Artisanal Foods

By Author: John Tang
Total Articles: 512
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Six years ago, New Jersey had about 50 farmers' markets. Now there are more than 100. We like having the farm come to us. But now more than ever we are also welcome at the farm—where we can observe (and taste!) the new artisanship in action. The recipe is simple: small batches yield high quality. Just add passion, know-how, and hard work.

Valley Shepherd Creamery

In the pastures of Long Valley, near the Raritan River in Morris County, Eran Wajswol's 460 sheep graze and bleat as sheep have done for thousands of years. Using all-natural ingredients, Old World recipes, and traditional cave aging, Wajswol makes splendid artisan cheeses from their milk.

But he gladly lets technology lend a hand. Twice a day, in the milking parlor, a computerized lactation carousel that handles 60 sheep at once—the only one in the U.S. for sheep, Wajswol claims—milks 300 ewes per hour. In the cheese room, vats of milk are heated to the precise temperatures required to activate specific strains of bacteria to produce just the right texture of curd.

Machinery helps you pay attention to what's important, ...
... Wajswol says. In cheese making, there are a couple of things you need to focus on. If you can eliminate the nonsense—the mundane, nonskilled steps, like feeding the animals or warming milk correctly—you can spend more time focusing on the texture of the curd and making sure the product comes out good.

A former life as a mechanical engineer accounts for Wajswol's appreciation of technology. (He and his wife, Debra, also a former engineer, met at Stevens Institute of Technology.) An overlapping career as a real estate developer in New Jersey accounts for the deep pockets that enabled Wajswol to invest millions—mostly from his own funds, plus one loan—to create Valley Shepherd Creamery, which opened in 2005.

Wajswol, 53, was born in Israel and raised largely in Belgium before coming to the U.S. at age 13. He has no shepherds or cheese makers in his family tree. The only explanation he gives for his vocational transition is that he liked cheese making. It was hard, he says. I like hard things.

For ten years before he built Valley Shepherd, Wajswol put himself through a self-styled, part-time apprenticeship, studying with experts in Europe, then practicing on small batches in his and Debra's home in Tewksbury. By the late '90s, he was selling his cheeses at farmers' markets.

From the outset, Valley Shepherd was conceived not just as a dairy but as a pilot for a new kind of agritourism.

Some places offer corn mazes and bales of hay for kids to jump on, says Wajswol, who teaches monthly classes in cheese making. That's fine. But I don't know what people are absorbing in these places other than fresh air. Instead of helping people kill a few hours' time, I am offering a real education here. Wajswol says that more than 25,000 people have visited the farm this year alone.

Information-packed tours lead visitors through the process. Tours begin with three films that in ten minutes explain the basics of milking, cheese making, and sheep shearing. (The Wajswols sell wool blankets and sheepskins in their Sheep Shoppe, along with cheeses and farm- and sheep-related gifts.) Next, visitors move toward the barn, where the first of several glass-walled observation areas allows them to watch the stages of cheese making without compromising stringent hygiene standards.

See that conveyor belt? Wajswol says, pointing. It can carry hay to 600 animals in 45 minutes. The conveyor belt is nothing compared to the milking parlor, where each sheep has her health statistics displayed on a computer screen before getting hooked up to the automated milker. Next stop is the cheese making room, with its fermented milk, curds, cheese presses, and whey.

Valley Shepherd's Fall Harvest Tour, which runs through mid-November, culminates in a wagon ride about a mile up the road to the aging cave, which Wajswol built by blasting 150 feet into a mountainside. He says a cave is mandatory, not just for its year-round temperature in the 50s, but for the constant 80 percent humidity that cheese likes. Visitors can walk along a corridor and view, again behind glass, rooms where thousands of wheels mature to full beauty.

When people see how much skill and resources it takes to make cheese—say, 1,300 pounds of milk to produce a mere six 20-poundwheels—they really appreciate it and become lifelong customers, he says. Six or seven years ago, this kind of cheese didn't exist around here. Now I can't keep enough of it in stock.

Sheep's milk has higher butterfat, protein and minerals than cow's or goat's milk and forms a tighter, thicker curd. It also matures in half the time of cow's milk cheese—a cheese maker's dream. That said, you need lighter milks to make a variety of cheeses, so Valley Shepherd also brings in cow's milk from a small farm in Sussex County.

The result is 20 delightful and interesting cheeses—some pure sheep, others mixed milk. A Brie-style wheel is wonderfully rich and melty. A mild, smooth Gouda is accented with the earthy zing of nettles. The pecorinos are tangy and intense. Oldwick, a pecorino, modeled on berbis from the French Pyrenees, is nutty and rich. Prices range from $17.50 to $23 a pound.

Even with automation, cheese making is a hard life. The Wajswols work seven days a week for eight months a year, and their two teenage children constantly help. The family doesn't rest until December, when cheese making winds down for the season. It's crazy here, he says. On the weekend, I'm sending cheese to a dozen farmers' markets. The phone is always ringing.

Still, he has no plans for expansion, even as demand threatens to outpace capacity. I can only be in so many places—I need to always be within shouting distance of the cheese room. You can destroy a vat just by walking out for five minutes. We'll add some more sheep, but not too many, he says, with a shake of his head. Big is bad. If you grow big, you'll screw up your cheese.

Why does Wajswol consider that inevitable? Why can't artisan cheeses be made on a large scale, especially when assisted by the kind of technology Valley Shepherd employs?

The process starts with grass in the fields and ends up with a hygienic, state-controlled product delivered to a customer at a farmers' market, Waj-swol explains. In between, the process is complex. Animals produce milk that goes into storage that gets heated that gets formed that gets put into caves to age. If you screw up any of these stages, you screw up the whole thing.

In today's society, those responsibilities are usually divided between several large-scale farming operations. One guy just does milk. The milk goes to a factory where it is held in silos until it's ready to be made into cheese. Then a distributor comes and brings it to the retail shop. Here we combine all those jobs in one.

That is the killer. You can't do any one of those things on a small scale and survive. Farmers' markets allow us small guys to sell at retail. Without it we're going under. One of the reasons we're forced to do this is what it costs us to buy land. If land was supported by the state, if farmers got a subsidy for preserving farmland—well, that could save small farms. Otherwise, what beginning farmer can start from a million-dollar piece of land?

For all these reasons, Wajswol says, the rewards of artisanship come from producing delicious rare cheeses that make customers happy, not from anything financial—the cost of doing things right is too high.
Real estate, he adds, with the tone of a guy who's seen it all, now that was real money.
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