Sacha Laurin, cheesemaker

Spring interviews Cheesemaker extraordinaire – Sacha Laurin of Many Moons Cheese. Sacha teaches at many venues including the Davis Food Coop – see Cheesemaking classes at the Davis Food Co-op: http://www.daviscoop.com/classes/Cheese_Lottery_Summer2010.pdf

Sacha Laurin and I met at a cheese-making class. She was teaching, I was agog. Somehow I’d always envisioned making cheese as something akin to mapping the genome, engineering a rocket, or installing programs on my computer. Sure, some humans could do these things, but none with the kind of squidgy brain that I’d been living with all my life.

But such are the ways of excellent teachers; they make you do more than you ever thought would be possible. In my case – Camembert. (Yes, I have made cheese now, and purposely. I am not even counting the accidental dairy science projects in my fridge that crop up in a distressingly regular basis) And as these things go, if I can do it, you can do it in spades. Check out her classes at the Davis Food Coop and make yourself a merry little camembert, a brined feta, some stretchy mozzarella, creamy ricotta, and much more.

Because of her excellence in teaching and her ability to do as well as teach, Sacha is the woman who finds herself known as “the cheese lady” and, as she says, “the one with the “weeyid” accent. She’s from Australia.

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Spring- I don’t think of Australia as the place to become enamored of cheese – more like a place to cook outside.

Sacha – Australians do tend to think that if you can’t throw something on the Barbie, or eat it with something thrown on the Barbie, it is not worth eating. However, Australia does produce some internationally award-winning cheeses – the King Island Dairy company is especially famous and their “roaring 40′s blue” is sold around the globe including at the Nugget and the Davis Food Coop here in Davis, California and is on par with France’s best blues. Tasmanian wines and cheeses are also acclaimed (so it is well worth a visit if you are looking for a gastronomic adventure on a spectacular island).

Spring – Americans have a tendency to think cheese is bad if it doesn’t smell good. Of course, lots of us eat more Velveeta and processed cheese foods than real cheese, so I suppose our taste buds have been foundered by the pale flavors of these things.

Sacha- The French think a cheese is not ripe until “it has grown legs and run off the plate”. They also like cheese which they call “affectionate.”

Spring– Affectionate?

Sacha – You know, soft and gooey and…

Spring- …making you feel loved? Cheese does make me feel loved. Food, generally, may not be love, but cheese is. I remember you also like spicy foods.

Sacha – I discovered hot hot hot very very hot spicy food on my exchange trip to La Réunion Island, in the Indian Ocean near Mauritius, when I was 16 and have loved it since. So much so I have to remain sensitive to the fact that in dishes where I don’t even taste the heat, others may be about to self implode from the fire! When in doubt…less is more.

My favorite foods to cook, however, are Coq au vin, Blanquette de veau and any kind of stew, especially French or Italian.

Spring – hmm, no Aussie dishes. Does that mean no cooking beyond barbecue among your family?

Sacha – My mother, sister and brother are all passionate cooks. My mother makes everything from pasta to bread to chocolate to cheese from scratch. My brother grows all of his own food, makes beer and ferments tempe. – We would always cook family dinners together, everyone would have their own task. I love to cook with others, especially when they’re pouring me wine!

Spring – So tell me about the rigors of cheese-making. I know you put the time in to make your cheese so wonderful.

Sacha – Cheesemaking, like good bread making, involves creating your recipe, planning your schedule, and if not sticking to it, at least writing down notes on exactly what variations you made in the temperature, timing and quantities, as every permutation, down to the minutes and degrees, will affect your final cheese. I typically make cheese twice a week, once on the weekend, and once mid week, and the process is about 5 hours from beginning to finish, with the “make” continuing on the next day once the cheese has drained overnight.

One golden rule of cheesemaking is to make it with the freshest milk possible, and as my fresh farm milk is picked up every weekend, this dictates my weekly schedule. I usually begin my cheesemaking around 6 pm so that I can be fully cleaned up by midnight, and I can have my cheeses draining in the cooler night air in the kitchen overnight. My cheeses are all like my babies to me and not a day goes by when I am not cleaning out their boxes, brining, wrapping, waxing, or drying them for further aging.

Spring – Speaking of sunshine…of all the places you’ve been and lived, has there been a favorite garden?

Sacha – The garden of my childhood home in New Zealand was the most fantastic I’ve ever been in. Feijoa trees dripping with fruit, passionfruit vines, tree houses and multiple cubbies, mossy rocks, flowers, the tunnels through the shrubs at the side, the magic forest out the back, it was a child’s paradise.

Spring – A child’s paradise? I want to go play there. You’ve really lived a lot of places, lived a lot of different ways- Where would you like to be in five years? City or country, doing….?

Sacha – I’d love to live on a farm in the city- is that called wanting your cake?- and making cheese. I love to teach - teaching myself cheesemaking and sharing it with others is among my biggest accomplishments. I love the transformation, art and science in turning fragile milk into ageless cheese. It is so magical for me. And delicious!

Spring – Has there been anyone along the way to help you learn cheesemaking?

Sacha- Steve Shapson – thecheesemaker.com- has truly been my mentor. One of his biggest gifts was making me understand that it is possible to experiment without mortally endangering someone.

Spring – As someone who eats a monumental amount of your cheese, I do appreciate not being endangered, mortally or otherwise. Anything else we should know about cheese?

Sacha – Eating cheese stimulates caso-morphins in the brain which act as opiate-receptors and really do give us a morphine-like buzz. The cheese-high is real. And – tomato plants LOVE whey!

Spring – Of course, they’re probably getting a buzz, too.