All-natural cheese ‘made with love’

Ashley Girourard stood over a truck-bed-sized metal vat in a humid room at Smith’s Country Cheese on a recent Monday afternoon, humming along to pop radio as she scooped handfuls of golf-ball-sized curdles from the vat into separate metal containers. Ms. Girourard, 29, was in the final stages of turning cow’s milk into Gouda.

As Ms. Girourard made the cheese, Carol Smith, 64, co-owner and operator of Smith’s Country Cheese, wrapped wedges of finished and aged cheese in plastic and stuck round labels on each one.

Smith’s Country Cheese is a 200-cow dairy farm, a cheese factory and a country store in Winchendon. Ms. Smith said that all the cheese the company makes comes from nonpasteurized milk from their 43-acre farm.

“Because we make it in small batches, it’s made with love,” Mrs. Smith said.

Smith’s Country Cheese may be small, but it is certainly bustling, and a “small batch” in the world of cheese making is still a process that begins with 12,000 pounds of milk, which makes about 1,000 pounds of cheese. The company makes about 3,000 pounds of cheese per week.

The cheese sold from Smith’s Country Cheese is all natural, with no dyes, and made from raw milk, a practice that is scrutinized and regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA demands that all cheese made from raw milk be aged at least 60 days for interstate commerce, a regulation that Smith said she follows meticulously.

“Raw milk makes a richer, more flavorful cheese. It’s how cheese gets its character,” Mrs. Smith said. While she said she meticulously adheres to the federal regulations within the company, she dismisses them in her personal life.

“My kids drank raw milk since they were little, and now they are grown and healthy,” she said.

Because of claims of food-borne diseases found in raw cheese, the FDA is considering raising the 60-day aging requirement to 90 days, stating that a longer aging period will kill off harmful bacteria in the cheese.

Pete Kennedy, president of the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, an agency that protects the rights of farmers, said that FDA’s aging requirement is not based in science.

“If cheese is properly produced and handled, it can be sold safely without any aging requirement. You could eat it an hour after it’s made and be fine,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Europeans do just that. Europe has no requirements for raw cheese sales, and all international cheese competitions involve raw cheese.

“Europe has a track record of cheese safety that we could follow,” he said. “I don’t see people over there dying over it.”

The trick to making raw cheese is to closely monitor the milk supply, Mrs. Smith said. The advantage of making cheese from milk produced from the same herd is there is greater control over the quality of the milk, she said. At large factories, if there is a problem with the milk, it is hard to trace where it came from, and even more difficult to stop, she said.

“But if we have a problem, we’ll know something right away,” Mrs. Smith said.

Smith’s Country Cheese began as a dairy farm in 1969; in 1985 David and Carol Smith were looking to make the dairy farming business more profitable and began making cheese with some of the milk their cows produced.

The cows at Smith’s Country Cheese are mostly Holsteins, and are milked three times a day, which Mrs. Smith said is healthier for the cow.
Cheese Recipes with Bill & Sheila
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