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Cheese Conference Chronicles

Wednesday, August 1. I’m in Burlington, Vermont this week for the annual conference of the American Cheese Society. Some of you may remember that last year’s conference was in Portland, and that for a week the area was swarming with cheese makers and mongers. The conference is terrific for meeting cheesemakers and tasting their products. Over the next few days, I’ll be able to taste hundreds of cheeses — many of which are produced on such a small scale that they are only available through their local farmers’ markets (so we won’t be able to offer them to you at Foster & Dobbs…) One of the things I especially enjoy about the conference is that I learn things that I might not otherwise ever have occasion to consider, and I thought you might enjoy learning a few of those tidbits as well.

This morning, I took a tour to two farmstead creameries: Neighborly Farms and Woodstock Water Buffalo. As the bus toodled along the winding roads, passing the ubiquitous steepled churches and tiny townships, I snoozed to the murmur of my colleagues’ conversations about milking equipment, hay quality (Did you know that Canadian hay has more protein than hay grown in Vermont, which is very high in roughage? Some Vermont dairy farmers speak of Canadian hay with quiet reverence), starter cultures, and the relative intelligence of pigs and dogs. After about an hour of riding through the knobby Green Mountains, we arrived at Neighborly Farms.

Linda & Rob Dimmick own this organic dairy and creamery. The herd is made up of mostly Holsteins and they’re milking 58 cows this summer. They became organic a few years ago, driven more by the need to be economically viable (since organic milk commands a higher price) than by philosophy. But as they’ve seen the health of their herd and the quality of their soil improve tremendously using sustainable and organic practices, they’ve become converts to the philosophy as well. The Dimmicks like the Holsteins because they are big producers — Holsteins just naturally produce lots and lots of milk — but they breed the cows with a Jersey bull for their first pregnancy. This way the first calf will be smaller (because Jerseys are smaller than Holsteins) and that birth will be easier for the young cow. Who knew?

Next we went to the Woodstock Water Buffalo farm. Water Buffaloes are not a common sight the northern United States, but they seem to thrive here nonetheless. One reason is that they are actually better than cows at digesting food with gobs of roughage — so hay grown in Vermont works just fine. Water Buffaloes are interesting and distinct from cows in several other ways as well: Cows and bison are genetically similar, and can actually interbreed, but Water Buffaloes have a totally different genetic structure. Cows’ tongues are rough, but the Water Buffalo tongue is smooth and looks a bit like a silvery trout. Water Buffaloes are born with a fixed number of hair follicles, so their long, wiry hair gets sparse as they grow larger, exposing their naked skin to the world. Gestation takes ten and a half months (compared to nine for cows) and they are often born with little horns already formed. (Ouch!) And of course, their milk is quite different — richer in protein and fat, and tasting more like Half & Half than milk. Yogurt made from Water Buffalo milk is naturally very thick.

More very soon!

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