Travel Tuesday: Artisan Cheese Festival Tour

As some of you may have seen in my Instagram and which I posted briefly about here on the blog, I went to visit one of my sisters who lives in the San Rafael/Bay Area recently. The specific event we had in mind to enjoy together was the California Artisan Cheese Festival, now in its 12th year, that celebrates California cheese with tours, seminars, tasting events, and a cheese market. Here’s a look at my review and recap of my experiences, divided among several posts. First I’ll start with my favorite activity during the festival, the Artisan Cheese Festival Tour.

I took off an extra day, Friday March 22, to enjoy the first full day of this 3 day, weekend cheese festival. The first day was devoted mostly to artisan tours to cheesemakers and local artisans via a bus with a group of 25-30 people. The tour I selected was called “Sensory Sebastopol”, which is basically the area 30 minutes away from Petaluma that our tour stops were concentrated on. The tour included a cheese seminar, a visit to 2 cheesemakers, a cheese lunch, and a visit with a distillery. I will cover the cheese seminar and the first cheesemaker, Bohemian Creamery, in this post.

Seminar

The start of the tour was a seminar with Kirstin Jackson, author of It’s Not You, It’s Brie: Unwrapping American’s Unique Culture of Cheese. At 8:30 in the morning, we all good-naturedly plunged into a blind tasting of 3 yogurts, 3 fresh cheeses, and 3 aged cheeses and learned how to identify between different animal milks used in the products.

Some tips-

Look at the color, goat’s milk products tend to be the whitest in color. They also may have a bit of a grassy flavor and more grainy look but fluffier texture  in yogurt, and relatively more tang flavor in fresh cheese.

Sheeps milk is slowly getting more popular (cow is #1 and goat is #2). Sleeps milk has the most butterfat of the three and so in comparison the richer more buttery tasting product is often Sheeps Milk.

Many dairies do a mixed milk cheese because some times you have less because it’s baby animal season and cows are the larger animal and produce more milk so can help supplement during those times, or just to produce enough cheese just need that extra volume in milk.

Bohemian Creamery

Next, on the tour we headed in our luxury bus (complete with leather seats and regular + USB plugs at every seat to recharge my phone which I great appreciated, and as an extra the bus was stocked with Lagunitas beer!) to Bohemian Creamery. Here is where we met Lisa Gottreich, one of the region’s most creative artisan cheesemakers, at her farm and cheese facility and small storefront perched on a hilltop overlooking the Laguna de Santa Rosa and the Mayacamas mountains.
 

Lisa transforms milk from her herd of Alpine dairy goats into a wide range of cheeses including goat, sheep, cow, and water buffalo cheeses, whey sodas, and soft serve frozen goat yogurt. The cheeses from Bohemian Creamery have been served at famous restaurants like French Laundry and Chez Panisse and even at the White House.

Bohemian Creamery is very sustainable, using a closed loop cooling and heating system so they can reuse their water, and using their whey (a byproduct of making cheese you see Lisa showing below after cutting and removing the curds which will become cheese) to make their whey soda, or feeding it back to the animals. Whey is used in soap, but also is very moisturizing and full of nutrients because it is very protein and vitamin-rich.

Of all the experiences centered around cheese for the Artisan Cheese Festival, this visit with Lisa at Bohemian Creamery was my favorite. Bohemian Creamery regularly offers tours on the weekends, though you should book your appointment ahead of time because this is a tiny place, and I think it is well worth the price of the tour.

Here you see one of the curd cutters she uses to cut the curds from the whey

Lisa and business partner Miriam Block established Bohemian Creamery in 2008, but Lisa had experience with goats even before starting the creamery, having grown up in the rural area with goats along the California coast. Lisa’s background includes studying philosophy in college, time living abroad in Italy, and she really emanates the joy of life she feels taking care of the goats and creating a living product (the cheese, duh) in comparison to her previous job in an oncology practice. She gushed proudly at one point about how each cheese is individual and grows like a person over time, changing characteristics and becoming interesting in different ways from youth to aged maturity.

With her previous experience as a writer, she is also a great storyteller, and the passion mixed with wry humor about the hard work that is cheesemaking gave me the most realistic look inside what is behind the cheese. As I learned from her, it is a mix of history that is centuries old from previous great empires (she has flipped through manuscript pages from times past about cheese), but it is also about taking new risks and crying into beer when it doesn’t work (but which eventually inspired one of her beers which she washes in beer from that brewery!). It’s a matter of science, and a matter of art.

Here you see Lisa showing us some of the molds she uses to form some of the harder cheeses she makes and dry them to varying degrees or in some cases press them while aging

The cheeses she makes find inspiration from Europe but also include some very unique cheeses. We were able to taste several of the cheeses during the tour as we explored the difference between the natural rind categories, bloomy rind categories, and washed rind categories of cheese. She has her own goats, but also sources additional milk from other farms, including other kinds of milk besides goat milk. She uses goats, cows, sheep, and water buffalo milks to make cheese.
 
In the front, you see a bloomy rind cheese, the triangle soft cheese is a washed rind, and that in the back the harder aged cheeses of different aging periods are examples of natural rind cheeses.

We were able to visit the aging rooms where the cheeses are growing up – haha this was definitely a mixed experience with seeing the natural mold growing so freely with some cheeses and one room being particularly strong in ammonia. Always makes me think how do people know that this is ok to eat? Thankfully Lisa already had anticipated earlier when talking through the 3 kinds of cheeses – noting that 50% tend to eat the traditional rind cheeses, you should eat the bloomy rinds, but should probably NOT eat the washed rinds.

Some of the 16 Bohemian Creamery cheeses include

• Twist and Shout, aged 3 or more months, a 1000 year old Sicilian recipe made with saffron and toasted peppercorns embedded in cooked curd to cheer up the King’s depressed wife
  
• Agua Bufazola, aged 4-6 weeks, based on gorgonzola dolce flecked with blue in a geotrichum rind and quite literally the only aged buffalo cheese in the US (water buffalo)
• Poco Loco, super soft, extra rich cheese with a tangy aftershock. Italian coffee beans lend the loco effect (water buffalo)
  
• The Bomb, fashioned after the French Epoisse, then washed with Russian River Brewery’s Consecration beer (goat and sheep)
• Surf and Turf, which has a a thin layer of dulce, toasted seaweed, harvested from Sonoma County Coast that divides the center and coats the lightly aged rind for hints of the Pacific sea with the cheese – something decidedly not European but so California (goat)
• Flower Power, a fresh lactic organic cow cheese pyramid speckled inside with bursts of bee pollen so bites offer lingering moments of milk and honey (cow)
  
• Cowabunga, a low fat miniature cheesecake-like surprise with a goat milk caramel aka cajeta inside that offers a sweet dessert richness (goat, cow). During our visit, we saw this cheese being made – first the cheese being shaped in the mold, a center area hollowed out, add the cajeta, and then close up and salt on both sides.
  
  Here’s a video of her assistant Magdalena at work while Lisa is conducting the tour in the same room so you can hear her explaining a step in the cheesemaking process
  

Next, we headed over to The Barlow. It is a walkable area in downtown Sebastopol that is composed of more then 30 tasting rooms, restaurants, and stores all by local makers in several industrial buildings that used to be the Barlow apple production facility, now re-purposed. We would have our last 3 stops here – lunch, visiting another cheesemaker, and a distillery. Check out next week’s post to see the next cheese adventures!

Have you ever been on a cheese tour and gone into an aging room? What were/are you thoughts on seeing the aging room?