News

Pineland is in the cheese
By Elizabeth Prata

Mark Whitney, cheesemaker, had an offer he found tempting beyond imagination: help design and build a cheese making operation at Pineland Farms. It would have the latest in state-of the-art machines, a 10-foot education corridor for students to view the operations, and milk from an award winning Holstein herd right next door. Mark said yes.

As of May 2006, the plant was just about finished and the cheese making began.

Already aging nearly 3,000 pounds of his famous cheddar, last Thursday the crew made Monterey Jack. It all starts with deliveries of milk from Pineland's herds. The receiving tanks hold 3,000 pounds of milk, which is directly piped in from the truck parked just outside. Above, Mark Whitney in front of the cheese tanks. The milk truck arrives from one of Pineland's dairies and hooks up outside. Capacity in one tank is 3,000 pounds. Prata photo

Like maple syrup, which has a high raw to finished ration, milk to cheese is a 10:1 process. 1,000 pounds of milk makes 100 pounds of cheese.

The milk is trucked in at 37 degrees but right away it needs to be heated up at a high temperature and then cooled quickly in a process called HTST, for high temperature, short time. It's heated up to 161 degrees and then cooled to 85.

Once the pumping and cooling is over with then the cheesemaker steps in. mark takes over and makes cheese.

There are different cultures for different cheeses. Today the crew is making Monterey jack, a slightly softer cheese than cheddar, which the crew made the day before. "You add the culture and let it ripen and work on the sugars and milk," said Whitney. Then the cultures react with the rennet that is added and that is what coagulates the mixture. Above, the giant paddles in the cheese vat. Prata photo

The next step the cheese harp, beautiful music to a cheese maker's ears. The harp is a set of knives run through the mixture to reduce it to the consistency of cottage cheese. This makes the solids stick together even more. It is at this point where the kind of cheese being made is decided. Will the cheese be a soft cheese? A hard cheese? It is here that temperature makes the difference, and later, pressure.

After the curds and whey are cooked and stirred, the mixture is poured onto a table, called a finishing table. The whey is drained out, and later, fed to the cows. A mat of curd is left, to be cut, rotated, flipped, a process which continually drains out remaining whey.

All that's left to do is cut it into uniform sizes, salt it, and shoveled into hoops. This is done manually and then the cheese is pressed.

"I like to make all kinds of cheeses," Whitney said, when asked if he had a favorite. When it comes to eating cheese, though, Whitney likes hard, aged cheeses best.

The jack made in June will be ready by July 23 for Open Farm Day at Pineland farms.

Executive Director of Pineland Farms, Todd Jepson, said that their business plan for the Creamery, as it is called, ultimately includes processing 3 million pounds of milk a year, for a maximum capacity of 300,000 pounds of cheese. "But that is 7 or 8 years out," Jepson said. The Creamery is one area where the non-profit educational endeavors elsewhere on the grounds would be supported by a money-making concern such as the cheese production. Above, Left to right, Todd Jepson of Pineland, Walter Greeley and Nancy Greeley of reading MA, and Mark Whitney, cheesemaker. The Greeleys were stopping at Pineland to tour the chese factory. Greeley is a large East Coast distributor who has worked with Whitney in the past. Prata photo

As of late June the Creamery is aging and cooling almost 3,000 pounds of already made cheese. When Open Farm Day at Pineland comes around, the first aged batches will be ready to buy. The corridor paralleling the operations has bay windows for viewing the production, and students and other groups will be invited to watch. Meanwhile, Whitney goes back inside the production rooms to clean the machinery and get ready to make more cheese.