 We're very happy to be here at the library in San Francisco. Thank you for having us. But what we wanted to talk a little bit about is not so much our background, but really more about cheese and how we worked with it in the book. We've seen a lot of books that were really recipe books. And when Sue and I were thinking about doing a book, we really wanted to do a book that was about cheese and more about classifications and how you look at cheese and how you would use it in a recipe, rather than being really specific about taking maybe a pound of gruyere and putting it in a gratin or something and having that be the recipe. But we decided that we'd work with cheeses in classifications. Well, and that if you understood how the cheese was made, it would inform you on how to cook with it. So that was really what we were trying to achieve. And we teach you how cheese is made by describing our journey, starting with fresh cheese. Well, no, starting with milk. Starting with milk, of course. Because we both came from backgrounds that really concentrated on ingredients. And we developed relationships with farmers and producers in the restaurants where we were that really concentrated on working with good, sustainable, mostly organic ingredients. And when Albert was able to take the family farm, which was the Strauss family dairy, Albert transitioned that dairy, which was conventional, to organic. And he was the first organic dairy west of the Mississippi. And that transition took place in 92. Is that right, Sue? He had to learn homeopathic medicine to treat the cows. He had to learn how to keep them healthy. And so he really had to study medicine. He had to study how to grow all the crops organically and to keep his land in organic compliance. So luckily, he's kind of brilliant. He is brilliant. But also, there was this little group of farmers out there. And one of the most notable is Warren Webber, who has star route farms. And I know that probably most everyone here has had something from Warren Webber's farm. But there was a little group that started up in point rays. And it was called the Farmers Growers Group. And the whole idea behind that was to be able to get a group together to start a farmer's market in point rays. But this group that got together was really a dynamic group. Sue was one of them. Albert Strauss, Peter Martinelli, Warren Webber, Ellen Strauss, who actually started the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. So it was a group that was about evolving the food world and trying to make it a better food world for all involved. I was living out there. I moved out there in 89. And I thought, we have to have a farmer's market. There's all this great agriculture, but no access to the food. And I went to the Farm Bureau and the Marin Agricultural Land Trust. And I asked them both to sponsor the farmer's market. They said, we have no farmers here. We have ranchers. And they grow beef cattle. And they have dairies. They didn't even count Warren Webber as a farmer. And in restaurant circles, he was probably one of the most important farmers in our community. So we were starting from a very, and the first meeting I went to of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, the same people who said, we don't have farms. We have dairies. They served powdered milk with the coffee. It's like a non-dairy creamer. So this is where we were starting, even though so much had gone before. So our story is really, we look successful because we're at the Ferry Building. So they're like, wow, they really know what they're doing. But it took us a long time to get to a point where we were actually cash positive. Probably took us about nine years. No, it took six. OK, six. And then the Ferry Building has been a huge help for all farmers. Our cheese shop is a marketing vehicle for artists and cheese. You really have to taste it because you've never heard of it. You've never heard of St. George from Santa Rosa. You've never heard of, well, you've heard of Humboldt Fog by now. But there are lots of small produced cheeses that we have available. And that's actually one thing that's been a really positive experience for us. When we started, Sue had started a marketing company for the Tamales Bay region, which was, excuse me, Redwood, Bellwether, Motto's, Strauss, and... Redwood. Did you say that? That's it. Oh, that's it. OK, and then when we started making fresh cheese, we made cottage cheese and fromage blanc and quark and crème fraîche. And we had, our first vat was really, it's crazy, but it was a 10-gallon vat that we made cheese in. And then we graduated to an old cottage cheese vat that we got in Wisconsin. Yeah, that was a 200-gallon. 