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2 1 October 2018 SNACKING NEWS SNACKING NEWS company, required him to do a lot of moving around Asia, and when her mother decided that she wanted to stop moving around so much and make a stable home for her children, she made that home in Taiwan, while her father moved to Korea to make a home base there. Her younger brother and sister stayed with their mother on Taiwan, coming to Korea to visit their father, but Chang won an international student fellowship to attend school in Korea. She was 18 in 1982 when her father applied to immigrate, with his family, to the United States through a program that awards residence in the U.S. to entrepreneurs who are prepared to invest in American business enterprises. "My father invested money. At that time, it was the only way to immigrate," Chang said. "He wanted a better life for his kids, but we weren't poor." Chang's father used his investment stake to open restau- rants in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado, and she started college in Georgia, eventually entering the Uni- versity of Georgia's medical school. In 1989, though, her brother, who was living in Boulder, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and Chang was called to Colorado to help care for her parents. She went to work for the family there until she burned out and told her family that they'd have to get along without her at the restaurant. "I told my dad I was going to walk out from the restaurant business," she said. "I felt like I was standing at a red, yellow, green light." While she was figuring out what she wanted to do next, she accompanied her daughter's Brownie troop on a field trip to Niwot Farm that sealed her fate. "I saw the baby goats, and I said, 'This is what I want," she said. "When I went to Niwot Farm, all I wanted was to take care of the baby goats." Once she had a direction, her path took her to Haystack's Longmont creamery, which was just open- ing up and needed people. They offered her a chance to work in the cheese room. "All I did was prepare the frozen curd," she said. She asked the cheesmaker if there was something more she could do, and that's when she started training to become a cheesemaker. In those early days, she faced some skepticism about whether someone with her ethnic background, and with the lactose intolerance that frequently goes with it, was suited to be a cheesemaker. That skepticism had its roots in racism, Chang is sure, but she let that motivate rather than discourage her. "There's a lot of American people who don't eat cheese," she'd point out. "I just ignored it. I told myself, 'Okay, I'll prove myself.... I'm not trying to compete with other people. I'm trying to do my best.... It's not that I try to win. I try to do my best." She moved to Haystack Mountain Creamery 14 years ago and became Head Cheesemaker in 2006. Today, she says that most of what she's learned about making cheese came off the Internet. "She's worked her butt off, and people are recognizing that," said Chuck Hellmer, President of Haystack Mountain Creamery since 2009. "A lot of people love Jackie. She's a very humble person. She's like a superstar in the cheese industry – and she doesn't get it.... People were very willing to teach her, but she's learned more from her own discipline and will than from any of the other cheesemakers that Haystack had before her.... She's self-made – that's for sure." At Haystack Creamery, her winter work week is only about 45 hours a week. In the summertime, though, her days start at 7 a.m. and end at 6:00 or 6:30, depending on when the day's milk arrives, but it's not unusual for it to be 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. before she goes home at night. Her 3,500-pound vat – cut down from a larger vat so that she can stir her curd by hand rather than using the automated agitator that's common in other creameries – makes 350 pounds of Gold Hill twice a week. Twice a week, Chang makes Queso de Mano, a raw goat milk cheese similar to Gold Hill, although made with a dif- ferent culture. Twice a week, she makes another cheese, often a Chile Jack. She works five days a week, but sometimes it's six days, and that doesn't count the two or three hours she spends at the creamery on her days off when she stops by to take the cheese out of the brine or just to make sure that everything's going well. "If you have kids, do you have an off day? No, you don't have an off day," she said. "They are all my babies. Somebody has to do it." Washed-rind cheeses are very finicky, and while they can be just fine one day, they can be headed for disaster the next, she said. The only way to know for sure what's happening in the creamery is to be there with eyes and nose open. Some days, the aging room where the wheels of washed-rind cheeses are working their magic smells like turnips, but sometimes it smells more like over- ripened mango. Chang can tell by the smell if the affineur has skipped a day with the washing. In the aging room for natural rind cheeses, she sometimes smells hay. "That's terroir," she said. "Sometimes I smell celery." She makes a total of 27 to 30 different cheeses, includ- ing a Gouda that she's still testing. That's a lot of cheeses for one creamery to make – and even for two – and al- though the array makes it possible for Haystack Mountain to offer its local market a wide variety of cheeses, it com- plicates the logistics of sourcing the milk, cream and cul- tures for all of them. "It's a double-edged sword that Jackie has the versatility to make all those cheeses. It's neat to be able to go to a market and say that for almost any taste they want, we have a cheese," Hellmer said. "It just requires more effort." They simplify some of the logistics by using only mi- crobial rennet for all of the cheeses, which cuts down on the chance that someone in the cheese room is going to reach for the wrong rennet during the make, but it also presents some technical challenges for the aged cheeses. "It's easy to get bitter flavors from the microbial rennet if you don't know what you're doing," Hellmer said. "It does take more knowledge and skill and discipline.... It's easier to do it that way than have people trying to make a decision about the rennet." Goat milk cheeses are made seasonally in the summer – a total of about 250,000 pounds a year. Of all her cheeses, Chang prefers the goats. Her body tolerates them better than cow milk cheeses, the milk is more interesting to work with, and she feels that the flavors of the goat milk cheeses are more sophisticated and nuanced. Chang also makes cow milk cheeses with organic cow milk from Aurora Dairy, so that the creamery can stay busy year-round. "We make cow cheese just to keep good employees," Chang said. "That's the only reason we make cow cheese – to keep the good employees so they don't quit." As a result, Haystack Mountain's 11-member staff includes two people who've been there more than 10 years and another few who've been there more than five years. It's particularly important for the creamery to keep a consistent staff because the goat milk that makes the cheeses that Chang prefers to make comes from a dairy at the Colorado Correctional Institution that's staffed prima- rily by inmates. Haystack Mountain pays fair market value for the goat milk, and it's the only available supply in Colorado, Hellmer said. Turnover in the inmate staff, though, guarantees some inconsistencies in the quality of milk that Haystack Moun- tain's tanker truck picks up at the prison. "It's just like if you're making cheese and you keep changing the cheese- maker – it's going to be inconsistent," Chang said. Each load of milk is tested when it arrives at the cream- ery, but by the time the results come back from the labo- ratory, it's already been made into cheese, so the raw milk cheeses are tested again at 60 days, which is the earliest they can legally be sold. "We go through lots of tests be- fore we release a batch of raw milk cheese because we're just not in control of the milk supply," Chang said. "With raw milk you're at the mercy of the care that the goats have had, what they've been eating." It was that inconsistency that led to the development of Gold Hill, which is made from pasteurized milk, Hellmer said. "Jackie and I knew there were times when the milk quality just wasn't good enough for raw milk cheese. There were cultures she could add that would give it some additional flavors," he said. "Then we aged it, and it turned out to be a pretty good cheese." Gold Hill is normally sold when it's six months old, but the particular wheel that the World Cheese Awards judges named "Best American Cheese" was aged for nine months. Chang entered the cheese not expecting to win any award at all – she just wanted the judges' notes. "We don't enter a lot. If we win, we win. If we don't, we don't," she said. "That was just a surprise." Before the win, Gold Hill was sold mostly to local restaurants, but publicity surrounding the award now draws a steady stream of tourists to the creamery so they can peer thorough the cheese room's windows to watch Chang stirring her vat. After their tour, they often want to buy a wedge of Gold Hill. "After we won, I started to have some confidence so we could increase production," she said. "It's a cheese we make from Colorado milk," Hellmer added, "so it's a statewide phenomenon that everyone from the state of Colorado should share – that's my point of view." n