FEATURES
An Italian Oasis

by Richard Triumpho

Tuscany cheese at Dancing Ewe Farm

PHOTOS BY RICHARD TRIUMPHO. This Caseificio, or cheese kitchen, was converted from an old farm shed. Inside are state-of-the-art vats and tanks where the milk is processed into cheese. The building contains the refrigerated aging rooms.

There’s an outpost of Tuscany in the hills of Washington County, N.Y. The sun shines there on Dancing Ewe Farm (www.dancingewe.com), a place about as close to Tuscany as you can get without actually flying to Italy. Dancing Ewe Farm is near the town of North Granville, just over the border from the Green Mountains of Vermont, and 50 miles north of Saratoga Springs. The presiding genius here is owner and cheese maker Joseph “Jody” Sommers, a young man with a passion for duplicating the authentic cheeses of Tuscany.

In summer 2008, Jody’s second year of production, his cheese won praise from Florence Fabricant in her “Dining & Wine” column in the New York Times. She wrote that Jody and his wife Luisa “ ... make a delicate, tangy, almost fluffy sheep’s milk ricotta, a specialty they sell only in the Union Square Greenmarket [in Manhattan] on Fridays.”

Dancing Ewe’s sheep’s milk ricotta sells at $15 a basket (about 1 pound). Jody and Luisa also make a moderately sharp aged Pecorino Stagionato (a grating cheese) that goes for $22 a pound. The way these two cheese specialties—Pecorino and ricotta—are made is a brilliant example of nothing going to waste. When sheep’s milk is heated to the correct temperature, it separates into curds and whey. The curds are made into Pecorino; the liquid whey (still rich in protein and lactose) is then reheated, coagulates again and becomes ricotta.

Dancing Ewe Farm also makes another traditional Italian cheese, prima caciotta, that is rubbed with tomato paste to deepen the color of the rind as it ages, and gives the cheese its characteristic earthy, sunny flavor.

How it began

Sommers grew up on a “hobby farm” in the southern Connecticut River valley. “We had a few sheep and some horses,” he said. Sommers attended a vocational agriculture high school in Lebanon, Conn., and at school he joined the Future Farmers of America (FFA). He praised the FFA experience. “It was great for me,” he said. “It allowed me to excel in animal husbandry.”

One of Dancing Ewe Farm’s eye-catching labels.

Sommers graduated from the University of Connecticut with a bachelor’s degree in animal science. As a freshman, he also worked one year at the university sheep unit where one of the instructors had border collies. “She worked a ‘brace’ of two dogs together, herding sheep and herding pigs,” Sommers said. He thought the dogs’ performance was amazing and begged to learn how to handle sheep dogs. “So I went to work, mucking stalls and shearing sheep at the professor’s farm,” he said “ and she taught me how to handle border collies.” He soon bought two border collies of his own.

After graduation, Sommers wanted to go to vet school, but the University of Connecticut at that time did not have contracts with the veterinary colleges at Tufts, Cornell or Penn State, and that would have forced him to pay high tuition as an out-of-state applicant. The upshot was that he went to his alternative plan: the food production branch of animal science.

‘While at university, Sommers realized that, traditionally, farmers have always been at the mercy of the middleman who actually controls prices. The only way for farming to be profitable was for farmers to add value to their product, eliminate the middleman and sell directly to the consumer. Sommers already owned a small flock of sheep that he used for training border collies. Could he expand the flock, milk the ewes, learn how to make a specialty cheese and sell directly to chefs?

He began to search for a niche different from other artisanal cheese makers. “I didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing,” he said. “I didn’t want to make fresh goat’s milk cheese; I didn’t want to make yogurt, or feta, or French style chèvre.” Upon reading “The Cheese Primer”, a book by cheese expert Steve Jenkins, Sommers learned that imported cheeses that commanded some of the highest prices came from the Tuscany region of Italy and were made from sheep’s milk. Pecorino Toscano, a sharp, aged, hard cheese used for grating was one of those. Sommers had the sheep; now he had to learn the craft of making Tuscan-style cheese.

Plenty of hot and cold water is needed to keep all the stainless steel utensils in this cheese kitchen sparkling clean.

One of his college professors suggested he get in touch with a Cornell professor of animal science, Mike Van Amburgh, who had taken Cornell students to Italy on an exchange program. Professor Van Amburgh put him in touch with a professor of dairy science at the University of Pisa, Uvaldo Baldasai, who had done a sabbatical at Cornell. “Baldasai is the chief nutritionist in Tuscany,” Sommers said. “He goes to all the farms in the Tuscany province of Italy and gives nutritional advice.” Sommers contacted Baldasai, asking if the professor could help locate a farm in Tuscany that would let him work there as an apprentice and learn how they made sheep’s milk cheese.

“The professor and I e-mailed back and forth for several months,” Sommers said, “and one of the farms, La Perina, was receptive to the idea. It was a big estate, about 1,000 acres; they made wine, olive oil and cheese.”

