TMSRCM Project

If I'd never met Terri Hall, Team Leader in Specialty at Whole Foods Market Marlton, NJ, I'd probably still be eating Cabot 50% light pseudo cheddar cheese with crackers as my sole source of cheese indulgence. Today, I'm an equal opportunity cheese monger—fresh, soft, hard, nutty, creamy, barn yardy, stinky, mushroomy, grassy, buttery, tangy, you name it, I'll try it. And as much as I dig tasting and talking feta, blue, and cheddar, I'd never thought about actually making my own other than some quick curd ricotta on the kitchen stove.

That is, until I met Linda and Larry Faillace of Three Shepherds Farm in Warren, Vt. Linda and Larry have taught the techniques, philosophy, and gastronomic delight of artisanal cheesemaking to more than 1000 students from North America, Scotland, Ireland, Columbia, Pakistan, Kuwait, India, and the Middle East. After three intense days in their cheese-making room, I had visions of my own small cheese business. I wondered aloud to my wife if my dog would mind sharing the backyard with my newly acquired dairy goats. I even talked about how we would convert the basement into a cheese cave for aging my soon-to-be award winning farmhouse Gouda by hacking through the concrete foundation to the 55'ish degree earth on the other side.

Filled with enthusiasm, I bought gallon upon gallon of organic milk, put a small gas stove in the basement, and threw myself into the process. I quickly realized that my dream business had one major drawback: Real cheese making is wicked tough and takes dedication as well as an understanding that it's not a static process or exact science that is easily replicated time after time. Companies like McDonalds spend millions of dollars annually ensuring that their products taste exactly the same wherever they are sold across the country, because that is what the consumer expects when they enter a McDonalds-consistency. Multiple distributors are charged the task of matching each others taste profiles from everything like buns, to pickles, to condiments. BORING! Cheese? Not going to happen on a small scale as factors such as pH, humidity, moisture, salt, temperature, curd size and drain rate (time) all play a significant factor in the taste of the final product. There's a lot of chemistry to ponder; some seriously intense temperature monitoring and note taking, and a ton of patience needed before you can slap an edible end result to milk chemistry in motion.

Of course, I also had some early success. My third batch of comparably easy-to-make ricotta was spot-on smooth, with just a hint of residual sweetness. My second attempt at mozzarella using raw milk and a self learned short cut, yielded a firm and milky-tasting product that fared well in a Caprese salad and melted beautifully on a grilled tomato and cheese sandwich. Not-so-rella was born! Today, I have high hopes for my soft ripened cow's milk cheese that I recently debuted with team members at Whole Foods.

This creation, drained and aged for a short time the confines of my basement, basically yields three VERY edible cheeses from one gallon of Whole Foods 365 Organic Whole Milk, utilizing 4 basic ingredients; milk, starter culture, citric acid and calf rennet.

The first cheese, a soft ripened cow's milk cheese with Italian herbs that drained in a ricotta basket is silky smooth and mild, and that same cheese (the second cheese) drained in heart-shaped molds with smaller draining holes yields a much more tangy, soft-ripened cheese that mimics a fresh chevre. The third cheese, Quark(in the bag), is a simple yet very versatile cheese that I whipped and then combined with cherry preserves for a decadent, yet light dessert.


I shared the two soft-ripened cheeses with numerous team members from Whole Foods, Marlton. Once the votes were tallied, it was almost dead even, with the younger demographic opting for the tangy rendition and the more mature folk giving the nod to the milder counter part. My goal here was multi-faceted. First, I wanted to receive objective opinions on the cheese from people.(I told numerous team members that it was a new cheese that we had just received in Specialty, not mentioning anything about being made in my basement). Second, I wanted to utilize the feedback in determining whether or not I should move forward in an attempt to someday market this cheese as a "team member" made cheese at Whole Foods.


Overall, the feedback was super positive and leaves me yearning to learn more about this type of cheese and how to improve and refine the process for larger batch production. I have enrolled in a french cheese making class at Three Shepherds in Vermont the third weekend in August where a good portion of the class will be spent making softer cheeses with similar profiles to the one I would like to eventually make and sell at the retail level.