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View ProfilesPublished February 27, 2024 at 1:40 p.m. | Updated February 28, 2024 at 10:03 a.m.
Cheesemaker Carleton Yoder gets up early, but "I'm not milking," he said with a grin through his signature bushy salt-and-pepper beard. As he drove to Cornwall's Severy Farm for milk pickup, just before 7 a.m., sunrise blushed the sky pink.
Unlike most small cheesemakers in Vermont, Yoder's Champlain Valley Creamery is not a farmstead operation — one that uses milk from the cheesemaker's own herd or flock. "I never wanted to be a farmer," Yoder said.
But his interest in cheesemaking goes back 25 years. The self-described fermentation nerd started by experimenting at home, taking occasional University of Vermont classes, and bringing his "homebrew" blue cheese in for professor and cheese expert Paul Kindstedt to taste.
"He actually said nice things about it," marveled Yoder, now 54.
The Pennsylvania native earned a master's degree in food science from Virginia Tech, with a focus on flavor components in wine. In 1996, he moved to Vermont for a job at American Hard Cider (now part of Vermont Cider), then at 153 Pond Lane in Middlebury's industrial park.
Yoder never expected to run his own cheesemaking operation in that same industrial park, a few hundred yards from where his Vermont career began. After two decades in business, Champlain Valley Creamery has carved out a space for itself in the regional market — and given Yoder the financial stability to return to his blue cheese.
In the spotlessly clean, 2,000-square-foot cheese facility at 88 Mainelli Road, Yoder and two part-time employees turn local, organic milk into the creamery's established line of fresh and lightly aged, bloomy-rind cheeses. Champlain Valley Creamery's cream cheese, Champlain Triple crème, ash-undercoated Pyramid Scheme and Mexican-style queso fresco are distributed throughout the Northeast and to a smattering of specialty shops nationwide.
Although blue cheese was Yoder's first love, he only recently started crafting Bleu de Champlain for limited distribution. The 60-day-aged, raw-milk blue cheese of his dreams is loosely modeled on Roquefort and another French cheese called Bleu des Causses.
Yoder had pushed such ideas to the back burner in favor of more practical cheeses — "ones that generate cash sooner," he said. But as he approached his 20th year in business, the cheesemaker finally felt secure enough to invest in a cheese with a longer payback. This year, he aims to ramp up Bleu de Champlain production from quarterly to monthly batches of 40 to 50 two-and-a-half-pound wheels.
Back in 2003, Yoder spent one season making cheese at Shelburne Farms as he considered a professional leap from fermenting apple juice to fermenting milk. That November, he rented a former deli in the Kennedy Brothers building in Vergennes for his nascent Champlain Valley Creamery.
After surveying the market, Yoder targeted a gap: what he calls "old-fashioned" cream cheese. His lightly tangy, almost fluffy, spreadable cheese is made simply, with organic cream and milk from the Jersey cows at Severy Farm plus culture, enzymes and salt. It's similar to fresh goat cheese but richer, sweeter and less acidic.
"Nobody was doing it [with cow's milk]," Yoder said. "Nobody's doing it still."
Champlain Valley Creamery cream cheese lacks the stabilizers or emulsifiers, such as gums, that most leading brands contain. Michael Clauss, executive chef for City Market, Onion River Co-op, made it the house cream cheese for all deli bagels served at the Burlington and South Burlington locations. "It's a real cream cheese with real cheese flavor, not like the mainstream ones," he said.
Twice weekly, Yoder takes his early-morning milk pickup runs to Severy Farm, an Organic Valley cooperative member. His operation is too small to warrant a stop from the co-op's milk truck. Even if it did deliver, the milk would be blended from numerous farms on the truck's route.
"We like the single source," Yoder said. That way, he can talk with the farmer about seasonal shifts in milk composition and any rare issues that arise.
Yoder worked with another Organic Valley farm in Bridport for the company's first 15 years, until co-op rules obliged him to seek a new farm partner in 2018.
"He stopped in one day, looking to find out our milk scenario," Joe Severy said as the pair chatted in the farm's milk room on February 20.
Now owned by Joe's son Nate and his wife, Kerianne, the farm could keep things simple by shipping all the milk from its 100-cow herd to Organic Valley. But "it's just kind of a neat thing" to contribute milk to locally made products, Joe said.
"He was making this killer maple cream cheese," the farmer added, ribbing Yoder about discontinuing his favorite product.
