7 Lessons I Learned Working with a Cheesemaker for a Week

I love cheese. It’s one of my favorite foods – sliced, melted, grated, schmeared, grilled, you name it.

For the past six years, I’ve worked with small-batch cheesemakers around Philadelphia to source their unique, handmade dairy delights on behalf of my CSA members, shoppers, and chef customers. I even scored a weekend gig repping the products of one cheesemaker friend of mine, Valley Milkhouse Creamery, at my local farmers market.

Getting paid to extol the virtues of delicious local cheeses to passersby? Sounds like the perfect job for me.

This summer, I realized a longtime dream when I was given the opportunity to spend a week working in the cheese room at Valley Milkhouse while their intern was away. The creamery is located in Oley, Pennsylvania, a little more than an hour northwest of Philadelphia.

There, cheesemaker Stefanie Angstadt makes artisan cheese, cultured butter and buttermilk, and cream-top yogurt that she sells at city farmers markets and to retailers and chefs, as well as at her creamery’s on-site farm stand.

Valley Milkhouse cheeses are named for plants native to the Oley area. During my week there, we rolled logs of Clover, Angstadt’s tangy, creamy fromage blanc-inspired fresh cheese; flipped immature wheels of Thistle, her Brie style; dusted pyramids of her Valencay-inspired cow’s milk cheese, Witchgrass, with their signature coat of inky black vegetable ash; and pierced each wheel of Blue Bell, her Roquefort-inspired cheese, with a skewer no less than 50 times each.

The hours were long, with lots of heavy lifting, flipping, wrapping, washing, and scrubbing, but it’s some of the most fulfilling work I’ve done in a long time.

Aside from the true value of a comfortable pair of muck boots or work shoes, here are seven lessons I learned during my week as a cheesemaker’s apprentice that I think could do us all some good as we move about our kitchens.

1. Cleanliness Is Everything

In any dairying operation, sanitation and hygiene are paramount. A small tub of sanitizer-spiked water sits just inside the door to dip your boot soles in after any steps taken outside the make room.

Dishes, racks, and pans are washed, rinsed, and sanitized in a perpetually full three-sink setup, then air-dried and stored – and dipped in sanitizer once more right before their next use. The creamery has its own hot and cold water hose inside so that racks, tables, walls, floors and, of course, the cheesemaking vat can be hosed down with piping hot H2O.

It’s a clean person’s dream, everything shiny and germ-free – an aspirational image that might not move you to install your own three-bay sink, but will hopefully spur you to clean your stovetop and backsplash a little extra hard when you think about it.

One innovation I loved: the use of a squeegee to instantly remove wetness from the just-sanitized sheet pans that hold and transport wheels from make room to aging cave and back again.

2. Pre-rinsing Is Key

When you’re washing 20 casein-encrusted drain mats, several dozen cheese forms, or hitting several square feet of stainless steel table with a scrubby pad (again), it really pays to pre-rinse.

Angstadt keeps a bucket of hot, soapy water on hand for this purpose – it makes the suds in her wash water last longer when it’s time to do dishes (especially useful after an afternoon of portioning and wrapping butter, when everything’s covered in a thin film of grass-fed grease).

Do something nice for your future self and don’t forget to hit that empty casserole dish or soup pot with some dish soap, to soak while you enjoy whatever messy-yet-delicious delicacy you just made.

Feeling inspired to get your clean on in your own kitchen? Check out all of the amazing guides in our kitchen cleaning how-to section.

3. Read Recipes & Take Meticulous Notes

Even though she’s rounding the corner on her five hundredth batch of cheese, Angstadt still consults her notebook of recipes as she makes each one. (She’s also required to keep temperature logs for her cheese vat on file, but I’m pretty sure the health inspector won’t show up at your door demanding to see your records if you make a batch of homemade yogurt (check out our recipe for dairy-free coconut yogurt).

Making extra-sure you’re following a recipe properly – especially with finicky items like baked goods or cultured cheeses, where milliliters make a difference and seconds count – is the best way to make sure you’re never disappointed with the result of your food dollars and hard work in the kitchen.

4. Source Only the Best Ingredients

While Valley Milkhouse products themselves aren’t certified organic, Angstadt only sources certified organic milk for her products (the cream she sources from Seven Stars Farm is also certified biodynamic).

Angstadt’s source farms also operate in such a way that prioritizes the health and nature of the animals – the cows are fed grass or hay exclusively, and spend their time grazing organic pastures.

This makes for healthy milk, with the fat and protein levels and seasonal variation that make it
perfect for small-batch cheesemaking.

