Issue link: http://osercommunicationsgroup.uberflip.com/i/789177
NATURALLY HEALTHY www.gourmetnews.com n MARCH 2017 n GOURMET NEWS N H 1 7 0 Rockin' and Rollin' in the House that Humboldt Fog Built By Lorrie Baumann Cypress Grove originally started in 1983 in a couple of old barns in McKinleyville, Cal- ifornia, before moving 13 years ago to its present-day home in Arcata, a small agricul- tural community just north of Eureka and just south of the border between California and Oregon. "We realized we needed a proper cheesemaking facility," says Cody Wandel, Cypress Grove Quality Technician. "That gave us our first purpose-built cheese fa- cility.... Our kind of cheese is very difficult to make and get to market in good condi- tion. We've been evolving our ability to provide the optimum environment for the cheese." In those days, Cypress Grove Chevre, as it was known then, consisted of about 15 or 20 people following the lead of Founder Mary Keehn in making high quality goat cheeses that adventurous eaters who weren't familiar with goat milk cheeses found easy to love. An American food movement that valued the local, the sustainable, the artisanal, had just started gathering momentum, and Cypress Grove's Humboldt Fog exploded into the scene as an American Original with aesthetics that combined a visually striking appearance with a mellow flavor that reminded precisely no one of the barnyard. "We were there and we were well established," Wandel says "People in America decided they were will- ing to give goat cheese a try." Today, Cypress Grove is owned by Swiss holding company Emmi, a company with majority ownership by a cooperative of farmers and dairy operators that bought Cypress Grove from Keehn in 2010. Cy- press Grove now employs over 70 people, including those at a new demonstration dairy made possible by Emmi's capital in- vestment, and Keehn is still the spiritual leader guiding the values that appeal to consumers concerned about the environ- ment and social justice as well as flavor. "Emmi's model is not to be involved in the day-to-day, so we really operate as an au- tonomous company," Wandel says. "It's been one of the challenges – how to grow and keep the sense of intimacy we all used to have with Mary back in the old days.... We pretty much are rolling the way we al- ways did.... It's very important that our goat cheese is the best you can get." "The goal of an artisan cheesemaker is to create a cheese that is roughly the same every time, as opposed to a commodity cheese, which is exactly the same every time," he continues. "All of our cheeses are almost en- tirely hand-made, and they're all made in the same process we've always made." Cypress Grove's cheeses include the fresh chevres that were among the first products that Keehn made when she found herself with a herd of show goats and more milk than she and her family could use. "I started raising goats as a show herd, but if you have enough animals to have a strong genetic base, it's too much milk to drink," she says. Her first thought was to sell the milk locally, but it was quickly apparent that there wasn't enough of a local market for fluid goat milk, so Keehn began making cheese and selling it to retailers wherever she could find them, which was sometimes at the Winter Fancy Food Show, where she'd bring cheese in ice chests – or even in her purse – and urge show attendees to have a taste. "From the very beginning, I was selling out of the area," she says. "I don't know why we survived. The cheese was always good, but nobody liked it then.... If you have goats, you're a little stub- born in the first place – and weird." Then came a chance for Keehn to go to France and learn more about traditional Euro- pean cheeses, in- cluding the Morbier that was something of an inspiration for Humboldt Fog. Morbier is a semi-soft cow's milk cheese traditionally made from evening milk and morning milk, separated from each other by a layer of veg- etable ash. On her way home from that trip, Keehn had a dream in which she saw, almost photographically, an image of a goat cheese with a black layer of vegetable ash bisecting it like the coastal fog layer that frequently floats among the hills around her Humboldt County home. "The naivety of it – it's wrong in many ways," she reflects now. "I didn't know what I didn't know." "Nobody liked it for quite a while," she adds. "We threw away a lot of cheese." Some of the people who did like it, though, were rather influential: New York Times food critic Florence Fabricant men- tioned Humboldt Fog in a 1997 article about growing interest in fine cheeses, and Russ Parsons, a former food editor and columnist for the Los Angeles Times, asked Keehn to send some to Julia Child for her birthday. "She happened to taste it, and she liked it," Keehn says. Humboldt Fog is still made in essentially the same way that it was in those early days: by hand, by cheesemakers who are asked to remember that they're not just making cheese – they're making Humboldt Fog. There are a couple of differences: the cheese is now inoculated with some Geotrichum mold as well as the Penicillium culture in its original recipe, which extends its shelf life a little bit without affecting its flavor, and Cy- press Grove is making – and selling – a great deal more of it now that Humboldt Fog has become one of America's most popular artisanal cheeses. "It just takes time and really sticking with what you care about," Keehn says. The path from Cypress Grove's earliest days is marked along the way by new cheeses, some of which are no longer made, although they're remembered in plaques outside the meeting rooms in Cy- press Groves' new offices. Truffle Tremor, another aged goat cheese that's fancied up with the addition of real truffle pieces for an earthy taste