An array of artisan cheeses: Mt. Tam from Cowgirl Creamery (upper left) sits on top of Humboldt Fog's goat cheese; at right, a small round of Crotin from Redwood Hill tops a chunk of Original Blue from Pt. Reyes Farmstead.
Praise cheeses. They’re all around us. Here in the Bay Area, it’s not an exaggeration to say we’re in artisan cheese paradise.
Since the 1800s, when the missionaries brought dairy cattle to California, and immigrants from places like Portugal, Holland, and Italy brought their cheese-making traditions to these shores, the greater Bay Area has been one cheesy dream.
Personal Touch
Lynne Devereux, director of California’s Artisan Cheese Festival, held each March in Petaluma for the last three years, says that you hear the word artisan thrown around a lot these days, especially in relation to food. For her, artisan cheese is true to a tradition and is made in a quantity that allows some personal interaction with the food.
“Artisan cheese is not just a commodity made in a large plant where no human being can breathe around it or touch it,” she explains. “The cheese maker has the ability to work with it, style it.”
By that definition, Northern California is a haven of artisan cheese makers large and small. At this year’s Festival, twenty-six local cheese makers participated, from small start-ups working a small herd to bigger companies like Marin’s Cowgirl Creamery, which started small twelve years ago and is now one of the nation’s favorite artisan cheese companies.
Sue Conley, who founded Cowgirl with Peggy Smith, says she has seen her customer base expand its knowledge of handmade cheese.
“The thing we ask people to look at when they’re studying a cheese is to really think about the milk that the cheese is made with,” she says. “Think about the animal, the place it’s raised, how it’s raised. That will give you more insight into the final product than anything humans do to the milk.”
Of Its Place
Sue is talking about the terroir, a notion, common in the wine world, that geography—including elements such as climate and the distinctive qualities of the soil—plays an important part in the unique aspects of food produced in a certain region.
For instance, two of Cowgirl’s most distinctive cheeses, Mt. Tam (a buttery triple-cream, soft ripened cheese) and Red Hawk (a triple-cream, washed-rind cheese with a big, full flavor), couldn’t be made anywhere else.
Cowgirl Creamery's Mt. Tam with a delicious artisan blue cheese.
The same is true for Humboldt Fog, the popular three-week-aged goat cheese (with a distinctive line of vegetable ash through the middle) from Arcata’s Cypress Grove Chevre, a company founded by Mary Kheen a little more than twenty-five years ago, when she had four daughters and a small herd of Alpine goats. Now she has a booming business and a whole lot of fans. The process of learning about cheese, Mary says, is indeed a lot like learning about wine.
Learning The Cheese
“You pick what you like, then you can branch out from there,” says Mary, “Like wine, there’s a huge learning curve. You know how you can study the three-hundred fragrances in a glass of wine? You can do that with cheese. Begin with the basic: do you like cow, sheep, or goat’s milk? Do you like it hard, goopy, or fresh? That’s as technical as you need to be at the beginning.”
Taste The Difference
Expert artisan cheese makers advise novice artisan cheese eaters to find a great cheese shop where the staff is knowledgeable, and you’re allowed to taste your way through their shop.
One such shop is San Francisco’s Ray Bair’s Cheese Plus on Polk Street.
“We are lucky to live in the middle of a very fertile area for the production of great artisanal foods,” Ray notes, “made by folks who like to think differently about where food comes from and how it’s made.”
Bay Area cheese enthusiasts have a new option when it comes to expanding their cheese knowledge: The Cheese School of San Francisco, opened in 2006 by Sara Vivenzio, who previously worked as a cheese buyer with Bair at Cheese Plus.
Says Sara of the school, “There’s so much to learn about cheese, and the school is really incredible.”
Like fine artisan cheese itself, Bair says, classes are “as serious or as fun as you want them to be.”
Chad Jones is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in various local newspapers and Theatre Bay Area magazine. He reviews theater for TheaterDogs.net
