Origins, part 2: A quilted soul - How cheese changed my life forever.
Making raw sheep cheese in California.
This is the second installment of a series that will continue over the course of several months, detailing how my cheese path has ripened over the last 15 years of movement.
You can read Part One here.
You know you’re heading in the right direction when the path unfolds in front of you beautifully. Naturally. When life seems to assists you, offering encouragement and putting the things you need directly onto your path. You simply walk forward with confidence and faith, like a deer heading home in the dark along a trail carved into the earth by generations of hooves.
The more I got excited about cheese and put my effort into learning about it, the more the momentum built and the path became set. This manifested in synchronicities and opportunities that came out of what had appeared to be barren soil, like desert flowers bursting forth colorfully after years of drought. The seeds were always there, they just needed a bit of water and care and then………..POP! Life.
I was making cheddar at my first cheese job in downtown Seattle, and was pretty fed up with being there. I wanted to explore other options, and had a strong vision of living on a farm, working with animals and making raw milk cheese for a small business. The cheese plant suddenly had to shut down for a few weeks, so I decided to take a spontaneous train ride down to California to see my sister in Santa Cruz. Upon arriving, I began contacting every cheesemaker in the area, and was invited by Rebecca King who owns Garden Variety Cheese to come visit. Crossing into Monterey county south of Watsonville, passing conventional strawberry fields coated in black plastic, my sister and I came suddenly upon picturesque green hillsides grazed by fluffy white sheep. It smelled good, and to this day the aroma of sheep evokes fond memories of these early, exciting years.
We spent the afternoon making cheese and seeing the farm. As I left, Rebecca mentioned her cheesemaker had quit and that she was looking to hire a replacement. Without wasting time ruminating on it, I blurted out “I’d make cheese for you”. We discussed it via email and she told me the job was mine if I could move down to the farm ASAP. I’ll never forget the train ride back to Seattle. I sat writing in my journal, looking out the window while weighing my options. I was full of optimism and a sense of alignment and flow. It felt like by impulsively traveling to California and throwing myself out there, destiny had presented this opportunity. The small doubts were quickly overruled by the momentum of the journey. A common, grandparent like voice in my head laid it all out. “You will quit Beechers, move down to Monterey county, and make raw farmstead sheep cheese. This is what you’ve been asking for, right?”
When adventure calls, you have two options:
To stay…….. or go.
You are Bilbo Baggins, comfortable in the Shire, and then Gandalf shows up with a gang of dwarves and the invitation, the opening of the quest. As chance would have it, Peter Dixon was teaching a 3 day workshop at Garden Variety, and I arrived a few days before it commenced. Peter would later become a mentor of mine, in the ways of natural cheesemaking. If you haven’t had any cheese from Parish Hill, you need to find some. Like, now. I learned a great deal from the workshop, but didn’t fully appreciate Peter’s teachings at that point. Sometimes the full impact of a teaching can take years or decades to come to fruition.
A teacher can give you many seeds, plant them in your mind. But they may lay dormant for a long time, waiting for you to be ready, and then, suddenly….POP! Flowers.
Landing on the farm I hit the ground running, jumping into the work with gusto. I learned to make hard sheep cheeses in the small creamery, and quickly took on cheesemaking responsibilities. A particular joy for me was doing the work involved in aging cheese, keeping the cellar organized, and monitoring ripening as I flipped and washed the wheels. On Fridays we would select and cut up many of the 4 - 12 month old cheeses, and take them to various farmers markets over the weekend. Suddenly, I was working for a company I believed in, doing work that felt positive and inline with my values. Instead of being alienated from the product of my labor, I was seeing it through its whole journey from plants and animals to milk to cheese to mouths. It was incredibly rewarding to sell cheese directly to people who appreciated it, who were feeding this real food to their families.
