God, am I high-road, or what. Everybody that knows me knows I must be livid to have to share an evening at The Y with these two.
I had to do a gig downtown several years ago where I had to appear with Eli Zabar and Andy Balducci. I wanted to jump out of my skin.
But the thing is way over-sold, so I don’t encourage you to call for tix. But this is not the point. The point is as follows.
The three of us will present two cheeses each. We are to have selected cheeses that have made a strong impression on us; cheeses we are particularly thrilled about or that have some certain significance in one way or another.
Out of the blue my dear friend Mary Falk sent me a cheese by parcel post. Mary is LoveTree Farm, ‘way up in the nostril of Wisconsin. She has won every award imaginable for her sheep’s milk cheeses, one of which is her glorious Trade Lake Cedar, a majestic, natural-rinded wheel festooned with aromatic cedar boughs. Mary and her husband Dave raise a sizable flock of sheep there, sheep that they not always successfully protect from predators by employing three Australian sheepdogs. Predators, you say? In Wisconsin? You better bloody believe it: Coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, eagles . . . Wild and wooly up there.
Anyway, this cheese arrives, always a welcome thing, particularly from Mary, because her cheeses are like drop-dead good. Well, this cheese was beyond drop dead. It was a raw (un-pasteurized) cow’s milk cheese, made from raw Jersey cow’s milk supplied to her by a neighbor. I have never tasted a cheese as delicious as this one in my thirty-one years in the business. Gooshy, yet chalky, with a natural rind, a recipe neither soft-ripened (like Brie and Camembert) nor washed-rind (like Munster d’Alsace and Epoisses); very smelly, very forceful, utterly staggeringly delicious. I could digress, but the goodness of this cheese is not really the point. Stay with me.
So I immediately contact Mary to tell her how knocked-out I am about this cheese, and can she send me eight pounds of it for the Y event. She says yeah. A day later it occurs to me that I don’t know what she’s calling it. So I e-mail her. The following is her reply. And I rush to deliver to you her reply because it stands for me as the most important document I have ever received in my life.
(Mary Falk’s reply)
Hi Steven
The “cheese” you will be tasting is currently called “Fishbait” since it is only 6 weeks old and made from raw Jersey cow’s milk.
I have never held onto it longer than 6 weeks since that is when it seems most ready. I suppose I really should give it a name especially in light of the fact that “Fishbait” seems to be evolving into a category on our sales board at the Farmers’ Market rather than just one cheese; for example we now sell the Fishbait Cedar, Fishbait Gabrielson Lake, Fishbait Fromage Blanc, etc.
Last week you asked that I explain why we are now adding Fishbait to our inventory of sales items. Here goes.
My customers have been routinely asking me for young, fresh, grassy raw milk cheeses. For the past 10 years I have dutifully told them that it is against the law in Wisconsin and Minnesota to sell raw milk cheese aged less than 60 days for human consumption. This has always been a sore spot for me since our farmstead milk is so darn clean.
In order to understand just how clean our milk is (and other typical farmstead dairy milk) it helps to be able to compare it to pasteurized milk standards. Pasteurized milk is allowed to have a bacteria plate count of up to 20,000 AFTER pasteurization and still be sold as pasteurized milk. The typical farmstead dairy averages a bacteria plate count of under 10,000. Our milk averages under 5,000 plate count. That means our milk exceeds the pasteurized milk standards FOUR TIMES OVER. Not only does it exceed pasteurized milk standards, but it still has the beneficial bacteria in it that pasteurized milk does not, and it still contains all the natural vitamins. Even knowing all of this, we still dutifully toed the line according to our state regs hoping that some day in the near future we will be able to prove that science is on our side, and that the fear of raw milk is worry from the 1940’s when these regs were first enforced, before bulk milk was even refrigerated and well before sanitation standards were even instituted.
But when we found out that it is legal for my customers to order fresh raw milk cheeses aged less than 60 days, from anywhere in Europe, and have them shipped directly to their door (as long as they promised not to re-sell it), but they couldn’t buy it from us (and we are licensed and have an HACCP plan) we then said enough is enough. After further exploration of our state regs (and those of Minnesota) we realized that the regs are basically set in place to protect and regulate the large commodity cheese industry, and we have been placed under the same umbrella even though it has made no scientific sense.
