Best Food Writing 2013 (22 page)

An American Original

To make an American cheese with the significance of Roquefort, Cheddar, or real Swiss Fribourg Gruyere is not easy. It requires three things: one, a belief that making such a cheese is possible; two, the willingness to do what it takes to make it happen; and three, an essential erasure of the modern world.

LoveTree Farmstead is where Mary effectively erases the modern world. There are the wolves and great horned owls, of course, but more germane to cheese production are the untilled, herbicide-free, pesticide-free fields of wild grasses, nettles, sedges, and assorted plants on her land. The dairy sheep rotate through the fields, contained by mobile electric fences—her one concession to modernity. The Falks move the sheep into one meadow, with their attendant animal SWAT team, then the sheep and lambs advance, often standing single file like a herd of munching Rockettes, slowly chewing. At the end of the day, the Falks retrieve them, milk them, and then move them into another field.

I toured these fields with Mary one day—fields with names such as Little Eden and Beer Can Stand—and with each footfall a hundred little bugs would hop and skitter: grasshoppers, crickets, odd little leaf jumpers. It sounded like we were walking through a bag of potato chips. “A guy from the USDA came out here to take soil samples for a statewide census of what's living in the soil,” Mary says. “He said we had more worms than anybody.”

It's easy to imagine why. Many plants need animals to distribute their seeds by physically carrying them through their digestive tracks or on their fur and by tamping seeds in the soil with their feet, piercing the top crust of soil and pushing the seeds into the earth. In the LoveTree fields, chomping, pooping sheep play the roles that deer and bison did on the prairie. Then the sheep turn those wild plants into milk. The milk retains the taste of fringed blue aster,

Indian paintbrush, and purple prairie clover, making it much different from the milk of cows raised in Switzerland or California or on a confinement dairy-cow lot down the highway.

Mary gathers that milk and, in its raw state, separates the curds and whey.

The importance of making cheese from the raw milk of ewes who graze one particular patch of land can't be underestimated. Humankind's understanding of the microbiome—the cloud of bacteria, yeast, protists, and fungi that circulate in, on, and all around us, from the deepest cave to the top of the tallest building—is in its infancy. Recently, scientists from the Human Microbiome Project announced that each and every one of us has 100 trillion microbial things living in and on us, turning food into usable nutrients, moisturizing our skin, and defending our lungs against invaders. Without them, we'd be dead.

Without the right ones, or enough of them, we might just be sick. Research into whether our microbiome plays a critical role in human health is just beginning, but preliminary research suggests it plays a role in everything from obesity to asthma and autoimmune diseases. Research into the flavor complexities of aged foods such as prosciutto, salami, wine, and especially cheese suggests that microbial complexity correlates to the complexity of the finished product's taste. But how does the native complexity of a stand of predator-filled woods in northeastern Wisconsin affect the taste of cheese?

To find out, Mary had her husband take out part of a hill with a Caterpillar. It was a red clay hill, and Dave is comfortable doing things like that, because he used to build silos for a living. “She looked at me and said, ‘We're going to put cheese underground,'” Dave remembers. “I had never heard of that.”

Once the hill was gone, Dave constructed a concrete room with ventilation leading out to the woods. Over the years he took that hill apart with a Caterpillar several more times, eventually discovering that the best shape for a cave was round, like a silo. It's best because of the way the air circulates, in a circle up to a ventilation hole, and for the way the moisture drips down from a pitched, round roof, keeping humidity even throughout the space.

When Mary shapes her individual cheeses, she brings them to her cave to age. (The whey from the cheese production is also blended
into the guard dogs' food, perhaps strengthening the dogs' attachment to their flock.) Many of Mary's cheeses are pure sheep's milk, but some are a blend of sheep's milk and her outdoor-pastured cows' milk. The cows are descended from a Scottish Highland-Angus-Jersey cross and are majestic animals with soaring horns that make them look like bulls, but they're actually milkable ladies. In the cave, the young cheeses are hand-rubbed—a treatment that encourages a rind to form on the outside—and are then flipped every day or so, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for many months, depending on Mary's own personal sense of when a cheese is ready. It is inside this humid, refrigerator-like, woods-connected silo of a cave that the cheeses become what they will become.

What they become is absolutely unique, a true American original cheese unlike anything that has ever been made, or tasted, on earth. Her Trade Lake Cedar looks like a rock or mushroom; the rind tastes earthy and ashy, an umami non-fruit world of hay and mineral, whereas the interior is tangy and chalky and meadow-like. Her dry Gabrielson Lake tastes a little like Parmigiano-Reggiano, but is freaked with little crystals of concentration and tiny red lace points of mold.

The cheeses come and go, and Mary often makes one-of-a-kind batches that reflect some event on the farm, some week of too much milk or too little. “When I think of Mary's cheeses, in terms of a world analog, what comes to mind are principally the cheeses of Sardinia and the Pyrenees,” Steven Jenkins tells me. “Though Mary's are more graceful and unctuous.” And they're essentially only available to people in the Minneapolis and St. Paul metro area. But she isn't very well known, even among foodies. In fact, an informal poll of people I know outside of the restaurant industry suggests that almost no one has heard of LoveTree.

