Cheese is a living food, and that means a cheesemaker's plans don't always work out. Failure is a natural part of cheesemaking. What separates the pro makers from the rest of us is how they adapt and move forward. We asked 11 of our creameries how they do just that. Here's what they had to say!
Making the most of an unexpected batch
Artisan cheese is high risk, high reward. We celebrate the batch-to-batch variation of each day's 'vintage'—but just as some cheeses are exceptionally delicious, others don't measure up to our vision or the value our customers have come to expect. Hard cheeses with slight defects can be routed to culinary applications or even shredded with other batches to blend out flaws. If the issue is more glaring or the style less ideal for the kitchen, we call our local pig farmer... — Zoe Brickley, Jasper Hill Farm
Keeping creative and humble
I always try to turn failure into opportunity. Many of the most interesting discoveries in cheese have come from mistakes or challenges along the way. Cheesemaking teaches creativity, humility, and the willingness to try again. Every wheel that doesn’t turn out as planned becomes a lesson that helps improve the next batch. — Marieke Penterman, Hollands Family Cheese
A new learning opportunity
Most of the time I treat an unexpected result as a learning opportunity. I contextualize the results using the data collected during each batch's physical production, along with factors such as ambient temperature and humidity. I analyze the results with our affineur and begin searching for the root cause. If it's an R&D recipe, we make changes and repeat this process until we end up with something delicious. There are situations where we can pivot our expectations for a cheese and encourage a new path with affinage, sometimes resulting in a new recipe. — Miguel Vivanco, The Farm at Doe Run
Staying the course
We have strict recipes in place which keeps cheese failures at bay. We monitor pH drops during the make and at the unhooping stage. We use commercially prepared cultures and rennet which lead to consistent cheeses. — Kerry Gewalt, Cobb Hill Cheese
A special deal for locals
We have a channel for this that we call Tractor. This cheese is very popular, particularly locally. We like to say we don’t make Tractor. Tractor happens. — Tom Perry, Shelburne Farms
No-waste alternatives
We don’t see many failed cheeses. Our process is tight, our team is experienced, and we taste-evaluate every cheese we mix, cut, or package. But once in a while, a wheel develops a flavor that isn’t exactly what we intended. Maybe a cheese leans a little more cheddar-like than the profile we were aiming for, or the texture matures in an unexpected direction.
When that happens with a hard cheese, we don’t waste it. Instead, we give it a home under our Mystic Farm Girl label. It’s our way of honoring the work that went into it while being transparent about the fact that it’s delicious—just different from the original target style.
Every cheese tells a story, even the surprises. And we stand behind all of them. — Anne Doe, Boston Post Dairy
A proper burial
Some cheese with rind flaws—our most common failure—can be salvaged, but most of our failures go out to the back pasture to be buried. If we're not happy with a cheese, we don't sell it. We spend a lot of time tasting and analyzing our cheeses, trying to figure out what went wrong and when—was it in the make? The cellar?—and we have made many improvements to our process, so that now it's rarely more than a few "failure" batches per year. But an aged raw milk cheese is a complicated business; if we can actually pin down for sure what went wrong, we count ourselves very lucky. — Kat Feete, Meadow Creek Dairy
Making quick corrections
Some errors during cheesemaking are not salvageable and the cheese needs to be disposed of. In other cases, issues can be managed to prevent failures. With cheddar cheese making, it is important to learn how to pivot quickly during the make process so that small errors can be managed and cheese production can continue as planned.
We know that our milk components change during the year, so we make small adjustments to try and maintain a consistent flavor profile. Adjustments may include acidification rates, coagulation time, and size of the curd. Sometimes, issues occur during the make process that result in a cheese that is not ideal for longer aging periods, but is fine as a younger-aged product. For example, the plan at the start of a make may have been to age the cheese out to add to our 2 Year Cheddar inventory, but issues during the make process result in the decision to use it for 1 Year Cheddar. Sensory evaluation during aging helps to confirm the call. — Meg Gonazalez, Grafton Village Cheese Co.
Developing new products
We use every failure as a learning opportunity. Generally it's something we'd tend to sell through our own store—we're lucky to have a market next to the creamery, so that small mistakes don't have to mean waste. A lot of failures have turned into a new product; rarely do we have a total failure. Often we simply something that doesn't fit what it was supposed to be. — Dan Porter, FireFly Farms
An ugly cheese sale
I don't tend to have cheese failures at the make level (knock on wood!), but there are definitely cave explosions, as I like to call them, which make the aesthetics of the cheese less desirable. For the last three years, I've been a vendor at Burlington Farmers market and that's really been helpful when a cave explosion occurs. I just called it an "Ugly Cheese Sale" and move the product that way. People actually really like hearing what went wrong and why—and learning to trust cheese that may look weird, but taste wonderful. They also really like the discount. — Rebecca Velazquez, Barn First Creamery
Working with creative chefs
If cheese goes sideways during the aging process—the rind doesn't develop just the right way, or maybe we take a core sample, and the flavor is just a little off—we can usually find a home for those cheeses with a handful of creative chefs. Thankfully, it's a pretty rare occurrence!
That said, we are ALWAYS tasting and making notes, and it's fascinating to think about all of the factors over months that led to the taste of a particular batch. A wet spring, a hot make day, a particularly frigid winter... It can all show up, for good or ill, in the finished product. — Kate Leach, Woodlawn Creamery
Thanks to all the cheesemakers that participated in this roundtable! Learn more about all of them in our Farm Focus profiles, and shop our bestselling artisan cheeses here.
Adorable goat photos courtesy of The Farm at Doe Run and FireFly Farms.
