Rogue Creamery- Medford, OR by Leslie

August 8, 2007

We started our day with a tour of the Rogue Creamery in Medford, Oregon, home of the legendary Rogue River Blue Cheese, which was awarded the coveted title of Best Blue Cheese at the 2003 World Cheese Awards in London. We got to sample this amazing cheese, which is sold out until 2008 (handcrafted only during the Autumn equinox and Winter solstice), but that was at the end of the tour, so we’ll get back to it later. We were led on the tour by its creator, lead cheesemaker Craig Nelson, and Marketing and Merchandising Director Francis Plowman. Craig, a retired military man who rose through the ranks of the creamery from dishwasher to lead cheesemaker in 18 months, concluded our tour with a and Q and A session and told us that he likes to make sure his tours are educational as well as delicious—I mean entertaining—and learn we did. I’d never been to a creamery, so I really soaked it up.

The first thing I learned was that you have to suit up to enter the cheese room. Local host Kendra Kimbirauskas, who consults for the Food and Water Watch and writes her own ag blog, filmmaker Steve Clack and I donned hairnets and plastic booties, then walked through a shallow pan of water before being allowed to enter the facility, which was (as you can imagine) clean as a whistle. In the cheddar room, where they process both pasteurized and raw cheddar cheese, we learned that Rogue cheddars are created in a huge vat and use about 10,000 lbs of milk to make 1,000 lbs of cheese, and tend to age anywhere from 6 to 8 months. It was also here that Craig told us the secret to good cheesemaking, which is a keen sense of smell and taste. Rather than rely on chemistry sets, as the larger cheese operations do, artisans at Rogue rely on taste, touch and smell, and tasters decide when each batch of cheese is finished aging. Of course the cheese is tested, too, but as Francis put it, cheese is a living product and each batch is “released when the cheese tells us.”


We walked outside from the Cheddar Room and through more pans of water and into the building where they make blue cheese. This building, because of the mold cultures involved in the “blue-ing” process, is entirely removed from the other, and people work each day in one building or the other to prevent cross-contamination. Here, we learned that to create the vein effect, each wheel of cheese is poked by a perforating machine, forming holes that let oxygen in. After it gets moldy enough, but not too moldy, it’s sealed back up, stopping the molding process. There’s picture of the perforating machine in our flicker photos—see the flickr “badge” below.

At Rogue, everything is done by hand, from the stirring to the packing. We visited the packing room, which was full of people cutting, vacuum-sealing (the only part of the process that involves a machine) and boxing up cheese. Craig told us that they take note of which workers work on which cheeses, and every member of the team is recognized when they win an award. Also in this building, we got to stick our noses into the “cave” room where the aging happens. It doesn’t look much like a cave, but our hosts told us that it resembles the caves in European creameries. If you’ve never smelled a cheese cave, you should! It smelled rich and buttery and kind of musky. It got us all hungry to taste some cheese, which was what we did next.

We were lucky enough to sample that infamous Rogue River Blue cheese, which totally lived up to its reputation. Amazing. Kendra calls it “smooth like brandy.” Maybe that is partly because each wheel is wrapped in brandy-soaked Syrah grape leaves. If you ever find yourself anywhere near this establishment, you should stop by and meet these guys—besides learning a lot about cheese, you can sample the legendary Rogue River Blue (without having to wait until next year) and appreciate the artisanship that makes it happen. Craig tells us that learning the steps to cheesemaking is easy, but “becoming an artisan is tougher.”

Our next stop was at the Rogue Creamery Dairy, where we met the cows that produce the milk that goes into these fine cheeses. The milk these ladies put out has some of the lowest bacterial count around, which in part makes possible Rogue’s Raw Milk Cheddar. Delmar, who was kind enough to show us around his farm, was recently Certified Sustainable by the Food Alliance. Way to go, Delmar!

Want to read more about our events today?

The Ditty Bops
SeQuential BioFuels
Thoughts From the Road

Article Tag(s):

If you are interested in commenting on this blog, please go to our forum...