Mixing tradition with innovation, local artisans elevate cheese to new heights

It's American cheese, but American Cheese, it is not.

photo credit: Marc Albert/KRCB
Omer Seltzer built a custom trailer for getting goat milk.

Vineyards and orchards have their place, this weekend though the spotlight is on very different gift produced by local agriculture --- cheese.

The 18th annual California Artisan Cheese Festival runs Friday, Saturday and Sunday with dairy tours, talks, tastings, pairings; plus a cheese crawl and marketplace.

To learn more about the craft, challenges and aspirations of some involved in the local industry...KRCB News ventured out into the pastures and workshops of a couple of local cheesemakers.

About a mile down a crumbling road out of Bodega, one of Sonoma County's newest producers is busily working away. To an outsider, it seems almost meditative.

Omer Seltzer started making cheese here last January. He moved to the US from Israel a year and a half earlier to explore his craft. From a cheese-making family in his home country, his aim locally--learn, share and innovate.

Here, he says, consumers are less bound by tradition and traditional tastes; more willing to try something new, allowing, if not encouraging, innovation.

Instead of a line worker in a factory, he sees himself as more artistically driven.

"I facilitate the cheesemaking. I do not look at the end result. I take the milk and facilitate the first part and decide how am I going to heat it up, how fast it's going to be maturing. These are all things that I do to give direction for the cheese to develop these flavors. But I'm interested in the process. Well, when you are talking about consistency, that is more like, what do I want my end product to look like and what am I going to do to get there and to get there as fast as I can. And that's a completely different pathway than the pathway that we are taking with artisanal cheesemaking," Seltzer said.

Rather than trying to assure the exact same flavors or textures, Seltzer embraces the variations created by the time of year, or even the time of day.

"The most interesting characteristic of the cheese happens from the environment. Here in Bodega we enjoy fog, so cheese that I would make in the morning tastes completely different than cheese from the afternoon. Because of the moisture content it has in the air. The way that you age it, are you losing moisture too fast or too slow, so all the time you have to be aware of what the surrounding is like to produce that cheese," Seltzer said.

photo credit: Marc Albert/KRCB
Omer Seltzer checks in on ripening goat cheese.

He's developed several varieties, cultivating synergy with other local produce...grape leaf wrapped goat cheese, and jersey cow's milk cheese aged with crushed zinfandel grapes.

"You are not trying to imitate a cheese that already exists but you're trying to create a cheese that uses what it local here. Zinfandel grapes grow local here. And, what I do with this cheese is age it inside with a pumice after the wine has been pressed, and the idea is to have those flavors penetrate the cheese," Seltzer said.

Altering methods or ingredients, even slightly, he said, can produce widely different results.

"You can take the same cheese, make four different types of techniques, and have a completely different outcome. And that's when you really have to pick what technique am I going to stick with and what flavors am I going to get with it," Seltzer said.

Seltzer sells his Mt Eitan Cheeses at the Sunday Sebastopol Farmers Market...and he's participating in this weekend's Artisan Cheese Festival.

photo credit: Marc Albert/KRCB
Salting the rind to extract moisture, develop a rind.

While primarily working with goat milk, he's recently been branching out, producing cow's milk cheese.

He demurs questions about finances, he's in it for the challenge and being able to express himself through his work.

"So, you can ask a lot of people that produce are if they are making a living out of their art, regardless I would keep on making it. So, the idea is to have a creation, part of it, or aspect of it, I do my best," Seltzer said.

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This weekend's California Artisan Cheese Festival turns the Sonoma County fairgrounds into a temple of dairy delights. The hundreds of varieties put a laser-like focus on the geographic blessings of the North Bay.

Omer Seltzer, the cheesemaker at Mt Eitan, set up his one-man operation shop here, hoping to learn, share and cross-pollinate with other small producers.

It's something you'll hear a lot----there's competition, but there's also community----local producers are facing enough headwinds collectively, that there is a certain level of comradery, like among small craft-beer producers.

In contrast to Seltzer's operation, in the verdant landscape west of Petaluma an established dairy is successfully navigating agriculture's economic rollercoaster with perpetual re-invention.

This time of year, the emerald rambling hillsides along Chileno Valley Road look a lot like Ireland. Yet Donna Pacheco and her family's Achidinha Cheese Company, which translates as "small find" in Portuguese, owes more to pluck, than luck.

