Episode 125: Cheese, Glorious Cheese

UConn is known around the country for great academics, championship basketball and the greatest ice cream you can find. Now, award-winning cheese can be added to that list! Cheeses produced at UConn’s Creamery have recently won major awards in national and regional contests, including winning a first prize at the American Cheese Society Annual Judging and Competition. Dennis D’Amico, associate professor of animal science, joins us to talk about the cheese making process at UConn, and also brought some samples along for your UConn 360 hosts to sample and enjoy. Jacie Severance from University Communications is a guest co-host this episode and started off by sharing a few of her favorite cheese puns!

Link to Episode 124 at Podbean

Transcript

Mike: Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the UConn 360 Podcast. We’re here in the Lakeside Building, University Communications. I’m Mike Enright. Today, we have a special co-host with us. Our usual co-host on the UConn 360 Podcast, Iizzy Harris, is out on assignment, as they say in the news business. So Jacie Severance, one of my co-workers here in University Communications, is filling the co-host seat today. So Jacie, thank you for taking some time and joining us today.

Jacie: Thank you, Mike. It’s Gouda to be here. Oh, here comes the cheese jokes.

Mike: It’s going to be a cheesy episode folks. And we haven’t even started yet. We haven’t even introduced our guest yet, but let’s do that now. So Dennis D’Amico is joining us today. He’s an associate professor in the Department of Animal Science obviously here at UConn. In addition to his classes, he teaches in dairy technology, He’s our cheese guy here on campus, and along with the good folks at UConn Creamery. UConn has developed some cheeses that have brought UConn national recognition.

We’ll talk a little bit about the individual awards later on, but for instance, our Artisanal 1881 Reserve Cheese was awarded first place in the American Originals Monterey Jack category at the 2024 American Cheese Society Annual Judging and Competition, which I for one was never aware an event even like that was a thing.

So congratulations and welcome to the podcast, Dennis.

Dennis: Yes. It’s the Oscars of cheese. They call it.

Mike: Is there a red carpet for an event like that?

Dennis: They’re, they’re getting there. Yeah. There’s a, there’s a little spot where you can stop and catch some photos with your, with your medals and whatnot, but hasn’t quite reached that elite level yet.

Mike: Soon to be, I’m sure. So when people hear UConn, they think basketball, they think Dairy Bar ice cream. Tell us about cheese and how that’s become a new award-winning thing at UConn.

Dennis: Yeah, so, dairy production at the University of Connecticut’s been around since the early 1900s through the Department of Animal Science.

And evolved into producing products for, for commercial sale around the 1950s or so when the Dairy Bar opened. And at that time we were producing mostly milk and cottage cheese, which if you remember, cottage cheese was all the rage back then. And we were known for our cottage cheese at the time.

Then the creamery kind of slowed down production for various reasons, and we shrank our footprint down to what we have now, which you can come see if you go to the Dairy Bar. If you look through the glass, you can see our current production facility and the focus at the time. This was really, I’m trying to remember the exact time frame, but sometime in the late nineties shrunk down and focused primarily on the production of ice cream at the time.

And that was what the people were doing. Really putting their effort into. We weren’t really producing all that much ice cream at the time then around 2004-05. Individuals came to the university and started to sort of reinvigorate the Dairy Education portion out of the department and started producing some cheeses along with. And so he came in and got a relatively small cheese vat for, for mostly doing workshops for the public and for teaching in the department and started making some cheeses.

I don’t, I wasn’t here at the time, so I don’t have all the details on, on how much was produced, but He started to produce a cheese called who still Lipa. I’d spell it for you, but it’s a very long Finnish name. It means bread cheese. And he decided to make that cheese because of he thought there was a market for it with the Finnish population in the state.

And that proved to be quite popular. And he also made some cheddar. And so I, again, I don’t know the production volume at the time, but those are the two products that they were making. And then when he left the university there was kind of a lull the manager that took over the creamery was, is really focused on ice cream.

He’s the ice cream expert and when I was hired, I came in and said, ‘Let’s make some cheese.’ And so they, they kind of gave me the walk around and talked about some of the products they had made in the past. And I started to come up with ideas of how we could start to produce cheese again with the facilities that we have and the staff that we have and, and work around some of these some of these restrictions that we were faced with.

