Newest cheeses and flavors to try at Valley Ford Creamery
With little fanfare late last fall, Valley Ford Cheese and Creamery made a business deal with their neighbors at Double 8 Dairy and bought their cheese-making operation.
Double 8, best known for its buffalo milk products, also made cheese with milk from a small herd of Jersey cows.
The purchase of that Jersey operation (Double 8 held onto the water buffalo herd) has nearly doubled the size of Valley Ford’s Jersey milk cheese production and product line, according to cheesemaker Joe Moreda.
Although there have been the anticipated growing pains of learning new equipment, making new products and taking on new employees, he said it’s been a good fit for his family’s dairy and creamery.
“The product lineup really meshes well with our Italian-style American originals,” he said. “Their line of ricotta, mozzarella, stracciatella, flows really nicely.”
Valley Ford already has an award-winning selection of Italian-inspired cheeses including their signature Estero Gold a Sonoma County take on a creamy Montasio from Northern Italy; the melty, fontina-style Highway 1; and Grazin’ Girl, a blue cheese similar to gorgonzola.
Those cheeses are aged anywhere from four months to a year, while their new acquisition adds fresh cheeses that don’t require months of aging.
Currently the ricotta is supplied only to wholesale accounts. They sell limited quantities of mozzarella at their shop and café in Valley Ford, but much is sold to restaurants in San Francisco, Oakland, Napa and in Sonoma County to Acre Pizza and Red Horse Pizza.
Joe is hoping to expand the reach of their mozzarella in Sonoma County, and his mother, Karen Bianchi-Moreda, hinted that a soft, ripened Robiola type cheese is also in the works.
Karen said she began “playing around” with making cheese with milk from the family’s dairy in 2006.
“My family still makes cheese in Monte Carasso, Switzerland. I knew I wanted to do a cheese that was similar to what they were making over there and stay in line with the Italian side,” she said, mentioning that both her grandparents’ families come from the Italian part of Switzerland.
The cheese making got more serious when Joe, who studied dairy science at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, returned home and they made their first batch of cheese together in December of 2010.
The awards for their Estero Gold, Estero Gold Reserve and Highway 1 began rolling in. Developing a blue cheese was another huge achievement.
“The gorgonzola is (Joe’s) baby. It took two years to get that dialed in. It’s one of the harder cheeses to make,” said Bianchi-Moreda.
Almost immediately it won best the semi-soft cheese division at the California Cheese Competition in 2018.
From the ground, up
While we were talking, Bianchi-Moreda’s other son Jim, who runs the dairy, popped into the café for lunch and a latte, made with his milk, naturally.
“He went into the dairy industry with the expectation his milk was going to go into a value added product,” she said, explaining that it’s a way to have more control in a very challenging industry.
During college, Jim, now a fifth-generation dairy farmer, did dairy product judging, a skill he uses daily both with the raw material and the finished product.
“I taste all the (milk) at the dairy before it’s processed, so the before and after,” he said. “I have an immediate way of measuring my success. Not all dairymen have that close relationship with their processor.”
Jim’s role is to build quality from the ground up, quite literally. He makes sure his herd of about 200 Jersey cows are the quintessential Sonoma County happy cows by providing them pasture access all year long and supplementing with hay in late summer and early fall when the grass is gold and dry.
This time of year, though, is prime time with the late winter rain and early spring sunshine working in tandem to create lush, green grass that makes some of the finest cheese.
Bianchi-Moreda points to the cheeses displayed on the tasting board in front of us.
The Estero Gold, she explained, is from milk the cows gave in November, while the Estero Gold Reserve is made from last winter’s milk then aged for a year. The color difference was striking.
“Not only does it yellow as it ages, but it is also last February’s milk when the cows were on grass, so that adds that beautiful color to it. It definitely plays out in the seasonality of cheeses when the cows are out grazing,“ she said.
The rich color from the grass the cows are eating right now will show up in the Estero Gold, Highway 1 and Grazin’ Girl released later this summer.
From pasture to plate
Valley Ford Creamery is unique in that it follows cheese through its entire cycle — from pasture to dairy, then processing, and finally, using the cheese in dishes served at the café.
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