Depending on the season, Yoder said, he buys 30 to 50 percent of the Severys' weekly production. He pays a premium for the organic milk from grass-fed cows — "the world's most expensive cow's milk," he joked.
Getting serious, Yoder said he believes the Severys' approach is "the way people should be farming" and that the milk's quality shines through in his cheeses.
The rich milk is showcased beautifully in the supple, mushroomy, bloomy-rinded triple crème. Antonelli's Cheese Shop of Austin, Texas, featured Champlain Triple in its February cheese club. "It's to die for," the store's social media team enthused on Instagram.
In the buttery Bleu de Champlain, shot through with salinity and delicate funk, "all that spicy flavor comes from the fat [in the milk]," Yoder said.
Frank Pace is co-owner of Burlington's August First and Great Northern Catering. The latter runs the kitchen at Zero Gravity Beer Hall, where the "super-balanced—salty, acidic and sweet" blue cheese stars in the Buffalo wing drizzle, Pace said.
Working with Yoder over the years, the chef has developed great respect for the cheesemaker's hard work. "He's been able to make a living, source the milk he loves, improve his actual craft and grow organically," Pace said.
Yoder said he couldn't have done it without his wife, Moira Cook, a public health professional, whose job delivers a steady income and benefits. From 2009 to 2011, the couple worked together at the creamery; they had their second child in that interval. Cheese supported the family, but "it was lean," Yoder acknowledged.
From its first annual $17,000 in sales, the gross revenue of Champlain Valley Creamery has risen to about $400,000. Cash flow remains unpredictable, but Yoder no longer dreads waking to find that he's blown through his overdraft cushion, as he did a few years ago.
Last year, the creamery produced 45,000 pounds of cheese. By comparison, Yoder said, the Agri-Mark plant in the same industrial park produces 150,000 pounds of Cabot cheddar in a single shift.
Yoder has expanded gradually, using credit lines and small grants and reinvesting most of the narrow profit margin. "You can write a business plan, but you have no clue. You're really just making it up," he said. "I've been very stubborn about sticking this out."
He's wrestled his debt down to about $40,000, but he's constantly weighing needed investments. The creamery's 2012 move to the industrial park from Vergennes was a huge step, as was the 2018 purchase of a small-scale tank system for milk hauling to replace old-fashioned, labor-intensive milk cans.
Recently, Yoder spent $10,000 for sets of conjoined molds for his best-selling triple crème. They cut the three-hour job of filling individual receptacles to 20 minutes, but then he needed a $20,000 piece of equipment to clean the new molds.
"There's always something," Yoder said with a shrug.
On February 21, the three-person team was busy processing the 219 gallons of milk picked up the day before. By noon, Yoder, Amanda Werner and Scott Litchfield had packed 111 eight-ounce containers of cream cheese and filled 342 molds with curd for the triple crème and 324 for the truffle paste-infused version of that cheese.
Queso was next. The vat pasteurizer had been filled with 76 gallons of skim milk mixed with eight gallons of whole milk and brought up to temperature. The cheesemakers added cultures and rennet to thicken the milk to the texture of silken tofu. Then mechanical knives circled like sharks, cutting the curds.
As far as Yoder knows, he is the only Vermont cheesemaker making queso fresco. Marc Koontz, general manager of Burlington's El Cortijo Taqueria, praised its creaminess and "slightly sharp" flavor. "We use it on everything here," he said.
The queso was "a use-up scenario," Yoder said, because it's made with the skim milk left over from his other, cream-rich cheeses. It comes plain, spiked with jalapeño and Peppadew chiles, or smoked — thanks to an old commercial fridge fitted with a Bradley smoker.
The cheese differs from traditional queso fresco, which varies regionally. Yoder's starts crumbly, but as the vacuum-packed cheese ages, it becomes melty and shreddable — perfect, he said, for pizza and burgers.
After the curds had been salted and some whey drained, the cheesemakers dug in up to their elbows to pack curds into molds of two sizes, adding another 78 cheeses to the day's total and finishing up the last of the previous day's milk.
The trio paused to chat around the vat. Then Werner said, only half-joking, "If we're standing around, we've probably forgotten something we're supposed to do."
The original print version of this article was headlined "Cream of the Crop | Middlebury's Champlain Valley Creamery marks 20 years with a milestone cheese"
Tags: Food + Drink Features, Middlebury, cheese, Bleu de Champlain, blue cheese, Carleton Yoder, Champlain Valley Creamery
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