We also found out that once all 50 states in the US allow for the sale of raw milk cheese less than 60 days old, then, according to import/export law, the US then has to allow that same age of raw milk cheese to be imported from Europe. And therein lies the rub. Large commodity cheese factories would be crazy to make raw milk cheese from commingled bulk milk, and they believe that they would not be able to compete with the flood of raw milk cheeses that Europe produces. For example, in California you can buy fresh fluid raw milk for human consumption (as long as it meets the pasteurized milk standards), but you can’t sell cheese aged less than 60 days that is made from that same milk. This is so totally insane since the cheese product is so much more biologically safe than the fluid product. So no one in California is worried about a flood of fluid raw milk being shipped in from Europe, but CHEESE! Ah-h-h-h. Cheese has the big guys worried.
So this brings us back to Fishbait. We first tried to sell “Catfood” at the Farmers’ Market, but when the state of Wisconsin found out we were doing so they threatened to yank my cheese plant license for making “illegal pet food without a license”. Evidently they had just instituted these new regs in order to “control” the “pet food milk” market, etc. The license costs $25. I wanted to be a law abiding citizen, so I requested a license application, but it was never sent to me. My husband (Dave) requested that I leave the Wisconsin Department of Food Safety alone and just make the cheese that we were licensed to make.
Being the dutiful wife that I am, I agreed to leave the Department of Food Safety alone. I instead phoned the Department of Natural Resources and asked them what, if any, license requirements were necessary to produce fishbait. The DNR said that it would be nice if the product was bio-degradable. I said that we could do that.
So now we bring Fishbait to the St. Paul Farmers’ Market and we sell it with a sign that states that it is not legal to sell raw milk cheese aged less than 60 days for human consumption in the great states of Wisconsin and Minnesota, so we bring it to the citizens of Minnesota, Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, as “Fishbait”.
We have been EXTENSIVELY inspected by the state of Wisconsin because of our Fishbait, and also by the USFDA, but it seems OK so far to sell the product in this manner as long as the public is properly notified that it is fishbait, and not legal cheese. I guess there’s no anti-Fishbait lobbying organization yet worrying about a flood of European Union imports! Laugh out loud! I did have a cheesemaker from Georgia ask me if I had a copyright on the term fishbait, and I replied to him, “Heavens, NO!”, and that it is a generic term, and I believe ALL cheesemakers should be able to sell “Fishbait”.
We just want science-based regulations. Since we CAN scientifically prove that our product is safe then we should be able to sell it. The best way to regulate the production and sale of dairy “fishbait” is to legalize it. In restaurants in the state of Minnesota it is illegal to serve a rare hamburger, but you can serve a rare steak. A similar distinction is all that we are asking for. We, of course, are the rare steak.
More about pasteurized milk in cheese:
Pasteurized milk only has synthetic vitamins added back to it if it is being sold as fluid, and then the vitamins are only added back if it is stated on the label. Pasteurized milk for cheese production has NO vitamins added back to it and also typically has fluid calcium chloride added to it so the cheese can be made since the pasteurization damages the calcium structure; this is one reason why so many folks tend to get constipated from commodity cheese.
Some pasteurized commodity Brie-type cheeses and cream-style cheeses that tend to have a ph factor around 7 have been the culprits of food borne illnesses in the most recent past, not raw milk cheeses. The only food illness that was truly triggered by raw milk cheese was 1988 in California where fresh raw milk cheese that was not licensed, nor working under state sanitation guidelines was sold out of someone’s kitchen using milk of very questionable quality. Every other so-called “raw milk cheese-poisoning” was actually, subsequently found to have been the result of pasteurized milk cheese that had been contaminated after pasteurization with raw milk, and then not processed accordingly.
Hugs,
Mary at LoveTree
There you have it. The importance and significance of Mary’s documented experience is evidence that so many foodstuffs (not just cheese) in this country are regulated not for health and nutrition concerns, but for economic ones. And the result is that so much food grown or produced here is just not very good, or good at all, and certainly less nutritious than it could be. And the logical step past that statement is that our federal, state and local government bureaucracies are actually becoming more intrusive, more obfuscating, more impossible, more blind to the real need for food to be NOT refined, and even blinder to the fact that their job SHOULD be to be absolutely supportive of farmers, cheesemakers, local and seasonal produce and other artisanal foodstuffs and their makers.
So dream on. It’s only going to get worse. I see in The New York Times that raw milk cheeselovers can order on-line direct from France any number of superb examples of illegal raw milk cheeses and have them delivered right to their door here in the US. They’ll cost you around $50, $60 per pound, plus a walloping shipping cost, but what the heck, right? How ridiculous. The cheeses they are offering are NOT illegal (each is aged at least 60 days) and not one of them is a French cheese that I haven’t stocked day-in, day-out here at Fairway since 1980.
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