Working 230-acres, Pacheco, who co-owns and manages the property with her husband and the couple's four children, said she is supremely aware she can't set the market--she can only react.

"We've evolved, I mean, ultimately, there's always going to be somebody that can do this business more cost effective. Bigger, stronger, faster, so for us, we've been re-inventing ourselves consistently to hold on to the property," Pacheco said.

Once a dairy ranch with 600 cows, when cow's milk became less profitable, the family pivoted to goat milk. It wasn't their first re-focus. Through the decades the Pacheco family has added and removed chardonnay vines, raised beef cattle, pigs, chickens and even gone into repairing dairy equipment. "If you don't roll with the changes," Donna Pacheco observed, change will roll over you."

photo credit: Marc Albert
Donna Pacheco uses a bread mold for her prized Broncha.

When larger central valley producers went 'whole hog' into dairy goats, the Pacheco's knew they'd have to pivot, again.

"The only way to stay in agriculture, for us, is to milk more animals, which, our property cannot sustain more animals or to process our own product. And, so that's what we did, we started making our own cheese," Pacheco said.

Vivien Straus is founder and managing partner of California Cheese Trail, which supports and publicizes small cheese producers throughout California who either welcome the public for tours or sell cheese on site.

Straus said the financial pressures are very real

"We're losing dairies at a very rapid clip in America and also in California, we've lost quite a few in the North Bay in the last few years for reasons of drought, the economic viability of being a farmer and people don't really understand farmers and farmers are trying the best they can to survive, and one of the ways they do that is to make their own products and that's something that's been growing probably since the mid 90s, I think we had three cheesemakers in the area, now we have 20 or 25 in Marin and Sonoma counties," Straus said.

This weekend's festival with it's marketplace Sunday is one way to connect. Visiting one or more of the 47 producers on this year's California Cheese Trail map is another way to support local makers and gain perspective.

"We have this incredible array of cheesemakers in California, they are all different, they are all doing something very special and have their own personal flavor and I think it's a great way to take an adventure in California. Go visit a cheesemaker you'll see something you'll never see otherwise," Straus said.

The Pachecos are definitely among the survivors Straus mentioned. To survive, Donna Pacheco insists, you must be willing to change.

The bustling goat herd once numbering 1,800 is down to just four, mainly to control blackberries and thistle.

Now there's 120, mainly Jersey cows, 80 beef cattle and 300 chickens.

That also means a big change for Broncha---white in Portuguese---an aged goat cheese Pacheco remains especially proud of. It's now made from cow's milk.

"The results are so extremely different from making just a goat's milk aged cheese to just a cow's milk aged cheese, it's a completely different cheese," Pacheco said.

From grazing cattle to the milking shed to production facilities and aging rooms, every aspect happens right here.

Pacheco described the start of a lengthy, scripted process.

"When we're done pasteurizing we transfer the milk over to the cooking table, and that's the first thing that we do is re-inoculate with bacteria so the cheese has life and flavor, because we've killed the bacteria in that pasteurization process."

It's a real basic space---concrete floor, stainless steel, pipes, valves and gauges.

photo credit: Marc Albert/KRCB
In the barn at Achidinha Cheese Company off Chileno Valley Road.

"So it's just going through, getting everything to the right temperature, different cheese require different temperatures and different bacteria, once we've gotten them to their temperatures, we've added the bacteria, we add rennet, for us we use a vegetable derivative rennet," Pacheco explained.

While happy to share and speak freely, some of the secret sauce used to turn fresh milk into award-winning cheese, will remain just that.

"So, the bacteria that we put into the milk is like gramma's secret, you just don't tell anybody and it's the same with the pH you don't talk about what the pH is," Pacheco said, with a chuckle.

Like Omer Seltzer at Mt Eitan, at Achidinha, there's an acknowledgement that as craft producers, they can't correct for the subtle changes brought on by changes in a cow's diet or event the weather. Rather than fear the variability, it's embraced.

That, Pacheco said, contrasts with established large-scale producers, such as in Italy, where consistency is a must when producing Parmesan.

"Parma, their cows are fed very consistently, for us, being a small farm, we are consistently inconsistent due to what the girls are eating," Pacheco said.

With no guarantees and unending chores, drought, insurance, changing tastes and market conditions, and the possibility of calamity ever present, it's the passion that keeps the Pacheco's going.

"You have to be passionate about what you're doing or you just won't make it. you have to love what you're doing in agriculture or you'll go crazy," she said, laughing.