of knee-buckling decadence, is a hearty survivor of a ruthless market. Truffle Tremor started as an experiment in whether truffles and goat cheese could find happiness together, and it wasn't exactly love at first sight, Keehn remembers. She added some truffles to fresh chevre and realized im- mediately that the bright, clean flavors of her chevre and the mellow earthiness of the truf- fles conflicted, as did the contrasting textures of the truffles and the fresh cheese. "It was like a fight in your mouth," she said. "It was so bad." Keehn responded by trying the same strat- egy that worked for the kids in "The Parent Trap" – putting the pair she loved away by themselves so they could fight it out, in the hope that maybe they'd find a way to get along. Two or three weeks later, she brought the aged truffled cheese out into a staff meet- ing and asked people what they thought. "We tried this cheese – I swear, this was my, 'You coulda heard a pin drop' moment," recalls Cypress Grove Sales Director Bob McCall. "Nobody said a word for a long time, and then somebody just said, 'I think you have a winner.'" "I love it when they do the happy dance," Keehn adds. "I don't believe in doing some- thing unless you can really knock it out of the park. There's no need for another mediocre cheese.... For us, cheese is a vehi- cle to make people's lives happier." Taste the Family Farms Behind Minerva Dairy Butters By Lorrie Baumann Minerva Dairy's Amish Roll Butter offers a taste of history. Adam Mueller, who runs Minerva Dairy with his sister Venae Watts, is a fifth-generation member of the family who founded the dairy in 1894. It is the old- est family-owned dairy in the U.S. "We make more product today than we used to, but we still make it in batch churns, so the texture and the flavor profile of the butter is the same as it was since the beginning," he says. Minerva Dairy is located in northeastern Ohio, in a part of the country settled by fam- ily farmers who found the area favorable for raising small dairy herds. Today, about 70 of those family farmers are supplying Minerva Dairy with the milk that provides the cream that the dairy turns into its butter. They're all raising their cows on pasture, with a typical herd size of 50 cows. "We're very proud to be working with them. If they couldn't exist, we couldn't exist either. It's a symbiotic re- lationship," Mueller says. "When you know that your butter is coming from Minerva Dairy, you also know that the milk is coming from pasture-raised cows with the freedom to roam in and out of the barn – they have a freedom of lifestyle. That's why we prefer 'pasture-raised' much more than 'grass-fed.' It's not just about the feed of the animal – it's about the cow's lifestyle. Cows need to have fresh air and the option to move around, just like they did a hundred years ago." Minerva Dairy uses that milk to make its Amish Roll Butter in small-batch churns that preserve the butterfat that's lost in the high- speed process used to make commodity but- ter. The result is a butter that's 84 percent butterfat and has all the flavor and texture of an artisanal product. That's why it's called "Amish Roll" Butter – in this context, "Amish" is a dairy industry term that signi- fies high butterfat and traditional churning rather than a religion or culture. The butter is salted with sea salt, which contributes a lot of salty flavor for the amount of salt that's actually added. While Minerva Dairy cleaves to tradition with its Amish Roll Butter, the most recent additions to its product line represent a de- parture – with butters in- fused with flavors in the churn. "All the flavors are made right in the churn. That's a big dis- tinction about our opera- tion – it's not butter that's incorporated with flavors at another time," Mueller says. "It is all natural-fla- vored butter. We don't use any blends; we don't use any preservatives; we don't use any oils. It's just the butter that you've al- ways known from Minerva Dairy with those different flavors. We're not using any processed or imitation ingredients." The flavored line includes Smoked Butter, which is cold-smoked with maple, and Gar- lic Herb Butter, both of which are typically used as finishing butters to be melted over a steak or perhaps some grilled vegetables. "Anywhere you might envision using butter, we're able to lighten that up and give a dif- ferent flair to the recipes," Mueller says. "We're the only smoked butter out there. You can imagine how difficult it is to smoke but- ter and not have it melt. We did a lot of work to figure out how to do it and have it retain its shape." Along with those flavors, which are avail- able year-round, Minerva Dairy makes some seasonal flavors, with Cinna- mon Honey Butter coming out this spring for a limited time. "It's more of a breakfast butter. You're going to be using it on your bagels or your toast," Mueller says. "With the cinnamon honey, other people might use honey extract that's not even real honey. We use actual, pure honey." "We have a really fun time developing new flavors. We have a couple of different flavors that we're working on for our next seasonal offering," he adds. Rumor has it that those flavors might be sriracha and saf- fron, although Mueller didn't confirm this. "One of my joys is to be able to walk around with samples and get everyone's input. It's a company-wide effort," he says. Minerva Dairy's products are distributed throughout an area bounded generally by Maine in the northeast, Florida in the south- east, Texas in the southwest and Wisconsin on the northwest. "We're not necessarily going after the commodity market," Mueller says. "We are looking at consumers who want to know the entire food chain." For more information, visit www.minerva dairy.com or call 330.868.4196.