200-gallon vat that actually we just last year stopped using that vat and we got a larger 300-gallon vat. But our production is small and we were making only fresh cheese because we were modeling our creamery after Neil Jardieri from London. And we thought, OK, we'll buy small production cheeses for our cheese shop and then we'll supplement with fresh cheese that we make using Albert's milk. And that's kind of a traditional style of cheese shop in Europe. And at this point, we started making fromage blanc and crème fraîche and cottage cheese and different restaurant tours. We're a little bit interested in it, but anybody that was a distributor said, are you kidding? I'm not going to drive out to Point Reyes to pick up. For 200 pounds of cheese. They sell cheese on pallets. We were giving like a few cases. We were carrying four little boxes out. So we had to start distributing ourselves. And I don't know why I got into that. Oh, I know. Because of all the small producers, what would happen? There are so many of small producers out there that they would come to us and say, hey, nobody else is willing to take my cheese. Would you all mind if you distributed my cheese as well? So we started to build a good little portfolio of small production cheeses. And then in 1999, I think it was, we got this little teeny shop on California Street. And it was at California in Fillmore. And we called it Artisan Cheese. And this shop was 400 square feet. But I would say 250 were the back rooms. And if we had three people in that shop, it was packed. And we could only fit one and a half people behind the counter, which is a problem. So we jammed two in. One and a half, yeah. So that way, we thought, well, if we have this little shop, then people who work in restaurants can come and try the cheese the way it really should be tasted rather than in carrying around a little sample bag that stays in your car. And you taste it at the beginning. And it tastes one way. And then by the end of the day, it tastes completely different. So we were able to build our business that way. Our restaurant business, the chefs could come in and taste all these things at their peak. Also in our farm community, we have young people coming back to the farm to make cheese. And it started slowly. There was one family. Then there was two. Then there was four. Today, there's 30 families making cheese in Sonoma and Marin. A lot of things have happened. Yeah, actually, just thinking about the farm and Sue talking about the family coming back to the farm, I know I use the statistic, and I hope it's right. But milk prices have really stayed pretty stagnant since the 70s. Just thinking about if you're the one delivering milk, the milk prices have stayed pretty close to the 70s. And if you're thinking about operating a business with what you sell, never having an increase in value for 45 years or with the cost of doing business in Marin County. So, Sue, why don't you talk about we always assume that everybody here knows how cheese is made. And do y'all know how cheese is made? OK, do you want to give the elementary version of it? Well, we didn't know how cheese was made either when we started. But Ellen Strauss said, well, every farm wife ever has been in charge of making cheese. Usually, the man takes care of the animals, and the woman makes the cheese. So how hard could it be? Everybody did it. So we made cheese on her stove. And basically, the simplest cheese, which is fromage blanc, it is not a cooked curd. It's a very fresh curd. So the milk is warmed to about 75 degrees, which is the temperature it comes out of the cow. So that's great. And you can just add a little bit of buttermilk to warm milk to curdle it, separate the solids from the liquid. So the curd is the solid, and the whey is the liquid. That lactic acid that's in buttermilk will cause the milk to separate. And if you let that sit overnight, it'll be nice and firm like yogurt. Scoop it into a cheesecloth sack and drain it. And that is the simplest cheese. That's fromage blanc. We then salt it, and we add a little creme fraiche to bring up the flavor. So that's how we make our fromage blanc. That's just very basic. But in the book, we go starting with that fromage blanc and going through the different styles of cheese. You can really get a little more insight without being too technical. We've never been too technical, but now we have actual science working with us. We used to make cheese like we're cooking. We're tasting it. We're touching it. We're feeling the temperatures. And now we measure everything. Well, I mean, before it wasn't that ad hoc. I mean, there were techniques that we followed and recipes and everything, but now we measure everything. Well, good. But one thing I wanted to say is that in any kind of cheese, you have four ingredients. You have milk, and milk can be from, you could have lots of different kinds of milk to make cheese. And you can mix milks to make cheese. You need salt, and you need a coagulant, which would be the rennet. And then you need the bacteria and enzymes that create the flavors that you find in cheese. So just using those four ingredients and with lots of different techniques and aging temperatures, curd cuts, all those things, every single way along on the path of making cheese determines what the cheese will come out to be. And as we know, there are thousands of different cheeses, but they all use four ingredients. So it's really interesting to think of that way. Now, we have some questions for you, Sue. Uh-oh, since I'm reading them. All right. How do ranchers and land trusts in the Point Rays area deal with the dangers of rising property taxes? Well, the land trust keeps the value of the property at about 40% of the same developable land. So in other words, it's taxed at about 40% of its actual value. There is also another protection in California that's voluntary called the Williamson Act. And actually, with Schwarzenegger, we were really close to losing this. It seems to be more stable now that we