And so over time, since I got here in 2013, we’ve slowly built up the, the cheese manufacturing and, and started to produce wider array of products. And that’s kind of where, what got us to where we are today.

Jacie: So what goes into making cheese and how it’s done here at UConn? Are we, are we using the milk from the dairy herds?

Dennis: Yeah. So the Department of Animal Science has a fairly large dairy herd. We’ve got about a hundred dairy cattle. And so we bring that milk down, we pasteurize it. And then depending on the type of cheese we make there’s various, you know, processes that go into the different types of cheese.

And so, you know, one of the big parts of my role is that dairy production and the making of cheese and dairy products is educational for our students and for the public. And so we make three. Basically, we make three cheeses. And they’re made in three different ways. And so it’s a way for us to show people how you can make cheese in three.

Basically, we call them cheese technologies. And so we continue to make the Lipa. We don’t make it as often. It’s actually a cheese where we just add, we take the milk, we pasteurize it and we add an enzymem which turns it from a liquid to a solid. And then we basically do a couple more steps, press it into a shape.

We cut it into blocks and then we put it into a pizza oven and we bake these these blocks of cheese and they crisp up like the top of a pizza. So the cheese itself is very, very mild. There’s, there’s it tastes like fresh milk because we don’t add any It’s just the milk that’s been solidified and then baked, so it tastes pretty much like you would taste the pizza on the mozzarella cheese on top of your pizza.

Jacie: And that’s why it’s called bread cheese.

Dennis: That’s why it is called bread cheese, because it crisps up and looks just like a loaf of bread. And at the time they were adding jalapeno peppers to it. So you these types of cheeses don’t have a lot of flavor on their own. They’re very mild. They kind of take up a lot of the flavor that you add.

So if you put in something like a jalapeno pepper, it’ll take on some of that that flavor that, you know, not overpowering. You can still taste the fresh cheese. Then you can taste some of the jalapeno flavor, and then it has that really buttery, crispy top. So, that takes a lot of effort to, because we, we bake it ourselves, and you know, it’s hard to find some time to break out the ovens and get that going, but we try to as much as we can to make that product.

And then we make another cheese the Old Farm Lane fresh cheese. And that one is another process where you heat milk up really hot, you add an acid, and that destabilizes the proteins that normally don’t interact, and they clump up, and they trap the fat, and you collect those curds, and you press those.

So again, a really fresh tasting cheese. And that’s why we really like these cheeses, too, because we have such high quality milk, and it’s so fresh that we can really capture that without any modifications or adding any other flavors like bacteria that we use for some of these aged cheeses I’ll talk about.

And again, that one really versatile cheese. Lots of people like it. It’s pretty mild flavored. It doesn’t melt just like the bread cheese. So it’s really good for adding to dishes, like just to add protein to dishes, crumble it in tacos, chili, things like that, or eat it on its own. It’s also very easy to add flavors too.

So we’ve tried a ton of different flavors. I don’t know. For those of you that have been out there to the Dairy Bar, we went on a kick during COVID because we had we had some freedom there. And we started adding every flavor we could think of into this cheese. And then we slowly whittled it down to our favorites.

But we’ve always made like a chipotle flavored one, a green chili, diced green chili. But we’ve also made cracked black pepper bacon, pepperoni. So it’s a cheese that we can pretty much add anything to. And again, it’ll kind of take on some of those flavors and it makes it really versatile for us to be able to put out lots of different flavors without, you know, having to produce different batches day after day after day.

We can kind of mix and match and make a variety, so. And then the third one was really getting back to aged cheeses, these cultured cheeses, and they’re much more labor intensive. And they take a lot more skill and sometimes some specialized equipment and conditions. And so we didn’t really have those in the creamery at the time.

So again, during that sort of COVID period, I worked with the creamery to sort of develop these aged cheeses and figure out a way that we could produce some really high quality handcrafted cheese in a facility that’s designed and built for producing ice cream. And that’s what this was. These, these cheese that that we’re talking about here from the American Cheese Society are these cheeses.

