Cheesemakers make Cato Corner Farm a cheese destination

Colchester - It's summer in December inside the cheesemaking room at Cato Corner Farm, and Mark Gillman, clad in a T-shirt and shorts, has just spent 40 minutes hand-stirring 340 pounds of curd that will become wheels of one of Cato Corner's best-selling cheeses, Bridgid's Abbey.

This is what a farmstead cheese operation is all about: a do-it-yourself, do-it-all business. Gillman's mother, Elizabeth MacAlister, 65, cares for the farm's 70 or so pasture-raised cows while Gillman, 40, converts the cows' raw milk into smooth, or nutty, or stinky, cheeses.

It all happens by the magic of cultures and rennet, moisture and mold, time and patience and lots of manual labor.

"There's a satisfaction of starting the day with one product and transforming it into something else," says Gillman, who quit his job as a seventh-grade English teacher in 1999 to join his mother in cheesemaking. "That's the fairly immediate reward. And then you take that to market a few months later, and people respond to what you've created."

Cato Corner, which MacAlister started in 1997, staffs the equivalent of eight full-time employees. The farm produced 50,000 pounds of cheese in 2009 and sells its products at farmers markets in Connecticut and New York as well as to specialty food stores and high-end restaurants.

Unlike many European cheeses, which have been perfected over generations, Cato Corner and other artisanal cheesemakers have, in an astonishingly short period of time, raised the bar for high-end domestic cheeses.

Gillman and MacAlister have garnered national recognition for their products. Less than 10 years into their business, Saveur magazine named Cato Corner's Dutch Farmstead, a Gouda-style cheese, one of its 50 favorite American cheeses of 2005.

In April 2006, the Gallo Family Vineyards awarded its "Never Stop Growing" distinction to Cato Corner Farm and an "Outstanding Dairy Product" gold medal to one of its cheeses, the Hooligan.

"They kind of looked at what was out there and made things that were unusual and special," says Liz Thorpe, vice president of the famed New York City cheese shop Murray's Cheese and author of "The Cheese Chronicles. "So it makes their cheeses stand out."

Cato Corner's cows, mostly Jerseys, graze on open pastures on the 75-acre farm between May and November. They eat feed that is free of growth hormones, herbicides and subtherapeutic antibiotics often used to boost farm animals' output.

"The cows are happy and healthy," Gillman says. "In terms of grass feeding, that has flavor implications as well as ethical implications. Cows are meant to eat grass, that's their natural diet. And hey, as it turns out, it's better for you and it tastes better, too."

Move over, Manchego

Dozens of farmstead cheese operations like Cato Corner have cropped up throughout the country within the past decade, with the number of American cheesemakers more than doubling in that time, Thorpe says.

In Connecticut, the state Department of Agriculture licenses and regulates 18 producers of cow, goat and sheep's milk cheese, including 12 farmstead operations that own the animals and make cheese from their milk, according to Wayne Kasacek, assistant director of the department's Bureau of Regulation and Inspection.

Thorpe says she featured Cato Corner in her 2009 book on American cheesemakers because the farm is representative of the local success small-scale cheesemakers have found in their local farmers markets.

"In the last 10 years, farmers markets have really exploded," Thorpe says. "And now they're sort of an outlet for cheesemakers to sell directly to their consumers. And Cato Corner has done that very consistently, from the beginning."

Gillman has also managed to tease out a surprising range of flavors and textures from one lone product, raw cow's milk.

Eleven cheeses with clever names such as Womanchego and Fromage d'O'Cow make up the main roster of Cato Corner's cave-aged cheeses, but variations on age and rind washes add eight more.

Hooligan, popular among refined palates that favor "stinky" cheeses, also goes to market as Despearado, which is washed in Ashford-based Westford Hill Distillers' pre-distilled alcoholic pear mix; Drunken Hooligan, rubbed in wine grapes from Priam Vineyards in Colchester; and Drunk Monk, washed in Willimantic Brewing Co.'s brown ale.

Of vats and cultures
and whey

In the cheesemaking room, Gillman's cleanliness rules involve compulsive hand-washing and regular sanitation of the stainless steel equipment. He wears two hairnets - one for his wild red hair, the other for his wild red beard - an industrial apron and freshly scrubbed white boots.

"Cheese is all about the bacteria growing, so you want to make sure it's the right bacteria," Gillman notes.

The 2,800 pounds of milk warming in the stainless steel vat is as fresh as it gets. It's been pumped out of the milking parlor, where cows are milked twice a day, just that morning, and combined with milk from the two prior days.

Gillman makes cheese three times a week, sticking to a basic formula that includes warmed milk, cultures in freeze-dried form to help break down the milk's protein and fat, and rennet, or enzymes that help coagulate the milk and separate the solid curd from the liquid whey.

He tweaks temperature, moisture and idling time to develop the farm's 11 cheese varieties. He must also make alterations to compensate for seasonal changes in the milk's butterfat and protein composition.

"I think you can make very good cheese without knowing that much about what's happening on a molecular level," Gillman says. "But cheese is a wonderfully complex food, and the more you understand about that process, the more you can kind of tweak what you're doing."

The curd is delicate, milky and bland - nothing like the complex finished product - when Gillman cuts it into half-inch cubes. The curd pieces are then hooped into plastic colanders and pressed before soaking in a brine bath, a process that introduces a natural preservative to the cheese and helps dry out the rind.

Cato Corner's cheeses must age in the cheese cave for at least two months before they can be sold, per U.S. regulations that dictate the sale of cheese made from raw milk.

The cool, damp cave is where the cheese begins to develop its personality. The ambient molds make friends with the rinds, coating them in a gentle fuzz that anyone other than a cheesemaker might mistake for food gone bad.

Small differences in texture, color and taste are to be expected in an artisanal product, especially because Cato Corner doesn't standardize the milk to ensure consistent fat and protein levels year-round.

"I try to keep good notes with every batch, just so that we know what we did," Gillman says. "And if it came out really well, we can look back and maybe figure out why. If it came out really badly, we could also try to see if there was some problem."

Gillman, who grew up on the farm, remembers a time when he wanted to leave farm life for good. He went to college in Philadelphia, then moved to San Francisco and settled in Washington, D.C., to teach.

But cheesemaking beckoned.

He thought, "'Hey, I can teach again if I want to. Let me go home and spend some time working with my mom and making cheese,'" Gillman says. "So that was 1999. And the books are still in the attic, and I'm still here making cheese."