have money in the kitty. But it values agricultural lands at a much lower rate and that every 10 years they have to re-up. OK, this one's a good one. What to do when I bring the cheese home? If I buy a red hawk at Embarcadero today, should it go in the refrigerator, stay on the kitchen counter, or other question mark? It depends who's home. Because it really will fill the home with aroma. But Peggy, why don't you answer that? Aromatic, yeah. No, the idea is that just with any kind of cheese, what we suggest is, number one, you just buy as much as you're going to eat in the near future. In two weeks. Well, or yeah, that's good. Depending on the cheese, I think with soft ripened cheeses, that's a little different. Then you'd want to eat those a little more quickly. But what we always suggest is that you wrap your cheese in the cheese paper or wax paper. Once you get it home, take the saran wrap off of it. Because oftentimes you have to use saran wrap in stores to present the cheese to the public. But when you get it home, it's good to wrap it in wax paper or cheese paper. And I always put my cheese in the vegetable crisper when I get home. And I actually put it inside a box. And then that goes in the vegetable crisper. But what happens when you put it in an enclosed area, it keeps the forced air from the fridge off of it. Because once you cut into cheese, you've kind of disturbed the ecosystem of that cheese. Because as long as cheese is whole, it's still aging. It's still developing. And it does have its own little ecosystem. As soon as you cut into it, it starts to deteriorate. So that's why you want to go someplace that you know that if there's a big wheel of cheese that's sitting on the counter, that the person that's selling that is going to go through that cheese pretty quickly. And that things are cut pretty close to when you buy them, because the flavors will really change. But getting back to the fridge, I have a wooden box. And I think Sue has a wooden box that we use. And that keeps its own little atmosphere in the fridge. It also keeps other flavors from penetrating into that fat. And it's like butter. If you have the butter sitting near an onion, it's going to taste like onion really quickly. Fat holds the flavor. How long can cottage cheese get cooked before it's overcooked? Well, cottage cheese is a cooked curd. And it's also a all cottage cheese is made with non-fat milk because they use the byproduct of butter making. That's how that was developed. They skim the cream off. That was the good stuff. And then the skim milk, they just figured out they could make a cheese with it. And it's very stable because of that. And as is ricotta. Ricotta is a cooked curd. And it's cooked at a high temperature, even higher than cottage cheese. So that's a little more stable. But I don't know if I have an exact temperature. That's a hard one. I mean, because I think a lot of it depends on the size of the curd, too. Yeah, and I wouldn't want to cook it at 450. But I think if you're baking something with cottage cheese at 350, it's very stable. Cheese is usually high-fat. Can you produce lower-fat cheeses that still taste good, i.e. cottage cheese? The answer is yes, of course. But we don't sell any manipulated low-fat cheese in our shop. And if you're watching for high-fat, you have to stay away from aged cheese. Your tendency is that the soft cheeses seem high in fat. But they're actually lower because the aged cheeses are more concentrated. You know, maybe you don't eat eight ounces. You just eat. You know, if you buy cheeses that are really flavorful, they're very satisfying. I can just have one little taste of Conte. And it satisfies me. And you know what a great low-fat cheese is, mozzarella, like a delicious, fresh mozzarella. Cottage cheese. And cottage cheese. All right, and here's another one. Any tips or demystification for those watching their cholesterol? Oh, yeah, I got to do that, too. You have to exercise more. And moderation. Moderation, yeah. Yeah. All right, did you ever think of making buffalo milk mozzarella, and might you do it? Well, we have a neighbor who's doing it. Oh, wait, I didn't finish the question. How can I, lots and lots of cheese without eating too much fat and hurting my diet regime? Oh, I don't know which part is the beginning because I both say over. We really have to get out and exercise right after this because we're going to have some cheese. But as far as buffalo milk mozzarella, there's a farm that's in Tamales, and they have a herd of water buffalo that they're making buffalo milk mozzarella. But you know what, it's so expensive because they're starting from zero. Like, there's no infrastructure. They have to build up the herd. They have to figure out how to build a corral. It's just a huge investment in infrastructure. And so they're talking about charging $50 a pound. So this is a question interesting. Do you not use rennet? Yeah, rennet is a great topic. We can dwell on that for a while. And traditional rennet, you might see that on a label that is made with the enzyme from the stomach of a calf or a lamb. And there's not very much traditional rennet made in the US anymore. Most cheese makers are using a microbial rennet that's extracted from mushrooms or thistles or a genetically modified rennet. So OK, we're buying milk from a Jewish family that has kosher