And these are again, very labor intensive because they have bacteria added, lactic acid bacteria. They have to produce lactic acid over time. There’s, it’s about a 10, 12-hour day to make these, whereas the other ones you know, we can do in, in one, you know, short shift. So we love them. They’re a labor of love.

The fact that they are being recognized is really important to us because of all the effort that went into designing them, but also all the effort that goes into producing them on a day to day basis.

Mike: So tell us a little bit about how often these cheeses are available at the Dairy Bar, how oft they can buy them.

Dennis: As with all of our products, they’re only available at the Dairy Bar right here on the campus Storrs campus. And we typically try to make these as much as we can, as we fit them in. So we’re in the, coming out of the height of ice cream season.

And so at this point in time, we are in a battle of producing, trying to produce more than the dairy bar is selling, which is quite a battle throughout the summer. So we’ll be replenishing our freezers for a while. And then once we get to a state where we can get through our, you know, maintenance and all of that stuff, we’ll start making cheese again.

So usually in the wintertime when ice cream is slowing down a little bit. And then they, depending on the cheeses, they need to age for a certain period of time. And then what we’ll do is we’ll start to cut them out for retail sale sort of periodically. We try to make sure that we have cheese available.

I want to say every season, I don’t want to say all the time because the cheeses tend, we don’t produce a large volume. And so with the demand, they usually sell out almost immediately. But we try to make sure that every quarter, every season we have a release where these could be available.

So the Dairy Bar does an excellent job of marketing and putting out letting people know when these are hitting the shelves, we try to do it through our, our, channels as well. So for those that are interested, if you keep up to date with the Dairy Bar social channel media, outlets the animal science you should at some point see that we’re going to be releasing a batch and then come by quick to get it.

Cause I mean, it’s, it’s, it seems like I’m saying it to be, to sound great, but it, it really does sell out within, you know, the week or weekend.

Jacie: That’s incredible. So how did you personally develop an interest in making cheese?

Dennis: Yeah, my parents never, never dreamed that I would be a dairy microbiologist with an expertise in cheese, and neither did I.

I was a nutrition and food science undergraduate. I had been working in a lab developing a ultrasonic processor for an alternative to pasteurizing milk and apple cider. So just one of those things I fell into as an undergraduate. I was really interested in food microbiology. There was this idea to develop a way of an alternative to pasteurization at the time.

And so my master’s degree ended up being working with raw milk and raw apple cider, developing this ultrasonic processing system. And then another professor came by and said, you know, you’re working with raw milk. Like, I have this project that’s looking at raw milk cheese. And I was like, more raw milk stuff.

Like, how did I fall into all this? But I loved microbiology. So I said, okay. And at the time, the FDA, the U. S. Food and Drug Administration was trying to ban raw milk cheese. And my advisor at the time said, you know, this is the project is to is to study this. And I said, well, why? She said, well, they’re trying to ban raw milk cheese.

I said, why are they trying to ban it? And we didn’t have an answer. There was no reason. And so I said, Oh, well, let’s show them the data that they don’t have. And so we got into this project of looking at the safety of raw milk cheese production from the farm all the way to sale. So we looked at safety on the farm, safety during production.

What happens to these dangerous bacteria in different types of cheese? How do those bacteria survive in the cheese processing environment? So we, we wanted to look at the full spectrum of the risks associated with raw milk cheese so that when we went to the FDA, we could say, yeah, you guys are right, this is, you know, a worthy thing to ban, or, you know, it’s You got it all wrong.

There’s nothing harmful about this product. And I really liked it. The idea of, you know, filling in those gaps and showing somebody like, you know, you can’t make decisions without data. So let’s get the data that you need. At the same time, my advisor started the Vermont Institute for artisan cheese, which was this wild idea.

It was going to be the first comprehensive Institute for teaching artisan cheese making in the U S. And at the time. The artisan cheese industry was non existent, so to speak. And when I told people what I was researching, people said, why? You What is that? You know, shouldn’t you be looking at salmonella and chickens or something like that?

I said, oh, no, this is this is really important. And so I was in charge of this is during my PhD work, I was in charge of doing workshops on food safety for, for the attendees at the Institute. But the majority of the work that the Institute was doing was bringing in experts from every country to teach U.S. cheesemakers how to make these cheeses. Very traditional, historic really fancy, fancy cheeses. So I would sneak in, I was welcomed in, but I would sneak in whenever I could and sit through these workshops. And so I learned how to make mozzarella from the Italians. I learned how to make Swiss cheese from the Swiss and cheddar from the English.

And these were, the premier experts from around the world coming in and teaching this. So I just was fascinated with all of the diversity and the flavors and the, the art that went into it, but also the science it’s, there’s so much art, but there’s so much science. And at the same time, I was learning cheese making for my PhD work.

My coworker at the time was a, was a dairy scientist who was the most passionate person about dairy. And I never, I don’t know how he infected me with this, but he, everything was just the coolest, you know, we would be stirring the milk and he’d be like, look at this, this is the cooler. And, and it just, I caught onto it.

And so between learning how to do it for my PhD work and listening to these other experts and their passion for these products that have been made for thousands of years and the tradition that they were preserving, and there was just so many aspects to it that I just fell in love with it. But at the same time, it’s an extremely complicated scientific process and biological process.

And so, I was fascinated from the sort of scientific microbiology, food science aspect as well. And to this day, he and I might the one I was talking about are still calling each other every day talking about all these little intricate dairy science. You know, we’re dairy nerds.

I’m doing this. We still collaborate on a lot of projects, and his passion is still there. And so I haven’t lost it either. And neither of us. We’ve agreed that we’ll never know as much as we there is to know about the complexities of developing and producing cheeses. It’s just a never ending exploration.

Mike : So we joked about a little bit about this at the beginning, but tell me a little bit about these cheese competitions. Is there a whole, do you send them the cheese? Do you travel? Are there people in tuxedos like the dog shows, tasting cheese is how do they work? And I know you, you won some awards.through the Big E, and you’ve reached ratings of 99 out of 100 on some of these cheeses. Talk a little bit about how what are these competitions like?

Dennis: Yeah, so there’s a fair number of competitions across the world. And so there’s the World Cheese Awards. There’s, there’s a bunch of them. You know, the biggies are regional one that we love participating in.

The American Cheese Society is a competition that has been around, I think, since the 1990s or so. I don’t know if the competition’s been around. The American Cheese Society has been around. They came at the sort of the judging and competition slightly different from some of these other awards.

Their approach was to, one, focus on American cheeses and so it’s only for cheeses produced in Canada, North America, South America. And they, traditionally you would have what’s called like a technical judge and they would say what’s wrong with your cheese. So they would, they would take points away from you for, for making mistakes.

And then the American Cheese Society instituted two judges. One that’s a technical judge and then one that’s an aesthetic judge. And so they have somebody that’s in there that. Assesses it from its good qualities rather than looking at any flaws. They’re saying what’s good about it. And so they’re adding points.

And so they combine those two scores and that’s the score that you get. So the, the judging competition happens with these expert judges and that’s with any competition you have. Sensory experts, cheese experts, cheese buyers and then the aesthetic judges are usually food writers, restauranteurs, people that have a lot of experience eating cheese, but maybe not the technical background, and so they have this competition, and then once the now the way they run is they do it before the big ceremony, but the big ceremony happens at their annual conference.

And yes, it is tuxedos. Not everybody. You’re not going to get a bunch of small-scale artisan cheese producers toe to suit up in tuxedos, but the host are pretty dolled up and it is held much like a fancy Oscars style award show. And so they announced the winners. There’s a big celebration. It’s live streamed.

Everyone’s tuning in and waiting with bated breath to see the winners. And so that’s how that’s how it works. And so you can’t automatically get an award. You have to have your product has to achieve a certain score to even be considered for an award. And then once you’re considered, then you’re put up against the other cheeses in your category.

And then usually one prevails.

Jacie: It’s a head to head cheese showdown. Yeah,

Dennis: It is, it is. It’s all in good fun, but, you know, there’s a lot of nervous people in the audience. It’s a big deal to win these things. It’s a recognition, especially for these small producers that are scattered across the States.

We might not know about products that are being produced in other states on the small scale. And so it’s a way for these cheese makers to really get on the map and have other people seek out their products.

Jacie: Well, you’ve been so generous to bring us some samples to try today. What have you brought us today?

Dennis: I brought us a sample of our store’s original farmstead jack and our 1881 Reserve.

Jacie: And so what is unique about these particular cheeses?

Dennis: What is unique about these? So as I had mentioned, we wanted to get back into cultured cheese making and the first one was, well, let’s make cheddar. And I said, everybody makes cheddar.

And plus the creamery had made cheddar before and they said, Oh, it takes so long. And I said, okay, well, we’ll make a different cheese. Now. I didn’t tell him at the time that this was going to take the same exact amount of time. But I said, okay, well, let’s design a cheese that, that we can make comfortably here with, with the, again, with our we have student, student staff, our, our staff in the creamer, our students and we have a couple of full time employees.

So it was sort of, how are we going to manage this? And so I said, well, let’s make a traditional Jack. I have young kids. My kids eat a lot of Monterey Jack, you know, cheese sticks and whatnot. And going to these competitions and learning, I knew that that Monterey Jack is not what Monterey Jack tasted like when it was first created.

And I said, let’s go back and look at the old text that I can find because I happen to have an obscene number of historical cheese making books and whatnot. And so we went back and I said, let’s try to recreate. That original Jack cheese, because it’s as you said with the award, it’s called an American original.

So, America is only known for a couple of cheeses that we actually created. The rest we just recreate. So most of the cheeses you eat are from another country. We didn’t come up with them. Jack is one of the cheeses that’s considered an American original. And so I said, well, it’s one of our original cheeses, but now it’s this kind of soft pasty, you know, that’s, I can’t imagine that’s what it actually tasted like back in the day.

So went back and said, let’s come up with a recipe that will emulate what I think the original Jack cheese tasted like. But then I also had this idea of, well, we only make these very small batches and. I don’t want to make one cheese. I want to make two. And they said, well, we don’t have time to make two.

There’s a, we don’t have space for eight. And I said, okay, listen, I’m going to make a cheese that’s going to morph because I’m a dairy microbiologist. So I took this on as a challenge of how can I make one cheese that if you just treat it a little differently, we’ll turn into a completely different cheese if you just separate them and let them develop differently.

Jacie: And so these two cheeses are actually the same cheese.?

Dennis: So the cheese starts out as stores original farmstead Jack, but if we And I can’t give away our trade secrets. I hope you understand. I understand completely. Our compliance people would be very upset if we did. So t’s built so that there’s, there’s different cultures in there.

And so the, we emphasize through environmental conditions and the composition of the cheese and stuff, certain cultures at the beginning that will make it taste like Monterey Jack. And then we slow those cultures down and we, we kind of store it. Then we. take select blocks from that batch and we put them under different conditions, which wakes up a whole second set of cultures.

The whole second set of cultures makes a completely different flavor. And so the first cheese tastes much like what you would think a Jack cheese would taste like. It won’t taste like the ones you buy at the store. It’s a little drier. And that’s, that’s intentional. The second cheese will age and it’ll start to develop a really sort of rich nutty type of flavor to it.

And so you end up with a cheese that’s more like a mix of a flavor of like a Parmesan or what’s another example? Or like a Gruyere which is completely different from the store’s original Farmstead Jack. So we get two totally different cheeses from the same batch. So which one should we try first?

Well, the rule in cheese tasting is you start milder and then work your way up. Now, they’re both, none of them are gonna, you know, destroy your palate with flavors like a blue cheese or something, but I would start with the Farmstead Jack.

Mike: Why don’t you grab two slices there, Jacie, and we can make our listeners at home or wherever they’re listening from jealous about this is the first time I think on the UConn 360 podcast we’ve done any kind of taste testing. So again, this one is called what?

Dennis: This is our store’s original Farmstead Jack.

Mike: Once you know it, it’s very good.

Dennis: Very, very good. So you can see it has probably a little more flavor than you would typically get in a Monterey Hack.

Jacie: Still has that same consistency, but a little sharper.

Dennis: Yep, and it’s a little firmer than you would typically find. And again, that’s all  design. I wanted to make a cheese that my kids would eat. But that I would also feel respectable presenting to people. And the second one we have here today? Now this is the aged version of this cheese. Okay. And this is called 1881 reserve.

Mike :1881, of course, is the year that UConn was founded.

Dennis: Correct.

Mike: For those of you that don’t know that, I would assume a lot of our listening audience does.

Jacie: And you can already see that the texture is much drier. Yes. Right out of the package.

Dennis: Yeah, so as, as cheese ages, it will lose moisture, and so it’ll develop a slightly firmer, drier texture.

Mike: Thank you. Well, this a little different.

Dennis: So, this one will be Again, a little, it’s hard to describe it specifically, but it’s a little nuttier.

Jacie: Yeah, definitely.

Dennis: And sometimes can take on some slight fruity, fruity flavors. Again, depending how long it’s been aging for. So these will continue to develop. So if you buy our cheese, you know, in February, And then again in, in June they might taste similar but different because they are continuing to evolve before we release them out for sale.

So again, we’re not a big producer, a big commercial factory. We’re not looking for exact consistency every day. You know, we want you to taste the cheese as it develops and evolves. We do know where we want it to be. So we’re not gonna put something out there that we haven’t tried ourselves. But it will kind of evolve over time.

So depending on when you get it, it might might veer one way or the other.

Jacie: Put the two of those together, you’d have one serious mac and cheese.

Dennis: Yeah, these are very, very good for mac and cheese and grilled cheese.

Mike: Also, a nice winter night in front of the fireplace and you’re watching a game or you’re watching a movie and you slice up some cheese and it’s with your favorite wine, probably a very relaxing night.

Dennis: Yeah, not bad. Not bad. Go ahead.

Jacie: Can you tell us, you know, what are your favorite flavors to make and to eat in your cheeses?

Dennis: So, making cheese, I like them all. You know, again, it’s the sort of science and art to it and I just, I just love the process. The more complicated the cheese, the more time it takes.

So there’s an interest in the complicatedness of it, but then there’s a disinterest in the amount of labor and a lot can go wrong with the more complicated a cheese gets. So for example, I love making cheeses like blue cheese, where, you know, after a certain amount of time, you open it up and you have this beautiful blue blooming inside.

And there’s all these different, you know, each cheese has its own little unique nuance that I love and they all have specific technological requirements that I have to hit perfectly or else they go bad. So I love the technical aspect, but again, I don’t like the fact that things can go wrong. And here, here at UConn, we don’t make cheese every day, so I only get a couple of shots at it a year.

So I don’t have a lot of room for, for playing around. I don’t have a lot of room for mistakes. So, I can’t tell you a cheese I like making more than one, than the other because they all have their benefits. Cheese eating. That’s a question. You know, as a cheese scientist, I get that question constantly.

And as most people that are in a profession that they get a question constantly, you never have a great answer. So I always just say if I had like a desert island cheese, right? If I had one cheese, you could only eat one cheese. So it’s not my favorite, right? Because I have a lot. Everyone’s I love blue cheese, but I also love, you know, so desert island cheese would probably be Greer.

Yeah. I could narrow it down to a very specifics, but in general, the general cheese type would be Gruyere because I think it and I tried to design 1881 to kind of push towards that flavor so I could enjoy it myself, but not so much that people who don’t like that cheese would be put off. It’s just, it’s complex, but it’s not overly complex.

You could approach it kind of generally like a cheddar, or you can really, you know, break it down and go, wow, I’m really tasting lots of nuances in these, these little notes of this nut and this berry, blah, blah, blah. But It’s a great snacking cheese, but it’s also really complicated if you really, really break it down.

So that’s, that would probably be my desert islands. It’s not too hard, not too soft, not too strong, not too mild. It’s kind of right in the sweet spot for me.

Mike: Well, Dennis, thanks for joining us today here on the UConn 360 podcast, and thank you for bringing a unique national recognition to our university.

Dennis: It’s my pleasure. We’re very proud.

Mike: Those samples are not going back with you. It’s good to stay right here.

Dennis: These are for you guys. I appreciate it.

Mike: And Jacie, thanks for sitting in today.

Jacie: This has been great. Thanks for having me.

Mike: Thank you. And thank you for listening to the UConn 360 podcast, and we look forward to having you join us for another episode.