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| Say 'fromage': Wheels of sheep cheese ripen underground at Vermont Shepherd. Mima Mohammed |
Stopping along Vermonts Cheese Trail
Vermont Shepherd owner David Major credits an American poet for his cheesemaking lifestyle.
from the October 24, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Cheese is made a few times a week.A starter culture of bacteria is added to fresh sheep's milk to begin the fermentation process. Rennet then coagulates the milk into curds (the byproduct whey can be used as a food additive or in animal feed). The curds are gathered, drained, and molded by hand into wheel shapes. No additives are used.
The wheels of fresh cheese are then salted and set to ripen on wooden boards in a special cave that Major dug four feet underground.
One enters the cave by ducking under grape vines and passing through a bright red door. The air is damp and cool – perfect conditions for ripening cheeses to their full flavor. Wheels of cheese rest on wooden shelves, each wheel resembling a circular loaf of bread. The wheels are turned every other day and a brine wash is applied every week by an affineur ("cheese ripener," in French). This is so the cheeses will develop a natural, edible rind. The cave can hold up to 20,000 pounds of aging cheese.
Major gingerly picks up cheese wheels to explain the brine process, but only after he has washed his hands thoroughly. Extremely clean conditions are essential to the production of cheese, he says. Any slight contamination will be evident once the cheese has been sitting in the cave for a few days.
Major has help – farm hands and additional workers during the busy summer season. He also gets assistance from his family: Wife Yesenia and their children work as well.
Additional "staff" include the shaggy salt-and-pepper border collies that corral the sheep for their morning and afternoon milking. The border collies stay with the flock during the day to protect it from marauding coyotes in the area. The dogs greet Major enthusiastically, bounding up and down at the sight of him.
The sheep are rotated among pastures every day, and Major stresses the importance of what the sheep eat to the quality of the milk they produce.
"Each pasture is different; most have thyme, bluegrass, and alfalfa," Major says as he plucks blades of grass from a pasture. "The taste of the cheese will definitely differ depending what the sheep have eaten."
As is their privilege, the Majors get to enjoy adding fresh sheep's milk to their blackberry tea in the morning, right after the sheep have been milked. But on the whole, Major and his family don't eat a lot of the cheese they make. For one thing, the cheeses are pricey, costing from $100 to $150 apiece. But they do enjoy an occasional treat, eating cheese with freshly baked bread or incorporating cheese into pesto for their favorite pasta dish. The cheese can also be made into salad dressing or used as an ingredient in salads.
While Vermont's Cheese Trail may be an attempt to model the vineyard tours of California's Napa Valley, the similarities are few. Not many of these artisanal cheese operations could accommodate tour groups, and the farms are so widely spread that it would be difficult to visit more than one in a day. So even though the artisanal cheese movement in Vermont continues to flourish, the best option for most may be to sample the cheeses at cheese stores or farmers' markets, rather than trying to pay a visit to the farms.
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