A registered nurse who became a tax lawyer and, in her fifties, a California cheesemaker and shepherd, Cindy Callahan died in early June after a brief illness. She was 88. Callahan was an American sheep cheese pioneer who, with her son, Liam, and his wife, Diana, built one of the most successful U.S. creameries devoted largely to sheep’s milk products. Bellwether Farms, in Sonoma County, is now the nation’s leading producer of sheep’s milk yogurt and an acclaimed producer of sheep cheese. In her multi-faceted career, “shepherd” was the job Callahan loved most. She didn’t exactly choose the role but life happens.
Read moreNext-Gen Gouda
A Dutch gentleman in the cheese business once told me that the reason his country’s cheesemakers put so many different spices in Gouda—cumin, caraway, fenugreek, mustard seed—was because the Dutch eat Gouda every day. You have to change it up or lunch gets boring. Goat Gouda, which didn’t gain traction in the Netherlands until the 1980s, provides some variety in the modern Dutch diet. But sheep Gouda? “I am aware of no exported cheeses from the Netherlands made of sheep’s milk, nor, to my knowledge, is there any dairying of sheep there at all,” wrote Steve Jenkins in his authoritative Cheese Primer twenty-five years ago. Time to strike that, Steve. A new Dutch sheep Gouda has landed and it’s on the march.
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