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closeOn a farm tucked away in Penns Valley’s eastern end, Brian Futhey practices alchemy.
CDT/Nabil K. Mark
Brian Futhey moves his cows from the barn to the pasture. Brian Futhey is the owner of Stone Meadow Farm in Woodward, Pa., where has been making cheese since 2005. CDT/Nabil K. Mark
He holds a pipette in one hand, a small glass beaker in the other. Today’s experiment is proceeding as planned. He’ll need to test the acidity of his raw milk, freshly obtained from his Jersey cows, before he turns 10 gallons of it into a soft, Camembert-style cheese called “Leigh-Belle.”
It’s one of six kinds of cheese Futhey creates at Stone Meadow Farm, his home near Woodward, and sells in local stores and farmers markets. A dairyman turned professional cheesemaker, he’s among just five agricultural producers in Centre County, and 116 in Pennsylvania, with state permits to sell fluid raw milk and make raw milk cheese.
“It’s like baking bread or making wine,” Futhey says. “You’re taking a raw product, and throwing in a few ingredients, and making food.”
If only it were that simple.
His art owes much to science, to exact temperatures, timed stages and precise amounts of mold and other reactive agents responsible for creating tangy, pungent solids from creamy liquid. Then, nature takes over as the cheeses age anywhere from 60 days to 18 months to become market-ready.
A small mistake or two can yield slop instead of sharp cheddar or fiery pepper jack — as Futhey learned starting out.
“When you do it in the experimental stages of your cheesemaking, you end up feeding a lot of pigs,” he says. “You end up correcting a lot of things. A lot of things can go wrong.”
By now, with cheese his financial bread and butter, Futhey knows exactly what he’s doing.
The cheese house he built next to his barn resembles a laboratory, with its stainless-steel shelves, counters and a double sink. A gleaming, 200-gallon vat sits in the middle of the room, near a long press for squeezing out whey or water. Another machine vacuum-wraps five-pound cheese blocks.
In the vat, Futhey can make 150 to 170 pounds of cheese. But on an overcast April morning, he collected only enough milk to fill a small kettle. It’s his first batch of the season after his normal winter hiatus, and his cows are nursing their spring calves.
Golden from the butterfat, the milk heats on a propane burner. Futhey aims for 93 degrees, exactly what the Leigh-Belle recipe specifies. While waiting, he measures the milk’s pH balance, adding three drops of chemical solution into a sample until it turns a pinkish hue.
When the milk’s ready, he sprinkles in micrograms of penicillium mold and geotricium and almost a half-gram of a culture — the crucial catalysts. He checks a wall clock. In 50 minutes, he’ll mix three-quarters of a teaspoon of rennet, an enzyme, into 60 milliliters of water to form a solution the color of apple juice. It halts the bacterial growth and begins curdling the milk.
He stirs in the rennet, not swirling but moving up and down methodically.
“I’m not sure why,” he says. “I was just taught that way.”
Details count; procedure matters. He runs his water through a softener first — mainly to make cleaning his equipment easier — and then sanitizes it in ultraviolet light. It doesn’t pay to be sloppy, not when striving for as much consistency as unpasteurized milk will allow. Flavors can change depending on the season.
“Kraft cheese is always going to be the same,” Futhey says. “However, I want my cheeses to taste the same enough that people know what to expect when they’re buying it off a shelf. I don’t want them to be surprised.”
Elizabeth Larakers works at Tait Farm Harvest Shop, which sells Futhey’s wares, as does Nature’s Pantry. An amateur cheesemaker herself, she admires his ability to turn out a distinctive product repeatedly from a “very delicate process.”
“It’s good,” she says. “It’s particularly hard to make raw-milk cheese. A lot of the time, we see varieties of cheese that don’t really taste like what they’re labeled.” Futhey learned from a master.
He was a third-generation dairyman, working his family’s 118-acre farm and looking to boost his income. Cheese seemed the answer — almost seven times more money per pound than fluid milk. Workshops and seminars gave him the basics; the son of a Swiss immigrant filled in the rest.
Futhey hired Eldore Hanni, an elderly cheesemaker from Wisconsin now practicing his craft in Snyder County, as a consultant for a few weeks. It was a wise decision.
“I got properly trained from the start,” Futhey says. “I didn’t pick up any bad habits.”
Experience has taught him to be patient.
His Leigh-Belle batch tests his cool. Eighty-four minutes after the rennet went in, the curds should be thick enough to cut into blocks. But they remain soupy. Maybe the weather is to blame, maybe the milk or an error on his part. In any case, he has to wait.
Almost an hour later, the batch is acceptable. He plunges a curd knife — three wire panels — into the custard, slicing in two directions, then ladles the splattering pieces into cylindrical molds.
Gravity will squeeze out the whey as Futhey flips the molds over three times that afternoon. The next two days, he’ll salt and flip the cheese rounds, curing them in rooms chilled to between 52 and 62 degrees so that a white mold forms on the outsides.
Eventually, they’ll wind up in a refrigerated dessert case in his basement, kept at 40 degrees for 60 days. His Colby, cheddar, Swiss, pepper jack and “farmer cheddar” blocks ripen for months more on shelves in an old supermarket walk-in cooler.
Some day, he’ll stash his cheeses in a hillside.
His old-fashioned cheese cave, made from a shipping container, lies buried in a slope near his house. With curved stone walls leading to a door featuring a glass pie plate portal, it looks more like a Hobbit’s residence than a storeroom.
Once Futhey installs interior siding and electricity, he’ll have a grotto for more exotic artisan cheeses to age unwrapped. He’s not sure when that’ll happen, but then, as a raw-millk cheesemaker, he’s used to uncertainty.
“It’s really a lot softer than I’m used to for consistency,” he says, spooning proto-Leigh-Belle into molds. “But it’s OK. I think it’ll be OK.”
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