Feature article
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Cheese plant thriving in Blue Ridge hills
By Fred Sauceman
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Clawhammer banjo brought Helen Feete to Galax, Virginia. Jersey cows have kept her there.
Galax, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is home to the world’s oldest and largest old-time fiddler’s convention. It was started in the spring of 1935 as a fund-raiser for the local Moose Lodge, and its original purpose holds true today: “Keeping alive the memories and sentiments of days gone by and make it possible for people of today to hear and enjoy the tunes of yesterday.”
Helen and her husband Rick, a classical guitarist, attended the convention regularly, clogging and picking way into the morning. On one of those trips down from their home in northern Virginia, in the middle of the back-to-the-land movement, Helen asked the local county extension agent about going into dairying. He encouraged her, at a time when the Kraft corporation still had a plant in Grayson County.
Helen and Rick started dairying in 1988, and 10 years later, they opened a cheese plant. It took a decade for them to get on their feet, but they’ve done it in a big way. Meadow Creek Dairy cheeses, made with raw cow’s milk, are consistently rated among the best farmstead cheeses in the nation, despite the fact that they’re made in a region with almost no cheesemaking tradition.
Although Helen says she gave up clawhammer banjo because she was getting too old to play until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, a cheesemaker’s hours are even longer: milking at 6:30 in the morning and finishing up in the drying room at 6:30 in the evening.
Helen and her staff milk 82 Jersey crossbreeds. They started with all registered Jerseys but have introduced French breeds, to change the composition of the milk.
“Jerseys have a lot of fat, but they’re high in protein, too, which is good,” Helen says. “Jerseys are efficient reproductively, and we breed our cows within a 60-day window. They calve between the first of March and the first of June, which means we don’t milk in January and February. We only make cheese when the cows are feeding on grass. We match the peak nutritional needs of the cows to the peak nutritional value of the grass.”
Meadow Creek’s biggest seller, Grayson, named for the county, is a washed rind, “stinky” cheese, made in the cellar. It’s washed with a bacteria-laden brine solution that creates a brilliant orange rind as the bacteria break down the protein, causing the cheese to ripen from the outside in.
Helen describes her Appalachian as being similar to a French country-style cheese, semisoft with a gray mottling and a mild, buttery flavor. White Top is a soft-ripened cheese. Mountaineer is a harder, Alpine-style cheese, akin to an Italian fontina. While the other cheeses, 60 days old or older, sell out in late spring, Mountaineer, aged six months, is available through July.
No longer traveling the farmers market and tailgate circuits, Helen and Rick sell their cheeses wholesale now. A vendor has listed them in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue.
Restaurant Eve in Alexandria, Virginia; La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles; Thomas Keller’s French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley; and the “urban version” of the French Laundry, New York City’s Per Se, have served Meadow Creek’s products for their cheese courses.
Grayson, White Top and Appalachian are sold in squares. Helen says there are very few square cheeses, and that “makes us stand out in the marketplace.”
Plus, she adds, cheese in that shape is much easier to handle and wrap, and more of it can fit on a shelf. “People remember it.”
Although pregnant women, older persons, and those with compromised immune systems are cautioned to avoid raw milk cheeses, Helen says they can be “as safe as any pasteurized milk cheese. We test our milk and cheese a minimum of once a month for pathogens. You’re starting with milk that has good bacteria in it, and you want to increase that. With pasteurized, you’re starting with a blank slate, and it’s easy to contaminate because there’s nothing to compete with the harmful bacteria.
“ What you’re looking for is balance. If you make everything sterile, you create an equal chance for any kind of bacteria. With raw milk cheeses, I stack the deck in my favor.”
--------GoTriCities--------
Food writer Fred Sauceman, author of the book “The Place Setting: Timeless Tastes of the Mountain South — from Bright Hope to Frog Level,” is senior writer and executive assistant to the president for public affairs at East Tennessee State University. E-mail him at sauceman@etsu.edu.
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