Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship
If you were to walk through the two massive barn doors at Shelburne Farms’ central complex, you would see a hangar-sized room, a desk and two windows. The window farthest away — the one to the back of the room — is small and fogged over and coated with soot.
The larger window to your side frames something of a live exhibit: Two people clad in aprons and sanitary caps and masks toil over a metal bin, stirring a sea of cheese curds.
Though a small part of the program, watching the cheddar cheese–making process is the centerpoint of Shelburne Farms’ “Sun to Cheese” tour, which opened May 10 and runs into October.
Stretching from the tiny welcome center near the road to a red brick building on the lakeshore, the tour travels the entirety of the farm’s campus, developed in the late 19th century when Vanderbilt heiress Eliza Webb bought and consolidated 33 farms.
Hannah Kuhn, a professional cheesemaker, explains how making cheddar is a laborious process.
“The milk arrives through the wall,” she says, referring to a hole that workers attach a tube to and pump in milk from outside. “It all comes from our own dairy just about a mile and a half down the road.“
Milking happens at 6:30 a.m. and ends at 7:30 a.m., she says.
“It’s anywhere between 5,000 and 6,000 pounds of milk, give or take,” Kuhn says, adding later, “It’ll make anywhere from 550 to 650 pounds of cheese.”
Then cheesemakers use paddles to stir the milk up in a vat. Warm water heats the vat walls, and the workers add “starter culture” to the milk, she says, bacteria crucial to turning it to cheese.
The next step is to measure the acidity by pH level. Cheesemakers continue to stir while monitoring the pH, then they add rennet.
That’s a term for enzymes — especially those found in the stomachs of calves — that help curdle milk. Rennet can be made from practically anything, including mushrooms — though in Kuhn’s opinion, animal rennet makes cheese taste the best.
Rennet comes in both liquid and powder forms. Shelburne Farms exclusively uses the liquid form. The purpose of rennet is to dehydrate the milk and make it clump together in bunches. Before it becomes curds, the milk solidifies into a sort of gelatin, says Kuhn.
After the concoction sits for half an hour, the workers take a tool called a cheese harp — a wooden rectangle intersected with strips of sharp wire — and rake it through the mixture, helping separate the curds. Depending on the type of cheese, cuts are made finer or wider, Kuhn says.
They mix the curds around another hour and a half, allowing the bacteria from the culture to eat lactose from the milk and produce lactic acid, bumping down the pH.
The workers push the curds to one side, letting them pack together into a mass. Whey flows down the drain at the bottom of the vat. Once the curds pack together, they are cut into slabs, then tiny “fingers” — what you typically picture hearing the word “curd.”
The fingers are salted, then packed into rectangular metal molds called hoops.
“We use water pressure to press out the curds overnight,” Kuhn says. “We come in the next morning at 6:30 and take all of those blocks of cheese, all very pressed, put them in vacuum-sealed bags, put them in boxes and then put them in the back.”
The blocks are left in storage for up to three years. The longer the cheese is kept in storage, the stronger the taste, a tour guide says.
As Kuhn speaks, the two masked cheesemakers keep working, bending down to toss and stir curds. They start to funnel the curds into the hoops.
Several hours later, the boxes of cheese will be placed in storage, where they will wait for months, possibly years.