“It's funny, there's a sort of Minnesota paradox when it comes to something on this level,” says Lenny Russo, chef at Heartland and owner of the only market to which Mary will sell. “The Minnesota paradox is, people who live here think it's the best place in the world, even if they've never been anywhere else. At the same time, there's this inferiority complex, where something not from here immediately gets a leg up. If you say this is one of the best cheeses in the world, there are a lot of people here who just won't believe you. But
they'll pay a super-premium for something from France or Italy that essentially comes from a factory. This indigenous inferiority complex is what will probably keep her from succeeding the way she should. If she was making this cheese in California or New York, she'd be world-famous.”

But Mary isn't even as famous here as she should be. The only places to buy LoveTree farm cheeses are at the St. Paul Farmers' Market (year round), Heartland Market, the summer Kingfield Farmers Market, and the LoveTree farm, at their new farm store. You can also taste them at the LoveTree farm on Pizza by the Pond days. Every Sunday, from 2 pm to 8 pm all year long (weather permitting), Mary trades in her shepherd's crook for a pizza peel and melts some of her LoveTree cheeses on top of her four-day-fermented pizza dough, made with flour from Great River Organic Milling, just down the river, and mixed with a sourdough culture developed from her cheese.

Before the pizza-farm events, she forages for such idiosyncratic toppings as fiddlehead ferns or wild wood nettles, or she trades ingredients with neighboring farms or friends from the farmers' market. Try the plain cheese—it's as bold a plain-cheese pizza as you'll ever have in your life. I've also tried the wild watercress, which tastes like something straight from Sardinia, iron-y and green and fresh. I've also had the Old Man Dave, which comes with different sausages from the day's farmers' market or is topped with meats from a neighboring farm, Beaver Creek Ranch, and vegetables from nearby Burning River Farm. The pizzas are delicious, but more than that, they're exquisitely true to their place. The whole scene reminds me of one of those ridiculous magazine features where writers are eating some salad of wild-foraged greens and locally grazed but unnamed cheese on an island in Corsica that no one could ever get to. But this is in Wisconsin, not too far from a Dairy Queen. The pizza oven is located in another part of the hill that Dave bulldozed, then lined with tire bales, built out with logs from the property, and roofed.

The Politics of Cheese

I talked to Mary in the pizza enclosure one hot day, as some strange beetle gnawed loudly on a log overhead, occasionally sending down a shower of sawdust. She was terrified about the raw milk crackdown
that's happening nationally and in Wisconsin. She's convinced that they're coming for the cheesemakers next.

Currently, raw-milk cheeses are allowed in the United States if they're 60 days old or older. She'd of course like to be making younger cheeses, as she has now and then and sold as “fish bait: not fit for human or animal consumption.” She has sold it at the St. Paul Farmers' Market, where presumably avid fisher-people snap it up. “We don't have much money or many material things. All we have is what comes from nature,” she says. “And that's a good thing. All you have to do to have raw milk and raw milk cheeses is regulate it. I'm not afraid. My milk is much cleaner than pasteurized milk.”

The way the state of Wisconsin regulates its milk is by counting absolute numbers of bacteria, the standard plate count. Milk, after it has been already pasteurized, can have an SPC of 20,000 bacteria per milliliter. Milk destined to be made into cheese is allowed to have an SPC of 1 million bacteria per milliliter. Mary says her raw milk is consistently measured with an SPC of less than 10,000 bacteria. If any, or all, of these numbers sounds high, you might have an incorrect notion of how many bacteria actually surround you and everything you see. Adults have two to three pounds of microbes—that is, bacteria, yeast, and other tiny creatures in and on us—at all times; they're also currently in your garden and on your walls and on everything you can see, except the moon, sun, and stars. Heavily pregnant women's whole microbiome changes, with digestive microbes moving to the birth canal; the act of being born is also a biological christening with necessary bacteria.

The way Mary sees it, good cheese does not repudiate its connection with nature; rather, it is the land from which it comes, from the wolves and eagles to the invisible microbes, that makes the caves of France taste like the caves of France and the caves of Wisconsin taste like the caves of Wisconsin. “I remember that first time I felt the cheese in the vat: What is that? That's the curd firming up. And that understanding: This is the milk I have, so how can I get to the flavor I want? Why are people so afraid of nature?”

She launches into a complicated scientific argument about how the cheese-making process destroys pathogens, about how the fact that food has microbiology at all is a foreign idea to many. We understand antibacterial soap, but we don't understand that without the
microbiome of bacteria on our very own hands, our skin wouldn't work; it would crack and split. We understand killing bacteria in food. We don't understand that bacteria are not an outside thing, they are part of the thing—they are part of the wolves and the flowers and us. She leans back and listens to a blue heron baying from a nearby pond. “But I don't know if most people even understand where cheese comes from,” she muses. “It's easier to be afraid than to learn something. Between the politicians and the coyotes, I prefer the coyotes.”

 

 

A S
NAIL'S
T
ALE

By Molly Watson

From
Edible San Francisco

The San Francisco area is fertile territory for curious foodists like Molly Watson, a freelance feature writer, recipe developer, blogger (
thedinnerfiles.com
) and local foods expert for
about.com
. You never know where culinary curiosity can lead you—in this case, it all began with escargots.

A
s I stood over our kitchen sink scrubbing slime and bits of snail poo out of a plastic bucket I did not feel heroic. I did not sense the triumph of the urban forager feeding her family with found edibles. I had no swell of locavore pride in preparing tiny creatures plucked from my yard. I did not even give myself a pat on the back for being such a dedicated food writer.

Instead, I knew that despite my fears, I couldn't be too bad of a mother if I was willing to purge snails for my son.