Older and Sharper

“The older I get, the sharper I like it,” says Snook, in the cheese house at Pleasant Valley Farm near Ferndale. “At my house, I’m eating a 15-month-old Mutschli.”

As she packs curd into molds, Snook talks about the cheese that she’s made for the last 20 years. Today she is making gouda, which will be five months old by Christmas. On other days she makes a farmstead cheese from a French culture, or a Mutschli, using a Swiss culture and recipe. She also makes flavored goudas and a Norwegian holiday cheese with cloves, cumin, and caraway. (This cheese, Snook instructs, should be eaten as dessert, with ginger cookies or dark beer.)

Because she makes her cheese from unpasteurized milk, it must be aged at least 60 days before sale. That is fortunate for us. Her aged gouda is divine—rich, complex, and tangy.

Snook is adamant about her milk. “You can make a good cheese with pasteurized milk,” she says, quoting another cheese maker. “You can make a better cheese with unpasteurized.”

Cheese from unpasteurized milk is a living product, she says. “It leaves you satisfied. When you pasteurize, you kill all the good stuff, too.”

Although Snook’s observation echoes one of the principal controversies in cheese making, the fact that WSU and Beecher’s use pasteurized milk complicates the argument.

Snook’s father, George Train, who milks the farm’s 70 cows, attended WSU in the 1950s and was a member of CUDS. Train and his wife Dolores bought the farm in 1963 and started building a herd, which now numbers about 70, a mix of Jersey, Guernsey, Brown Swiss, Holstein, and Milking Shorthorn. Originally, the Trains bottled and delivered milk. But Train figured there had to be a way to get more value from his milk. He decided to make cheese. In spite of the skepticism of the Creamery manager at the time, whom Train consulted, he forged ahead, experimenting with different cultures and working toward the fine cheese made by his daughter today.

Snook packs the curds into rounded molds and stacks them nine high, then places a metal weight on top and leaves them for two hours. Tomorrow she will soak them in brine for 24 to 48 hours, then coat them in wax and place them in the aging room.

Aging is what turns the bland, rubbery curds into anything from simple workaday cheese to works of gustatory art, again depending on the ingredients and the cheese maker.

After the first three weeks or so, most of the bacteria have died, having consumed the nutrients that they can use. But the enzymes they produced continue to break down the fat and protein into fatty acids, peptides, and some amino acids. It is this process from which the flavor develops.

Snook makes 130 pounds of cheese a day, four days a week. Beecher’s sells about 80 pounds a month. Most of the rest of their cheese is sold through their farm store, though at Christmas their cheese goes worldwide. This in spite of their not advertising at all. There is no Pleasant Valley Web site. But the New York Times food editor has visited the farm a couple of times. With such occasional coverage and word of mouth, the only business problem Pleasant Valley seems to have is not being able to produce enough cheese to keep the aging room full.

Later, in the house, we taste Snook’s cheeses chronologically. Two months. Nice flavor, mild, creamy. Six months. Umm. Getting interesting, a little sharpness developing.

And a year. Yes. This is what getting older is really all about.

The Time is Ripe

The dairy industry has just gone through a century of consolidation, says Marc Bates. As an industry matures, it consolidates. The result is the identical-looking and -tasting cheddars and jacks that filled grocery store coolers not too long ago.

But that was then. Fortunately, we live on the downside of that cycle. Lack of diversity can last only so long. Those industrial cheeses are still clogging up the coolers, but joining them are fine, deeply luxurious farmstead cheeses from around the country. The bottom end of the market, says Bates, is opening up again.

Industry preference for consistency and shelf life over flavor and variety has provided opportunity.

“We also have organic and sustainable ag movements encouraging small manufacturers,” says Bates. “Everything is ripe for this to happen.”

We may not have reached cheese heaven quite yet. But we’re well past the purgatory of cheese sameness. There is a lot more cheese to go with our wine than there was a few years ago. Besides the cheese course alumni mentioned earlier, Pierre Louis Monteillet, who attended this year’s cheese making class, is making a fine goat cheese in Dayton. The already legendary Sally Jackson in Omak produces eccentric cow, goat, and sheep cheeses that hold their own with the finest cheese in the world. Appel Farms in Lynden, Estrella Family Creamery in Montesano, Grace Harbor Farms in Blaine, Port Madison Farm on Bainbridge Island, and White Oak Farmstead in Battle Ground are all building Washington’s new cheese culture.

And of course, all along we’ve had Cougar Gold, rich, tangy, with that smooth creamy finish. We live in a wonderful time.

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Photo Gallery:
Making Cougar Gold

Fortunately, says Pleasant Valley Farm's Joyce Snook, the Creamery's cheese-making class scientifically confirmed the practices she has honed over the past 20 years. Photo by Tim Steury.