Angstadt also sources her milk raw, pasteurizing it herself for younger cheeses and going raw for cheeses like Gouda and Roquefort styles that will be aged more than 60 days.

It goes without saying that finding the freshest, best-quality ingredients you can afford is a good guideline for any cook. But starting with raw milk for making your own yogurt or cheese makes a huge difference in the end.

Angstadt and I are both lucky to live in Pennsylvania, a pretty ag-friendly state that permits raw milk for sale at grocers and co-ops, not just on-farm.

If you’re making any sort of processed dairy products at home (and you have access to it), it definitely pays to use raw milk – you’ll get a richer, more flavorful product, even if your recipe includes a pasteurization step.

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Turn a Crisis into an Opportunity

Imagine spending hours heating 90 gallons of milk, inoculating with culture, waiting, adding rennet, waiting, cutting the curds, stirring them, hooping them into forms to drain, waiting, flipping the wheels, waiting, salting them, waiting some more, moving them to wooden boards in your aging space, piercing them fifty times each with a skewer, flipping them several times per week, and wrapping them in foil to wait two more months for them to be street legal.

Then, the moment of reckoning arrives: You take a wheel down from the shelf and remove the foil. The rind is mottled with a healthy array of gray, green, and blue mold – all good signs. You pierced the hell out of that cheese so that the P. roquefortii you added could get all the oxygen it needs to stripe the interior of your wheels with vibrant, flavorful blue veins.

You cut the wheel in half. The paste is white as milk. You die a little bit inside.

Luckily, it still tastes great, and you’ve got several thousand dollars’ worth of inventory in the wings, so it’s time to get creative. That’s what Angstadt did when the scenario above happened with a few batches of Blue Bell that she made with raw sheep’s milk last fall.

Its rich texture and full flavor made up for the fact that Ivory Bell – its new name – didn’t quite turn out as planned.

Remember this the next time your homemade ice cream doesn’t freeze in time (it’s a cooling and seasonal cream soup!), or your jam sets up too firm (it’s pâte de fruit in a jar!). You meant to do it that way!

6. Make Time for a Proper Lunch

When you’re doing physically demanding labor – like lugging 80-pound milk cans and carrying trays of cheese wheels to and fro – for 10-12 hours per day, it’s important to take breaks.

Angstadt learned the value of a sit-down lunch once her intern came on this season; before that, she was snatching nourishment whenever she could find a few minutes, often in the car, and never really gave herself a midday break.

As her fill-in intern for the week, I had the privilege of joining Angstadt for lunch, which always involved a fresh-from-the-fields salad of, say, Bibb lettuce, hakurei turnips, and snap peas and a drizzle of vinaigrette; fresh strawberries we gleaned from a nearby CSA farm’s you-pick fields after a cheese delivery; soft-boiled eggs, and (always) Valley Milkhouse cheese served with fresh wood-fired bread from a local artisan.

We’d spend a few minutes on prep, eat on the back porch with a view of the creek and its picturesque covered bridge, digest and chat for a bit, and then go back to it, refueled.

Even if you’re not cooking in your home kitchen like it’s your job, we’ve all been there during a particularly arduous session of dinner party prep or holiday meal madness.

It’s important to carve out a few minutes, if you can, to rest your feet and eat something more than a few pieces of whatever’s edible on the cutting board. That way, you’ll be in better shape to enjoy the fruits of your labor, especially when guests are waiting in the wings.

7. Share the Goodness

Any time I’ve visited Valley Milkhouse – for a day of work, a meeting, whatever – I never leave without something delicious, courtesy of the cheesemaker.

Angstadt’s generosity with her products, and her joy at sharing them with her customers, neighbors, colleagues, and friends, is so inspiring. It reminds me that the real reason I’m putting up these garlic dill pickles or bourbon cherries is to bring them with me on family visits and give them to friends to enjoy, not (just) for me to hoard for myself.

I’ve gotten good at maintaining my own cheese karma, too: I can be counted on to show up to any food-related gathering with an impromptu cheese plate and some homemade accoutrements, spreading the dairy love (sometimes literally, onto a cracker) wherever I go.

Inspired to roll your sleeves up and make your own homemade cheese (or even your very own meat and cheese board)? Stay tuned – recipes are coming soon!

Want to join the conversation? Tell us all about your favorite types of artisanal cheese and share your pro-inspired kitchen tips with us in the comments!

Photos by Alex Jones, © Ask the Experts, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. See our TOS for more details. Additional images by Stefanie Angstadt and Cynthia Van Elk.