Say Cheese

Artisan Cheesemaking at Egg Farm Dairy

By Cynthia Glover

Jonathan White and I are lunching at the local diner. "That's not my cheese," he accuses with characteristic zeal, pointing a finger at the orange goo on top of my tuna melt. We laugh. I've spent the morning at his Egg Farm Dairy in Peekskill, New York, learning the difference by helping him make cheese. Spooning fresh, soft, creamy curds into plastic rounds and pyramids gridded with holes. Listening to the constant splish, splish, splish as the whey drips out. Salting the fruits of yesterday's labor--officially green cheese, now-- after releasing the compacted curds from their molds. I can see what he means.
       Like all cheese, the stuff on my lunch plate is made from milk. But that's where the resemblance ends. This is the product of industrial processes, prize of the American quest for efficiency, consistency, and shelf life. White's cheese, a hand-made, artisanal product, is an altogether different breed. It reflects the vagaries of nature, with flavor varying according to the season and what the cows or sheep or goats have been eating, and it bears the irregular imprint of the human hands that make it.
       What especially interested me in Egg Farm Dairy, though, was White's philosophy of cheesemaking. "Not that we are historical re-creationists or anything," he says, "but we make cheese like the Hudson Valley farmsteaders made when they first settled in this area." His creamery is designed to give us a taste of his own locale.
       "The modern-day artisan cheese industry that began in the early 1980s in America was centered on reproducing French cheeses," he continues, still pointing that finger. "Egg Farm Dairy cheeses don't resemble French cheeses. It's just like American wines they are fuller-flavored than the French. The French might say our hand-made cheeses are blunt and insipid, but that is a matter of opinion. To me, they have a more well-developed flavor."

For White, an engineer by training, cheesemaking began as a hobby. His early experiments with homogenized milk in an apartment in Hoboken failed miserably. "As I was pouring the stuff down the toilet," he says, " I thought: Some day I'll live in the country near a neighbor with a cow, and I'll try this again."
       Ten years later in 1989, a move to Yorktown, north of New York City, brought him that very thing, a cow-owning neighbor, a musician-cum-gentleman farmer, with a problem man has faced since the earliest domestication of animals: excess milk. What to do with this most perishable liquid? How to preserve it's food value for future consumption? In neighborly fashion, White provided an answer. He began experimenting in earnest, turning out butter, cheese, and clabber, a farmstead form of cultivated cow's milk similar to creme fraiche.
       In 1993 on a whim, White entered his home-made butter in a competition at which Charlie Palmer, owner of the restaurant Aureole in New York, was a judge. He won the contest. And Palmer, taken with the taste and cooking properties of the product, asked White to supply his restaurant. Churned from cultured cream, or clabber, this butter is both richer and less oily than commercially produced sweet-cream butter, and it has a subtle, tangy aftertaste. But producing it in such quantities posed a challenge. "Gee," White gleefully recalls, "I'd been making it in two-pound batches in my Cuisinart and he wanted 300 pounds a month." For the fun of it, White whipped up a business plan for a small creamery and presented it to Palmer, who wrote a check on the spot, becoming the first investor in the fledgling Egg Farm Dairy. White became a full-time dairyman.
       Egg Farm Dairy has been no stranger to awards since then. Both its clabber and mascarpone, that butter-rich Italian cheese ("our only product that is a knock-off of something European," says White) used in confections like tiramisu, have won first prizes from the American Cheese Society. And his Muscoot, a wild-ripened, brie-like cheese, has won second prize.
       White suggested I try his recipe for Muscoot en Croute encased in a classic choux pastry crust. A surprisingly easy recipe, it makes excellent cocktail-hour fare served with a touch of mild chutney or a delightful salad course when warm, sensuously liquid slices top lightly dressed baby greens.

Jonathan White's Muscoot en Croute

Serves 10-12

1/4 pound cultured sweet butter
1 cup water
1 cup unbleached flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1-pound wheel Muscoot, well chilled
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
       Melt the butter and water in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Bring to a boil. Add flour and salt and stir vigorously until a smooth paste forms. Lower the heat and keep mixing until the paste is dry, no more than a minute or two. Be careful not to burn it.
       Transfer the paste to an electric mixer. Mix on high speed. While still mixing, add four eggs, one at a time, and mix until smooth. The dough should form a slow-bending peak when you remove the mixer paddle from the bowl.
       Coat the Muscoot with a 1/8-inch layer of the paste, covering all sides. Place it on parchment paper on top of a baking rack with a pan below to catch the drippings. Bake until golden, about 30 minutes. Cool outside of the oven for 20 minutes before serving.

Click here for an E-Z print version

Most of White's cheeses are wild-ripened, which means that they rely on natural mold always present in the air, rather than commercially produced bacterial and mold cultures, to initiate the ripening process. To understand how this works, it helps to know a little about how cheese -specifically soft, surface-ripened, cow's milk cheese like that produced by Egg Farm Dairy is made.
       First, fresh milk is pasteurized, as required by American law. (European cheeses are often made with unpasteurized milk.) It is then infused with a starter, a bacterial culture, that begins the souring process necessary to make curds. Once that process is underway, the enzyme rennet is added, causing the curds to clump together. The curds are then cut with something like a slotted spoon, so that the whey, the thin liquid part of the cultured milk, can more easily drain away. Spoonful by spoonful, the curds are transferred to plastic molds of various sizes and left to drain. Once firmed up, the curds now officially called cheese are removed from the molds to be salted, air dried, and then ripened, a process that takes anywhere from one to three months.
       At Egg Farm Dairy, the ripening room is a walk-in refrigerator rather than a farmstead's traditional root cellar. But the idea is the same: to let the cheese ripen, or age, at a constant temperature and humidity. It is here that the cheese attracts the airborne mold that enables it to form a downy rind, to become sooth and elastic inside, and, most importantly, to develop its flavor.
       White also wild-ripens cheese made elsewhere, including a Vermont cheddar and various cheeses from Portugal, Uruguay, and the Azores. Among the cheese made at Egg Farm Dairy itself is the Muscoot, plus Amram, which is a pocket-sized wheel reminiscent of Camembert; Amawalk, a ripened pyramid, and Peekskill Pyramid, which is a lightly aged cheese.

But it is White's glowing description of a Toasted Hollis Sandwich for One, made with a cheese whose nearest kin is Limburger, that inspired my next cooking project. I unwrapped the Hollis with great trepidation, thinking of Limburger and Liederkranz and that whole family of cheese as too stinky for words. One whiff left me hoping for a miraculous transformation when the cheese melted. Here is his recipe.

Toasted Hollis Sandwich for One

Serves 1

2 pieces of bread, preferably homemade
2 slices Hollis, about 1/8-inch thick
2 pats cultured butter

       Place the Hollis between the two slices of bread.
       Melt one pat of butter in your favorite frying pan over medium-low heat. Place the sandwich in the pan. Cook until golden, then add the second pat of butter to the pan and turn the sandwich to toast the other side.

Click here for an E-Z print version

I was well rewarded. The Hollis sandwich was an utter surprise. Mellowed by the heat, that pungent cheese had taken on a soft, rich, almost fruity character. It was delicate, and delicious.
       Such transformations are the essence of cheesemaking. And they are what led Jonathan White to turn his hobby into a business. "The act of taking a fresh, ephemeral liquid and turning it into a relatively stable solid is alchemy," he enthuses. "To this day, I still make cheese at home. And when the alarm goes off in the morning, I rush downstairs to see what has happened. We're talking about the transubstantiation of matter here. I find it irresistible." And so are his cheeses.

Return to Top