
"Think about the difference between sourdough and conventional bread. Then imagine there are only five sourdough bread bakers in the United States." Rachel Fritz Schaal doesn't mince words about the kind of cheese that she and her husband, Peter Dixon, make at Parish Hill Creamery in Vermont. "13 years in, I'm a zealot. I'd stop making cheese if we couldn't use our starters."
Dixon takes a more musing, philosophical approach. "It's part of a long journey I've been on as a practitioner of the craft of cheesemaking. This is my 43rd year doing it. [Naturally fermented cheese] is the closest way to represent your place."
So what is natural cheese? All cheese is microbially fermented with the aid of specialized cultures. In the same way there are different yeasts for brewing beer or making Champagne, there are many strains of cultures for different kinds of cheese. These cultures have been meticulously bred to make predictable and reliable batches. That makes them easy to work with, but as far as Dixon and Fritz Schaal are concerned, such refined cultures fly in the face of hundreds of years of cheesemaking history, during which cheesemakers relied on local wild cultures, the same as natural winemakers and sourdough bread bakers.
Fritz Schaal and Dixon know what they're talking about. As industry consultants, they've developed countless recipes for award-winning artisan cheeses, including several that we offer. As cheesemakers, their productions are beautiful, delicious, and innovative. This is nerdy cheese, but you don't need to be a nerd to enjoy the fried chicken notes of Carefully or the long pineapple finish of Humble. We've even assembled a Parish Hill Creamery Collection where you can try both together along with Reverie, a surprisingly citrusy tomme.
Dixon and Fritz Schaal developed their house starters from raw milk at Elm Lea Farm, a dairy just up the road from the creamery where Parish Hill gets all its cow's milk. They let the milk sour into yogurt, selected their favorites, and propagated them much like sourdough starters.
This is just part of the Parish Hill magic. Another crucial element is their commitment to making cheese every day of the week, rather than once every two or three days, like most creameries. "That gets us milk with more of its original bacteria that formed during milking," Dixon says, "rather than bacteria that built up during storage." It's less efficient to make cheese every day, but Dixon and Fritz Schaal think the results speak for themselves. "Milk produced for cheesemaking lends itself to natural fermentation that contemporary and modern cheesemaking is just trying to approximate."
Their ideas aren't far-out. Dixon notes that billions of pounds of Parmigiano Reggiano are made daily in Italy without lab-derived cultures; ditto for those hulking wheels of Comte made in France. It's the industrialization of the cheese industry—and the capitalism of it all—that's made such methods seem like outliers. "When I was learning to make cheese in the US," Fritz Schaal points out, "I was taught that you had to buy commercial starters or it wouldn't work." Working with his own starters gave Dixon "the best way to come close to making cheese that might taste like it did a hundred years ago."
In March, Fritz Schaal and Dixon will be hosting a conference on the science and craft of making raw milk cheese, where cheesemakers, dairy farmers, and researchers can "check in on each other and focus on raw milk cheesemaking," Fritz Schaal says. The two-day event is a natural extension of the couple's educational work. "Everyone shouldn't have to figure out the whole wheel on their own," Fritz Schaal continues. "It's important to me that we bring people together—not just to teach them, but to give them an opportunity to learn from each other."
Try all of our naturally fermented, raw milk cheeses from Parish Hill Creamery!
Farm photos courtesy of Parish Hill Creamery. Photographers: Melissa Koren, Michael Prince, Melissa Koren.