Rather than simply being opposed to capitalism, while living a life of impersonal earning and consuming, I was participating in a regional economy at a level that felt right. To make food in a way that heals the land and sell it directly in local economies is a subversive act. Suddenly, I could talk about what I stood FOR, rather than against. I went from feeling pessimistic and defeated, to feeling empowered and motivated. This was the big flip, seeing the positive on the other side of all the negative I had been fixated on. Now I was working towards SOLUTIONS and ALTERNATIVES to the problems I had spent so much time studying. It caused a 180 degree turn in my thinking, and was a most enriching transformation. This from a job, where I was a paid employee. It was not even on my radar that this was possible.
I became obsessed with learning about the various commercial starter cultures that could be combined to make cheese, and thought these were the path to great and consistent flavor. I wanted to add more packets to cultivate the rinds that fascinated me, particularly those with orange, sticky, stinky “washed” rinds. These are formed by complex microbial communities, with salt-tolerant bacteria playing the starring role. I read recipes, and begged Rebecca to buy more cultures so I could try cultivating the rinds. I was fairly indoctrinated in the commercial starter, industrial mentality. I didn’t even know there was an alternative, and I think that is how most home and commercial-scale cheesemakers feel. I thought if you could monitor and control the variables of cheese, you could craft amazing ones. My experiments with cultivating washed rind ecologies using the packaged microbes didn’t work out. The best cheeses in the cave were the ones made without adding these “secondary ripening cultures”. These cheeses - made in a coastal area that gets heavy summer fog - developed their smear thanks to salt loving bacteria that are native to the milk in many parts of the California coast. All we had to do was wash the wheels with salt water and…… POP! Delightful washed rind sheep cheeses.
There was a lesson here that I didn’t yet have ears to hear, a seed representing the potential of natural cheesemaking, lying dormant in my heart, waiting for rain.
I did successfully improve the feta which we aged for a minimum of 60 days in tall plastic bins full of brine. I learned that this brine needed to have a similar mineral content and acidity to the cheeses aged in it. The brine tanks required maintenance, and had to be stirred and skimmed regularly. If the minerals were off, the cheeses got slimy. If the brine wasn’t sour enough or stirred too infrequently, rafts of yeast and mold grew on the surface, making the brine taste funky. Feta will only taste as good as the brine it ages in. After tightening this process we won an award for the cheese at ACS (the American Cheese Society conference), which I received while attending in North Carolina.
I was already on the hunt for another place to make cheese. Even though this job was gratifying and life altering, something was still missing. This would be a theme for everywhere I made cheese in America. Perhaps it’s actually a part of myself that is missing, that I have traveled so far searching for.
How many parts of our selves are missing?
If we search high and low, can we find them all?
Are they actually scattered around us, simply waiting for us to put them back together again?
In a new arrangement……
A quilted soul.
Exactly two years after moving to California, I turned 30, bought a mini-van, and planned a leveling up of the road trip adventures that had become my antidote to the depression that seems to creeps in after being in one place for an extended time. At ACS I had tasted this amazing sheep cheese from Colorado, and asked the chefs who make it if I could visit. They said yes, so I planned to end a four month dirtbag, van-dwelling pilgrimage through the American Southwest at their place.
Buying the mini-van, building a little home inside, and trip planning became my escape hatch from boredom and frustration. This represents the next ring of horizon expansion that began as a teenage punk with a skateboard, getting wasted and being nihilistic. From hitching and taking buses and trains, I now had my own home on wheels. The ring continues to expand, but I’ve become more comfortable, better equipped. I can live in my present van-home while in the states, and use it as a storage unit while I’m traveling in other countries. I owe it all to jumping into adventure, moving to California, and following the cheese. Everything in my life opened up once I pursued the unplanned, magnetic attraction to milk, and although my travels didn’t revolve around it yet, cheese was slowly was taking over my life, giving me a much needed sense of purpose.
The mycelium spreads slowly underground and then….Pop!! Mushrooms.
All it takes is a few good rains.
Parish Hill! I'll be there in a month or so. Best cheese I have ever eaten in America...
The grandparent like voice is so right. I have these short notes that say “I love you” from my grandmother that she wrote when I was so child. So simple, yet so rich for meditation.