certification. So the animal rennet is not acceptable for kosher food. In the organic certification, the genetically modified rennet doesn't fly. So for most of our cheeses, we use the microbial rennet. And if you see rennet lists, that's probably not technically true. They're using one of those, but it's probably not the animal rennet. OK, this one's a good one. What? They're all good. Here's another good one. I'm a chef student who's never seen the process for cheese making. And just right here, I want to say that in Point Rays, if you come out to our place in Point Rays, we make cheese behind a glass window. And Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Yeah, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And our aging room has a window also. And people are in there turning the cheese. You can see washing and then. And taste cheese at the counter. And we do a $5 tour on Fridays. That's pretty informative. But you don't need to go to the tour. You can see what's going on. And then it says, can you give us a quick peek into the process of making something like cheddar? Also, what makes cheddar orange? And I'll answer that part, like the part about the orange. That comes from, well, it should come from something that's called a nado. And a nado is a seed that's indigenous to South America. And what they do is in the old days, they used to get the seed. And they soak it. And an orange extraction comes out from it. They reduce that extraction. And then they add it to the cheese. And oftentimes, they'd have a certain color of orange that they'd want their cheese to be so that it would indicate what kind of cheese it was or whose cheese it was. It was a little bit like a stamp. And that's what makes cheddar orange unless some people now use orange dye. Well, back when we were young, they had red dye number two that was banned. Because it actually wasn't very good for you. I don't think they use that anymore. No, I don't think so. The process. The process of cheddaring is there's two vocabulary words you can learn when you're thinking about cheddar. One is, cheddaring is a part of the process. And milling, those are the two things that distinguish cheddar. And the cheddaring is just as we were making the cottage cheese and stirring it and cooking it. And then we chill the curd so that it doesn't stick together, doesn't knit together. But in cheddar, you want it to knit together. So the curds are cooked. And then they're allowed to sink to the bottom of the vat. And they form a slab on the bottom, really thick mattress. And that is cut into slabs that can be easily handled. Like big bricks. Yeah, they're like pavers. And then those are stacked on top of each other. And that is the process called cheddaring, stacking of those slabs. Then that pushes more of the way out and makes the curd really, really stiff and kind of rubbery. And tough. And if you're from Wisconsin, you've had squeakers. Yeah, so that's that texture of like a kind of a rubbery curd. Then they take that and put it through a mill. That's like a spaghetti mill. And so it comes out in these long strings. Yeah, it's like a sausage grinder. And those are salted. So everything is salted, not just the outside of the cheese, which is the way we do it with wagon wheel, where we just put the cheese in a salt brine. And that salt eventually gets into the middle as it ages. But in cheddar, they salt these dry curds. And then they're put into a press with thousands of pounds of pressure. And that is a dry, stiff cheese. Yeah, and so when you break cheddar, when we taste cheese, we take a small piece of it. And usually we try and have a cross section from the center to the rind. And if I were getting some cheddar, you would cut to the center and have a piece maybe that went like that. And then what we do is we would feel that piece when we're trying to decide if we're going to buy a particular person's cheese. But you always break it. And once you break it, you look and see what the face of that break looks like. And cheddar is always really knobby. It breaks in a curd form, in a sense. And when you open up a big wheel of cheddar, like a Montgomery's cheddar from Somerset, England, or something, you score the top. And when it opens up, if you don't have a knife that goes all the way through the cheddar, you'll see that little crumbly curd. And oftentimes it'll break off almost in a chunk. So you have a little bit of a hollow center on one side. And on the other side, you have like a little bulge from the curds always sticking together. But from doing that breaking of any cheese, you really get an understanding of what the curd was like. With a camembert or a brie, the curd is huge. And it's not disturbed too much. Huge cubes that you just cut it into big. They just want to move it like a little baby into a bassinet or something because they don't want to extract any moisture. But with the cheddar, like Sue's saying, they want to get as much out as possible. And it's a much tougher curd. And you can see that when you break into it. I don't think we have any more questions. You probably want some cheese. Oh, another question. I'm wondering what it is about certain cheese. Well, that's a very good question. That's what our book's about. We just didn't get to it. Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Craig. Excellent. Thank you.