kaas from Winchester Cheese Co. near Temecula, a nettle-wrapped seasonal cheese called St. Pat from Cowgirl or a triple-cream Largo from celebrated cheese maker Soyoung Scanlan in Santa Rosa.

“We get a lot of people who ask about California cheese,” Winterman said. “There’s a huge call for it.”

That is all by design, said Nancy Fletcher, spokeswoman for the state milk board, sponsor of the “Happy Cows” television advertising campaign.

Since 1999, the board has spent $1 million nurturing an artisanal cheese industry in California. The idea, Fletcher said, is to boost the state’s reputation by focusing on the tiny, noteworthy top end.

For example, not all cheese is aged or even needs to be, but some really benefit from the process, and the board set out to prove that point. It selected several cheeses, aged them in a temperature- and humidity-controlled room for three to six months and then returned them to the makers to sample how the additional investment in time and money improved their products.

The board has sponsored cheese-making classes at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. At the giant Tulare Farm Show in 2002, it held seminars for dairy farmers on how to start a farmstead cheese operation.

The board also retained a consultant to advise farmers on market conditions and help them choose which cheeses to produce. And it lobbied well-regarded cheese makers to join California companies, including Mariano Gonzalez of Fiscalini, whose Cheddar won best farmstead cheese the last two years at the American Cheese Society contest. Before moving to Fiscalini, Gonzalez had spent seven years as head cheese maker at Vermont’s Shelburne Farms.

Another plum recruit was Monte McIntyre. Formerly head cheese maker at Maytag Dairy Farms in Iowa, he now produces blue cheese for Point Reyes Farmstead.

“California is an area for everything from fine food to wine,” McIntyre said. “It is a good place to work.”

The board’s investment has paid off, Fletcher said. The number of cow-milk cheese makers in the state has climbed to 64 from 50 in the last five years, and the number of farmsteads making cheese has grown to 10 from three. Moreover, the number of styles and varieties of cheese made in California during that time has risen to 250 from 130. Most of the increase has come from specialty and artisanal cheeses.

There’s one explanation for the success of the milk board’s program: There’s money to be made making specialty cheese.

Domestically made cheese averages about $4 a pound in grocery stores, said Jerry Dryer of J/D/G Consulting Inc. in Delray Beach, Fla. The nine bestselling varieties of specialty cheeses -- including Edam, Gouda and blue -- fetch an average $8 a pound. Artisanal and farmstead cheeses can command $9 to $20 a pound.

Whether it’s commodity Cheddar from a factory plant in Tulare or fresh mozzarella from Belifore Cheese Co. of Berkeley, it takes the same 1.2 gallons of milk to make a pound of cheese.

And by making cheese instead of selling the milk from his farm to a processor, Bob Giacomini of Point Reyes Farmstead has “doubled our income on a per-gallon basis.”

Point Reyes made its first pound of cheese almost four years ago. Today, it sells 350,000 pounds annually. It has even found a use for the crumbles that fall off its rounds of blue cheese during packaging -- they are bundled into plastic bags and sold to chefs who are looking for sprinkles to accent salads and other dishes.

Cowgirl entered the cheese-making business seven years ago and remains a small, high-end producer, making about 3,000 pounds a week. It has doubled production in the last year, co-owner Conley said, and cheese making goes on every day at its plant, a former barn along one of two main streets in Point Reyes.

There is a solid stream of visitors to the plant and cheese store. People don’t seem to mind paying the $19 a pound for its Red Hawk and $18 for Mt. Tam.

“People are being adventurous and are willing to try things they would not have just a couple of years ago -- things that are sticky and smelly,” co-owner Smith said. “It is just like when people started to drink those big red Cabernet wines.”