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Food

Cheddar Keeps the Lights on for Kentucky's Cheesemakers

While Kentucky has a longstanding history of dairy farming, cheesemaking is a relatively recent venture. But from chevre to Cheddar, a determined few are making it happen.

I sat down at a marble counter in an oaky room, pressing my face close to the case atop the bar. Inside, propped up on transparent ledges, were pyramids, chunks, and wheels of cheese. Some were white and glossy, others flecked with blue and green; some firm and apricot-tinted, while others remained wrapped in cloth, paper, and delicate wax.

Murray's Cheese Bar is located in New York's West Village. It's a small, moody restaurant that opens to Bleecker Street, nestled cozily between a ruddy brick trattoria, its windows littered with ice-blue menus and orange letters that had been cut from construction paper. Inside, cheesemongers work behind the bar opposite a collection of photography. From my seat, I was eye-to-eye with a black and white profile of a goat, captured mouth agape, probably bleating "feed me."

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That was basically what I said, too, when I ordered the "cheesemonger's choice": six cheeses, two charcuterie meats and all the necessary accoutrements—smears of almost-cream honey, pickled raisins, sprigs of basil, and buttery crostini. The tastes moved from peppery to creamy, tart to pungent and briny to fatty.

Honestly, I was in heaven; had Murray's not been 780 miles from my front doorstep, it could have easily become my Cheers. But with a flight home for the next morning, it became apparent I would soon need to find or create suitable local replacements. If I were living in Switzerland, France, or even Vermont, this wouldn't have seemed such an endeavor. However, Louisville, Kentucky—known more for its horses than its havarti—feels far from the cheese capital of the United States. (I think somewhere in Wisconsin already holds that distinction.)

While Kentucky has a longstanding history of dairy farming, cheesemaking is a relatively recent venture. Most sustainable cheesemakers only started within the past three decades. However, there is a definite market for the product—especially as the state's chefs turn to more locally sourced ingredients, and with perennial demand for something as well-loved as cheese. Granted, it's almost cliché to pronounce one's love of cheese—like chocolate or coffee, it finds admiration from both high ($650-per-pound Caciocavallo Podolico) and low (Cheez Whiz) culture—but on the business-side of things, it can also be quite the costly passion project.

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Susan Miller, the founder of Bleugrass Chevre, says that starting a legal goat dairy in Kentucky is a difficult and expensive process. By legal, she means one cleared by the FDA; by expensive, she's talking a $100,000 minimum if you're starting your herd from scratch. "When you look at the pages and pages of regulations, it looks daunting," Miller said. "It took me five years to get my herd started and my dairy set up, but I would definitely do it again."

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In the fall of 2002, Miller, a freelance food writer, took a trip to New England, and while there, signed up for a one-day cheesemaking workshop at Ricki Carroll's New England Cheesemaking Supply in Ashfield, Massachusetts. And, in the same way that other people come back from vacation with a hobby—say, committed to breaking out the oil pastels for capturing beachy sunsets—Miller came home determined to make goat cheese.

Unfortunately, it wasn't as simple as purchasing milk from a nearby goat farm in Lexington and getting in the kitchen. As mentioned, there were no legal goat dairies in Kentucky, and in order to set up one, there was an inch-thick set of FDA regulations a prospective dairyman would have to follow to legally produce goat milk. So, she started with the first logical step: goats.

Why goats and not cows? "Because they are small enough for me to handle. Plus, they are charming," Miller said. So when spring came, Sophie and Luna, three-week old Nubian doelings who look eerily familiar to the goats in the photo at Murray's, arrived at the farm in a small dog carrier in the back of her SUV.

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While she got a handle on the learning curve involved in running a small business (while also learning to milk goats), Miller muddled through the paperwork, officially becoming the first legalized goat dairy in 2007. Since then, she's kept busy.

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"I make fresh chevre, feta, and a white mold-ripened cheese called Bloomin' Bleugrass. I have never been able to meet the demand because I am a small producer, and after eight years, I am still the only producer making soft goat cheese in Kentucky," Miller said. "That's the cheese everybody wants—I was lucky enough to come along just when the big popularity of goat cheese in the US kicked in."

While Miller's cheesemaking started as a labor of love, other Kentucky cheesemakers started out of necessity.

"In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, dairy farms all over Kentucky were disappearing left and right, or consolidating into larger and larger operations. It was becoming apparent that small family dairies were to become a thing of the past," said Van Campbell, the director of sales at Kenny's Farmhouse Cheese in Austin, Kentucky.

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At that time, according to Campbell, Kenny Mattingly and family were milking less than 100 cows and didn't want to turn into a mega-dairy, as they probably would have had to increase their size four or five-fold. Instead, they began looking for different ways to add value to their milk, and settled on cheese.

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After a trip to Europe where they saw a various different models of farming, they came back with a couple of recipes. 1998 was the first year they made cheese; in fact, they made 4,000 pounds of gouda from the milk of just two cows.

"Most of that cheese was sold through the Bardstown Road Farmers Market in Louisville," Campbell said. "Louisville chefs like Bruce Ucan and Kathy Cary that were instrumental in kickstarting the local food movement around here [and] helped us get started selling to restaurants."

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He continued: "Currently, we are milking about 140 head at the moment and they are made up of about 60 percent American Holstein—our only officially registered breed—and the rest of the herd is a cross between Jersey, Shorthorn, Brown Swiss, Australian Red, and Normandy."

The Holsteins are a higher-yielding breed, whereas the latter provide a higher butterfat milk.

"We are constantly trying to balance that out to make a specific kind of milk for the kinds of cheeses we are making," Campbell said. "Most of what we feed our herd is grown on the farm."

This brings up another area of progress for Kenny's—and Kentucky cheese. The dairy made a decision a few years ago to grow non-GMO feed, which they have successfully done. "Unfortunately, we can't always grow enough feed to sustain the whole herd for the whole year. Also because of the makeup of our herd and other factors we do use a little bit of grain," Campbell said. "Buying non-GMO grain is a challenge in our area, but that is starting to change, so we hope that within the next couple of years we can claim that our feed bill is 100-percent GMO-free."

From these cows come Kenny's most popular cheese, their white cheddar. "Cheddar keeps the lights on," Campbell quips. But some of his favorites are their signature creations, like their Kentucky Rose, a double-crème table cheese with a rustic, brushed-rind that goes really nicely with bourbon.

Campbell acknowledges that Kentucky still has a long way to go on the national and international cheese scene, but that's something he could see changing. "We are in the formation process of the Kentucky Cheese Guild, which will, among other things, provide resources for startup cheesemakers as well as some form of collective marketing representation. Locally, people are sometimes surprised that our cheese is distributed as far and wide as it is," he said, going on to say that they sell beyond Kentucky's borders to like-minded distributors in Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Dallas, and San Francisco.

"One advantage we have here in Kentucky is a history of dairy-farming and small family-farming. With those things, you have a foundation and an opportunity to see high-quality cheesemaking operations popping up," Campbell said. "Really good cheese needs a story, and more importantly needs a great milk source. We are lucky to have our own. Wisconsin, and especially Vermont and New York, have cheese-making traditions that go back a couple of hundred years."

He continued: "With the Kentucky scene only in its teens, I'd say we are doing pretty well."