Cal Poly Creamery Featured at California Artisan Cheese Festival
Story by Aja Goare
At the creamery on Cal Poly campus in San Luis Obispo, Jenna Bates and her fellow classmates create cheese that’s distributed to California grocery stores and restaurants. Two of these artisan cheeses – the Triple Peak Brie and the Highland Cheddar – will soon be on the cheese tasting menu at the 19th Annual California Artisan Cheese Festival in Santa Rosa.
“It’s really rewarding to know how much people appreciate what we produce and enjoy it,” says Jenna, a third-year student majoring in agricultural systems. “I love how people talk about how much they love it.”
Jenna is the Student Manager of the Cal Poly Creamery and has a hand in making cheese, ice cream and other dairy products. Since 1903, the creamery has been churning out dairy products produced by students with milk from Jersey and Holstein cows from the Cal Poly herd. It’s a learning experience for students, who manufacture, package, market and sell the products. “I’ve been involved with the cheesemaking from beginning to end,” says Jenna.
“Like bread, it’s not actually hard to make cheese; it’s just a few ingredients and time,” says Cal Poly Research Associate Dimitri Genard, who oversees the pilot plan at the Dairy Products Tech Center. “It is hard to make really good cheese.”
Dimitri says paneer and ricotta are the easiest to learn. Brie and blue cheese, he says, are much more difficult. For those interested in learning more about cheesemaking, one of the seminars at the festival is a cheesemaking demonstration with Keith Adams of Wm. Cofield. If you’re more into eating cheese than making it, three other seminars may be more your speed – cheese and beer pairing, cheese and chocolate, and charcuterie board building. There’s even a cheese pairing recital with live music and a sensory experience called Palate Play.
The festival will host over 100 high-quality artisan cheeses from across California and surrounding states, including Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, Cowgirl Creamery, Cypress Grove, Spenker Family Farm and more. The event boasts a cheese crawl, cheese tasting and marketplace, educational seminars and pairing demos. The festival, which began in March 2007, has evolved into three days of cheese tasting that gives visitors the opportunity to purchase new, limited production, and rare artisan cheeses as well as meet with and sample products from farmers, chefs, brewers, winemakers, distillers and artisan food purveyors.
Tickets are available on the festival website.
