Chasing the cheese Trail

In the early 2000s, I remember this marketing slogan “Happy cows make happy cheese”, advertising California as a premier cheese state for dairy products. It must have been effective because I still think about that ad every winter I drive the winding roads of Marin county, two months into a winter rainfall. 

Emerald hills basked in weak light, MALT signs intermingling with roadside stands selling bbq oysters. It really is a happy place, and not just for cows. 

My partner and I live in San Francisco, populated with many more people than cows, hillsides are less green and more multi-colored. Century-old homes adorned with decoration twinkle in the evening like any seaside city. San Francisco, for all of it’s flaws, is still a beautiful place, and has been a culinary hub for decades. One of it’s greatest perks is its proximity to so much biodiversity. 

My favorite kind of Saturday is spent grabbing a dill Swiss biscuit from Kahnfections and driving through the redwoods to a coastal town for fresh oysters at Hog Island. Across the quiet highway you’ll find Straus Home Ranch, run by brother and sister, Michael and Vivien Straus. Both enthusiastic and legends in the industry of dairy farming. 

Their mother, Ellen Straus, founded MALT alongside Phyllis Faber in 1980, and they had a “vision for Marin County [to become] a thriving and inclusive agricultural community in a healthy and diverse natural environment.” (malt.org) And the legacy continues with a new take on agriculture protection, through Vivien’s efforts with the California Cheese Trail. (Cheese) 

The Cheese Trail is a list of all of the cheese makers in California and expanding. You can visit the website for detailed profiles of each farm, or you can pick up a brochure at shops and stores across California. 

My partner and I stumbled upon the glossy cheesy map on a regular drive to Hog Island, and started to plan new roadtrips to father flung pockets of the state.

California cheese has long been a staple of the state, producing smooth and nutty cheeses that hold their own against the revered east coast dairies. The California Cheese Trail is a really great marketing tool, but it’s the kind of thing we need to be promoting. Over the last 70 years, California has lost 95% of its dairy farms. (Dairy cares) And Vivien Straus started the Trail to support cheese makers and local food systems. 

She wants to help tell the stories of Dairy owners to keep these food systems alive - and it’s to our benefit that someone has gone to the trouble of logging these creameries. 

My partner and I have made it our mission to visit every one we can manage — we even bought little cheese stickers that we use to mark off our map one by one as we visit each unique location.

We are also very competitive, and the Cheese Trail has driven us to compete so ferociously with two of our friends that someone recently asked me, “are you sure you all actually like each other?” It’s hard to understand a friendship based on cheese. But yes, that is what ours has become. Four friends who meticulously upkeep a four tab spreadsheet documenting every creamery in California. 

Last I checked we were at 32 creameries and they were at 27, but who’s counting?  It might seem like so many creameries would start to run together, it’s just cheese, right? 

That’s the beauty of a state so big with so many micro-climates, each experience has it’s own personality. 

Take Rocky Oaks cheese in Fresno California, you could lick ice cream off the floor of Margie’s milking room and it would be cleaner than my kitchen. Not only does she produce rich and deep flavored soft cheeses, but she pours love into her animals and her facility. 

I spoke with the team at Pennyroyal Farm, a creamery tucked away in Boonville, Mendocino county.  They love the Cheese Trail because it has “put them on the map.” Erica makes the cheese and Sarah makes the wine, but they use the same scientific process to approach both products, and that has made their cheeses perfect. It also means they offer a well rounded tasting experience. 

Sit down on a warm summer’s day, you’ll hear the bee’s buzzing in their extensive gardens as you sip on a crisp Chardonnay. The team is friendly and passionate about their fair. My favorite cheese is the Velvet Sisters, an unctuous triple-cream Camembert-style cheese that melts just as the name implies. “The rounds are turned by hand and salted, and then allowed to dry before aging. The bloomy white rind produces a creamy texture and bold flavors of mushroom.” [sited]

Stepladder creamery is tucked tightly into the coastal range of the central coast. It’s cheeses as luxurious as Hearst castles interiors, which sits just miles away. I always pick up Moonstone, a Gruyère-style cheese, at the Clement farmers market. And you cannot pass up their cultured-butter, so fatty and sweet it will make any meal sing. 

It’s not only creameries on the map, there are also dozens of amazing cheese shops with a spectrum of products from Istanbul to Mendocino. Take Brandon Wood’s shop, the Cheese Parlor, in Livermore; Brandon tells me that he fell in love with cheese because he loved punk rock, a segment of the music industry that is all about uplifting fellow punk artists. Brandon sees the California Cheese Trail as a symbol of camaraderie amongst producers and shop owners, just like the culture he found in punk.

“Are you sure you actually like each other?” I thought about this on a recent cheese-fueled road trip— we took off a Friday and drove from Concord to Salida, Avena to Fresno, Los Banos to Monterey and back again. As we sat in a TexMex restaurant in Fresno, digging into a chile relleno and fretting about the cooler in the car packed with five wedges and ice from the hotel ice maker, I wondered, has this gotten out of control? 

Maybe to some, but for my partner, my friends, and myself - it taps into the camaraderie Brandon spoke about, a weirdly unique kind. 

Vivien’s mission of promoting small agriculture and bringing awareness of the best of dairy practices, is working. Just like the legacy her mother started so many years ago with MALT.

Maybe you don’t eat dairy at all, but moving forward, as food of all kinds becomes harder to produce and harder to ship, we will want to know what options we have in our own back yard. We need diversity, we need small growers, and we need a little competition amongst friends to keep it happy. Just like those cows. 

So if you find yourself driving through California, remember it’s more than beaches, celebrity smoothies, and sourdough. Type ‘creamery’ into your maps app and see where the road takes you. I’ll meet you there.