Thegrandesdames

Photograph: Laura Berman

Cheese aging in the underground caves at Fifth Town

THE GRANDES DAMES OF ARTISANAL CHEESE Where there’s a wheel, there’s a whey

BY LAURA BUCKLEY

When Ruth Klahsen of Monforte Dairy was told she was too old to apply to midwifery college, cheesemaking seemed a logical alternative. Klahsen believes it takes the same kind of patience to make cheese as to birth a baby. “You can’t rush it, “ she says. “You have to wait for the cheese to be ready.” Patience is why she thinks women are better suited to cheesemaking than men. After years of mostly industrial-scale cheddar production, artisanal cheesemaking is a burgeoning industry in Ontario as consumers become more interested in local food and are willing to pay for quality. Cheesemaking has traditionally been the job of women on the farm, but women like Ruth Klahsen, Elisabeth Bzikot of the Ewenity Dairy Co-operative, and Petra Cooper of Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Co., are anything but traditional. They’ve given up other careers to become cheese entrepreneurs. And they’ve found a way around the Ontario Milk Act (and its numerous obstacles to using cow’s milk) by working with sheep and goat milk, which are not regulated by the government. Elisabeth Bzikot of Ewenity Dairy Co-op and Best Baa Farm in Conn, Ontario (about an hour north of Guelph), is convinced that the demand for her cheese will grow as more people start questioning where their food is coming from and how the animals that produce their food are raised. Bzikot, a former schoolteacher, clearly enjoys her work. When I meet up with her, she’s happily chatting with customers at the St. Lawrence North Market, where she sells her cheese every Saturday – along with the meat from the unlucky male lambs who can’t provide milk. “Today I must have been asked more than four times what we feed our sheep,” she says. “And this isn’t unusual.” This is when the schoolteacher in her comes out to give a lesson about nature and nurture: that it’s...