Sommers lived and worked at La Perina for a year, slowly picking up the Italian language. “We milked Sardinian sheep in a 24-stall parlor,” he said. “We started at 4:30 in the morning and were done milking three hours later. Then, we took the sheep’s milk and made cheese.”

While he was at La Perina, Sommers learned all the techniques of making Tuscan-style cheese. He memorized all the step-by-step processes that give those cheeses their gourmet qualities, and kept many hand-written notes. He also took precise measurements of their equipment, including the stainless steel cheese vat they used, which had an unusual design. When he came back at his own farm, he had his own 150-gallon cheese vat custom-built to those exact specifications. One of his unanticipated rewards from his year at La Perina is that while he was there he met Luisa.

Building and financing his new business

While Jody was in Tuscany working and learning how to make cheese at La Perina, he began thinking about a business plan for his own cheese venture back in North Granville. When he returned to the U.S. he applied for financing at the Washington County Local Development Corporation (WCLDC). The corporation had a Micro-enterprise Assistance Program (MAP) to help generate local business, including agricultural ventures, in order to help keep Washington County green. Part of the MAP program was attendance at an 11-week course on marketing, taxes, legal matters and other issues involved in setting up a new small business. At the conclusion of the course, Sommers had a business plan and could borrow up to $25,000 with a six-month grace period before repaying.

Jody Sommers demonstrates how the stainless steel bracket keeps the milk cups suspended under the sheep’s udder.

A chunk of start-up money came to him through a lucky break when an HBO movie, “A Dog Year” starring Jeff Bridges, was being filmed in the area. The movie was about a middle-age man and his border collie, both of whom are in a mid-life crisis. Jody was hired to bring 50 of his sheep and his two border collies on location and act as consultant. “We were there for a week,” he said. “I brought some temporary electric fence, my sorting chutes and kept my sheep there. I did all the finesse work with the border collies.” Sommers said if it weren’t for that movie job, his Dancing Ewe Farm start-up would have had a much slower start.

At his farm in North Granville, Sommers rebuilt an old shed, converting it into his cheese kitchen. He did all the construction himself—carpentry, electrical wiring and plumbing. He converted another shed into an insulated, climate controlled cheese-aging room. Another shed was converted to house a steam boiler, to generate steam needed to heat milk in the cheese vat at the start of the cheese making process. “My college studies had been as a pre-veterinary student,” he said, “so I didn’t know anything about plumbing steam. Using e-mail, I sent questions to the B.J. Muirhead Co. in Rochester, N.Y., from whom I bought the boiler, and they helped me put together the whole mechanical system. Whenever I got stuck, I e-mailed them digital photos of the problem, and they e-mailed back to say ‘solder this pipe,’ or ‘connect this to that’ and so on.”

The cheese maker climbs these steps in order to stir the milk, add the culture and monitor the formation of curd.

The 150-gallon stainless steel vat is an unusual design, since it is elevated about 6 feet off the floor, on legs. Jody explained that an elevated vat was what they used at La Perina. “What you typically see in the U.S. is cheese vats that sit on the floor,” he said, “and when the milk has curdled, the cheese makers in this country lift buckets of curd off and carry it to a ‘curd table’ where the whey drains off. It’s a slow process; but for making premium ricotta the way the Tuscans do, it’s very important to get the whey drained off the curd as soon as you can. With the vat elevated, and a 2-inch stainless steel drain pipe from the bottom of the vat to the curd table, all I have to do is open the valve and let it all flow quickly, by gravity, to the curd table, in less than a minute.”

Progressing to the future

Dancing Ewe Farm will continue selling its cheese to chefs in New York City, and also at the Green Market in Manhattan. This face-to-face relationship with customers is a key element of direct marketing, he believes. Another aspect that is important to a successful business is to know what you want to look like in two or three year’s time. Sommers has begun construction of a tasting room, and also a small bistro adjacent to the cheese kitchen, where he and Luisa can serve an authentic Tuscan meal featuring their cheeses. “This way visitors and customers will be able to see all the links from the farm to the table,” he said. “They can have a real Tuscan food experience, and Luisa will demonstrate the many ways cheese is used in Italian cuisine.”

Twelve sheep at a time are milked in this parlor. It has overhead delivery of grain for the mangers. Rapid exit gates are operated by an air pressure system.

As an example of how he hopes to expand visitor awareness of the multiple ways cheese can used to enhance a meal, Jody points to ricotta. “In this country, mention ricotta and the first thing that comes to mind for most people is probably a classic Italian lasagna,” he said. What most people don’t know is that there are a host of other savory ricotta cheese recipes, he points out, and also that ricotta is excellent in a variety of desserts. “There are so many, many ways to use ricotta and other cheeses,” he said. “We want to show people how!“

The author is a freelance contributor based in St. Johnsville, N.Y.