Marin French Cheese brings aged product into the future
On a sunny day in early March, Marin French cheesemaker Alex Borgo and his staff are tasting through batches of soft-ripened cheese that will be sent to the U.S. Cheese Championships in Wisconsin.
“Cheese-making smells good, with the warm milk and the tangy cultures,” said Borgo, who was born into a cheese-making family from Europe and Canada. “Sometimes I eat too much cheese.”
For the past eight years, Borgo has helped guide the 150-year-old company into the future, carefully navigating between the twin guideposts of tradition and innovation.
Borgo has standardized the percentage of butterfat for each line of cheese, making it easier to achieve consistency despite seasonal changes in milk. Yet he still makes all of the soft-ripened cheese by hand, in small, 20-gallon buckets, from cow’s milk sourced from within a 15- to 20-mile radius of the ranch.
“Most of our products are high in butterfat,” he said, noting the different fat contents in the milk of various cows. “So we try to get Jersey milk and blend it with the Guernsey and Holstein milk.”
Marin French Cheese, the oldest continuously operating cheese producer in the U.S., kicked off its yearlong, 150th anniversary celebration with a private luncheon in January. In June, August and October, it will hold a series of public celebrations that will tell the personal stories of its sprawling, 150-year history.
This weekend, Marin French Cheese will also take part in California’s 9th annual Artisan Cheese Festival, participating in the Friday tours and tasting, Saturday‘s seminars and Sunday’s signature marketplace event.
“It brings the cheese curious to us,” said Lynne Devereux, who helped found the festival and now does marketing and public relations for Marin French Cheese. “Cheese really started coming into its own in the 1990s.”
In 2011, the cheese factory was sold to the Rians Group, a French, family-owned company, who have continued to update the facility. Yet it remains rooted in the local terroir of West Marin, home to some of California’s happiest cows.
In the past few years, Marin French Cheese has snagged some of the top cheese awards in the world for its iconic Brie, Camembert and other French-style cheeses, while changing its long-time name from Rouge et Noir to Marin French Cheese.
Along with the new name, the “cheese factory” (as it is known to locals) also remodeled its tasting room, stocking its shelves with local products, including its own brand of honey harvested from the property. A cozy cafe now sells sandwiches like a Truffle Brie Panini with Roasted Turkey, along with a wide range of picnic fare.
“We get tons of bicyclists who are traveling here from other states,” Borgo said. “On the weekends, this place is packed.”
Back in 1865, the Hicks Valley Ranch was a family farm boasting a dairy barn where the duck pond now sits. It was owned by Jefferson Thompson, who launched the cheese company there as the Thompson Brothers Creamery and shipped a fresh, soft-ripened cheese to the dockworkers of San Francisco via steamboat. The workers dubbed it “breakfast cheese,” because they consumed it before going off to work.
“At that time, eggs were in short supply,” said Philippe Chevrollier, general manager of Marin French Cheese. “They asked the farmers here to make cheese to replace the protein of the eggs.”
West Marin was already famous for its butter, but Thompson took the proverbial “leap to immortality” by turning milk into cheese. The company remained owned and managed by Thompson family descendants through more than 13 decades.
In the 1990s, the Thompson family sold the ranch to Jim Boyce, an organic cattle rancher, who expanded the company’s cheese varieties from 5 to 40, including flavored bries and Quark, a tangy and lactic cheese that is made like a cheese but tastes like a yogurt. It has a short shelf life and is only available at the factory nine miles west of Petaluma.
In 2005, Marin French Cheese was the first U.S. cheese company to win a Gold award in a European competition for its Triple Creme Brie, besting the French in the brie category. In the fall of 2014, it launched its newest cheese, Supreme, a 17-ounce wheel made with 70 percent cream, which promptly won a Super Gold in the 2014 World Cheese Awards in London.
Following that win, the company’s legacy cheese, Petite Breakfast, was selected as a finalist in the 2015 Good Food Awards, which recognizes authentic and responsibly produced food in the U.S. This year, the Petite Breakfast cheeses sport a vintage label, “1865.”
“The Breakfast Cheese is unbelievable for cooking,” Chevrollier said. “It softens nicely but doesn’t melt.”
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