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In Defence of Pricey Cheese
By Daniel Wood
A few weeks ago, I was flipping goat cheeses just before midnight. I remember the night specifically because a comment was haunting me; a young woman made it to me earlier that day in the Saturday market on Saltspring Island. She said, "Hey, that’s the cheese my boyfriend’s parents eat "they are real snobs." I laughed and tried to hide my indignation. I wanted to tell her that it is not snobbish to eat and like goat cheese, or any specialty cheese for that matter. Artisan and farmstead cheese costs more because it is more expensive to make, and it is made in much smaller quantities than most of the cheese eaten in Canada because there are benefits to making it this way. Those of us who make it, and those of us who like it, appreciate these differences, and that is why we do it. Snobbery is buying a product for some shallow reason like it is more expensive than another is. As the son of a cheese maker, and a (albeit inexperienced) cheese maker myself, I want to explain some of the benefits that come with artisanal cheese.
There are many reasons to prefer farmstead and artisan cheeses. The first, and most obvious one, is that it is much easier to find and buy the highest quality milk when you are only buying enough for a small cheesery, instead of the thousands of litres that an industrial cheese factory goes through in a day. I honestly think that our suppliers of goat’s milk produce the best milk in country, though I have to admit my bias. Moonstruck, another cheese company on Saltspring, gets their organic milk only from their own cows. Each of their cows receives careful and individual attention. This is how Susan and Julia, the owners of Moonstruck, ensure that they always have the highest quality of milk.
There is another benefit of being a small artisan facility: goat's milk has very delicate fat molecules. Consequently, it is important to treat the milk as gently as possible. We use low speed pumps, and siphon our milk whenever possible. We also use a slower, colder method of pasteurization. We heat our milk to only 63 degrees Celsius for half an hour, rather than to 72 degrees for 18 seconds. The slower technique is difficult to use with large quantities of milk. Instead industrial dairies usually use the faster method. When they rapidly heat their milk to 72 degrees, a temperature so hot that the milk's fragile fat molecules break, it essentially burns the their milk. When goat cheese has a strong "goaty" flavour, there is usually only one culprit: the milk was treated too roughly while it was being pasteurized or moved.
Modern cheese making, like modern cooking, is a hybrid of tradition and science. Small artisan and farmstead cheese operations are the perfect blend of these often, but not necessarily, contrary forces. For example, it is well known that salt is hydroscopic (that it holds water), and foods with salt in them, therefore, hold more water than they otherwise would. This is why unsalted butter both tastes better and costs more than salted butter. Cheese makers have being exploiting this, some might suggest ignobly, for centuries, which is why salt is now ubiquitous in cheese (though I should mention, that salt is also used in some cases as a preservative, like in feta). It's ironic that even though salted cheese is essentially watered down, unsalted cheese often tastes bland to the modern palate.
At Saltspring Island Cheese Company, when we make soft fresh goat cheese, or what is called chèvre here in North America, we use a traditional method of cheese making, but we try to embrace science as well. For example, we experimented with different ways of adding salt to our cheese before we finally settled on our current technique. Now we salt both sides of our cheese individually by hand, but we wait until the cheese is ready to be packaged. This ensures that the hydroscopic effects of the salt are minimized, yet we maintain a mild salty flavour that people expect in cheese. Though the process takes longer, and is certainly more arduous, it results in a creamy soft cheese that has had no extra fat added to it, like a cream cheese usually has.
It is a host of small details like these, or the meticulous packaging, which can only be achieved by making cheese by hand, that I hope motivates people to buy our cheese. I certainly hope that it is not mere snobbery. And not only our cheese, but the many excellent artisan cheeses made in Canada, like "Beddis Blue" from Moonstruck, or a Gouda from Thunder Oak in Ontario, or "Dragon's Breath Blue" from That Dutchman's Farm in Nova Scotia. There are hundreds more, and it is unfortunate that I do not have the space to list them all. More and more people are buying artisan cheese, and most of them buy it because they legitimately appreciate the qualities that make them superior to industrial cheese ?and that's not snobbish.
Daniel Wood makes cheese on Saltspring Island with his father David.
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