Being from the Northeast I spent many years laboring under the mistaken notion that dairying, and cheesemaking, was an exclusively East Coast to Midwest thing. Getting into cheese in the 2000s, the idea of California dairying was massive confinement operations milking cows to death in a short two years, and the small, upstart artisanal cheesemakers defining themselves in opposition to that grim trend.
In truth, northern California has been a cornerstone of the American cheese scene since the 1920s. Years ago I spent a fascinating if somewhat awkward afternoon with Ig Vella, often known as “The Godfather of Cheese” at his Vella Cheese Company. His dad was in cheese, buddies with J.L. Kraft, back when Kraft was the good guy, paying fair milk prices to dairy farmers. Ig passed away in 2011, but Vella Cheese Company continues to produce the cheeses that typify traditional California cheesemaking: the American original Monterey Jack (invented in Monterey, CA), its aged counterpart Dry Jack, and Italian style cheeses such as Asiago and Toma.
While the Northeast and Wisconsin dominated Cheddar production, and Wisconsin recipes were influenced by the Swiss-German immigrant population, northern California catered to an Italian immigrant community. In 1935, Ig’s father Tom also brokered the takeover of a plant in Central Point, OR, creating a model where farmers could upgrade their milking operations, buy ownership of their cows, and Kraft (who financed the deal) could purchase premium cheese at a reduced rate, to be sold directly to US troops fighting in WWII. That plant, Rogue Creamery, is in operation today and making the broadest portfolio of blue cheeses in America (as well as a broad range of primarily flavored cheddars).
Point being, West Coast cheese is anchored by several “factories” with a larger production scale, and extremely deep and important roots in American cheesemaking. Complementing them are the makers I think of as “the goat ladies.” Starting in the early 1980s, a handful of women, inspired by the French, began producing cheese that was positively freakish at the time: made of goat milk, often involving mold and yeast. These women were ahead of the market, but cemented the possibilities for a new kind of European inspired cheese, borne not of the necessity to feed an immigrant community, but of their own passion for place and flavor. Laura Chenel of Laura Chenel’s Chevre and Mary Keehn of Cypress Grove Chevre, both in northern California, blazed the biggest trail. Their cheeses were purchased by Bay Area chefs, most notably Alice Waters, and established a model of collaboration between West Coast chefs and West Coast makers, continuing to this day with luminaries such as Thomas Keller and Soyoung Scanlan of Andante Dairy.
The smaller scale of these makers, combined with the temperate weather and ample retailers and farmers’ markets of San Francisco, has also supported a higher concentration of goat and sheep cheese makers than in other parts of the country. My parting advice would be, don’t discount the “big” specialty cheesemakers, without whom today’s “smallscale” artisan cheese industry would not flourish to the same extent.
West Coast Makers to Find: