Oser Communications Group

The Cheese Guide 11 while she continued making and selling more cheese, and she was still reeling. There were no reports of illness resulting from the contamination, but the recall itself cost the creamery about $200,000 and nearly put Doughty out of business. By the time I visited with her in mid-2015, she'd scrubbed her creamery from top to bottom, changed a good many of her operating practices, and was back in business, but she'd cashed in everything she owned to get there, and she couldn't afford for one more thing to go wrong. She seemed wounded then, and she could barely hold back the tears when she told me how angry she was that the FDA hadn't let her know about the problem sooner and, instead, let her keep buying milk to make cheese that ultimately ended up in the landfill. That delay increased both her losses and the chances that someone could have been sickened by the cheese they'd bought before she could recall it from the market. She'd started making Buff Blue, a blue cheese made from water buffalo milk, right around the time her world was falling in on her in late 2014. A friend who owned one of the few water buffalo dairy herds in the U.S. had been urging her to try making cheese with some of his milk. During the summer, he uses his milk to make gelato that sells in northern California specialty shops, but demand for gelato declines during the winter, leaving him with a milk surplus that he wanted to sell her. Doughty told him no at first, since she makes exclusively American Originals cheeses and had less than no interest in making mozzarella di bufala, which is what cheesemakers usually do with water buffalo milk. But he kept asking her, and she kept thinking about it and finally decided to try making a water buffalo blue cheese. She'd made blue cheese from sheep's milk before, but other than that experience, she had no real guidance, since the literature that has been written about making cheese from water buffalo milk is all in Italian and she doesn't speak the language. That left trial and error as her experiment strategy. She did some experiments with different strains of Penicillium roqueforti, the mold that puts the blue in blue cheese, until she found one that produced the flavor she liked, she learned how to skate her way around her creamery on the thin film of water buffalo butterfat that found its way everywhere whenever she handled the milk, and she named her new cheese Buff Blue. When she had a cheese she liked, she sent it to the World Cheese Awards, where it won a bronze medal in its first competition. In 2015, Buff Blue won a third place award in its subcategory for blue cheeses made from milks other than cows' in the ACS competition. This year, it won a first-place award in its category for blue-veined cheeses made from sheep's, mixed or other milks and then went on to tie for second place in the best of show category. It's a unique cheese – the only blue cheese made from water buffalo milk on the American market, and its quantity is severely limited by the gallon of milk a day that her friend gets from each of his water buffalo. "I'm going to tell him, 'Dude, you need to increase your herd,'" Doughty said. Listeria was a topic of discussion several times at this year's Cheese Camp, including during the FDA Update that's an annual feature of the conference and during the workshop in which Doughty shared her experience with her fellow cheesemakers. Of all the possible causes of foodborne illness related to cheese, Listeria monocytogenes is of particular concern, both because it's capable of surviving in environments that kill other bacteria and because the potential consequences of listeriosis, the illness caused by the bacteria, are so serious: listeriosis can result to fetal loss in pregnant women and to serious illness or death in people who are elderly or have compromised immune systems. This year, Dr. Nega Beru, Director of the Office of Food Safety in the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, was a guest speaker for the annual FDA presentation that many of the cheesemakers attend with a blend of anxiety and reluctant concession to necessity with which they might otherwise view their annual dental exam. The general assembly room was filled early with both cheesemakers and retailers gathered for the latest intelligence on what many regard as the agency's war on raw milk cheeses, a crusade that they believe ignores millennia of history of cheese as a safe food for an unnecessary, ignorant and ultimately futile effort to eliminate all risk of foodborne illness for the American consumer. Humans have been making cheese since about 6500 B.C. Ceramic sieves of the kind used into the modern era for separating curds from whey are abundant in the archaeological record, and analyses of the residues on pottery shards dating from around 6500 to 6000 B.C. confirm that the pots were used to store processed dairy products, most likely cheese and ghee. Today's cheesemaking grows out of the body of knowledge that has been accumulating for all of those 8,000 years and more. The milk is warmed in a stainless steel or copper vat instead of in a clay pot over an open fire, the cheese is aged in a concrete room that uses climate control equipment to replicate the conditions of a natural cave, and it's monitored along the way with sophisticated laboratory equipment, but it's still a human being who scatters salt over the curds and who eyeballs the curd to decide if it's ready to go into the molds. A human nose monitors the smells in the cheese room that indicate the health of the microorganism community that transforms the milk into cheese, human hands flip the cheese wheels as they're aging to be sure of a uniform paste, and it's a human being who ultimately tastes the cheese to decide if it's ready to go to market. This means that much of the artisanal cheesemaking across the country, in Wisconsin, in California, in Vermont and New York, in Missouri and Georgia, simply pauses for a few days every July so the cheesemakers can go to this annual meeting. These cheesemakers insist that if the FDA were to regulate raw milk cheeses out of the American market, what would go along with them are the complex flavors that only develop through the interplay of the enzymes and proteins comprising raw milk with beneficial microorganisms from the surrounding environment that create the fermentation that turns raw milk into the complex living entity that is an unpasteurized cheese. It's those complex flavors that are now enabling artisanal American cheeses to compete with

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