When I first called Peter Dixon to arrange an interview with him, he mentioned that he was due to put on an annual dinner for his village of Westminster West and invited me to come. Not being a stupid person, I accepted. Dave and I drove down, stopping in to visit David Major of Vermont Shepherd on the way.
David and his first wife, Cindy, started making some of Vermont's first artisan cheese on their property in 1990, and trained several of the state's most well-known cheesemakers at their Dairy Sheep Education Center. The cheese that they make, the eponymous Vermont Shepherd, is an aged, raw milk sheep cheese that is only available seasonally and has been lauded as one of the finest of its kind in the country.
Leaving Vermont Shepherd (sadly, in the middle of milking), we drove the mile or so to the tiny village of Westminster West on the outskirts of the town of Westminster. According to Peter, these little villages got started when a group of townspeople would leave to start a new church and settle nearby. The dinner was being held in the Congregational Church in the village, and we found Peter and some helpers out behind the parish barbecuing chicken and vegetables over a couple of large grills. It being a warm evening, the village children played among the headstones of their former neighbors and relatives in the cemetery across the road.
It was a wonderful demonstration of the continuity that exists in these little communities, and that same spirit was evident during the gathering over dinner. Attended by local residents and their families, as well as summer people and even a recently elected legislator who lives nearby, it was a time to catch up on news, lobby for favorite causes and enjoy the harvest of midsummer together.
On my way to visit Michael at Twig, I drove through the town of Middlebury and, completely charmed by its quintessential New England village main street, made a note to stop on the way back and check it out. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain on the way back, I was tired and hungry and almost didn't stop. But I thought, "This is going to make a good post for the blog." So I parked and pulled my rain jacket and hood tight around me and ventured onto the street.
With a Congregational Church at the the top of the street, Middlebury is populated with local shops sporting all kinds of hockey t-shirts and tchotchkes (Middlebury College's women's hockey team has won three straight NCAA titles, and their men's team isn't too shabby, either), as well as restaurants, bookshops and a state arts and crafts store. Running through the middle is Otter Creek with it's spectacular falls, visible from several viewing platforms scattered along its banks.
But, as mentioned above, I was hungry and the rain was determined to find its way down my neck, so I started looking for someplace to get out of the weather. Walking back down the main street I peered down an alley and saw what looked like a restaurant hidden along the creekside and went to investigate. As I climbed the wooden stairs up to the doorway, there was a little sign that said Tully and Marie's, so I walked in and was greeted by what at first appeared to be an art-deco oceanliner that had gone aground on the banks of the creek just before it plunged over the falls.
They asked if I wanted to sit outside on their leafy covered deck, but I was more in the mood for warmth and comfort, so I was seated at a table for two on the lower level overlooking the creek. Ordering a cup of what turned out to be an excellent cream of mushroom soup along with crusty and crabby crab cakes with salad, I sat and watched the rain pelt down as I congratulated myself on finding this gem. Needless to say, on leaving I was in a much better frame of mind to get in the car and drive through the rain back to Burlington.
I could have included this one in my post on Burlington, but since it was my very first experience I thought you'd want all the juicy details. I've been reading for years about driving up the coast of New England (funny how it's always driving up, not down, isn't it?) and stopping in one little town or another at the local lobster shack. It's always a game of one-upmanship about who has the best this or the freshest that, and the stick the writers use to measure one against the other is almost invariably the quality of the lobster roll. Needless to say I've wanted to have one of these for years and have never had the opportunity.
Ray's Seafood Market goes along with this formula in its approach to lobster rolls and just about everything else as well. You walk in, go over to the cash register next to the two cases full of very fresh-looking seafood (including four kinds of clams and four lobster tanks), order your food, then go get a booth at the other end of the place. Most people seem to order take-out, probably because Ray's doesn't serve alcohol and their interior designer probably died sometime after WWII, having achieved his design apotheosis with the icy blue walls and diner layout of Ray's.
As part of my diligent information-gathering tour of the cheesemaking community in Vermont, Luan of Foster & Dobbs insisted I must, if at all possible, visit Michael and Emily Lee of Twig Farm in West Cornwall, just outside Middlebury. So I called, hoping for the best, and they were more than happy to have me stop in for a tour and a chat.
They built their home and barn and graze their goats on combined acreage they bought from Emily's family and a neighbor, and designed the buildings specifically for their cheese production business. From their herd of 25 Alpine goats, they make three types of cheese, a Goat Tomme, a Square Cheese and a Soft Wheel. When I arrived, Michael ("He does everything," according to Emily) was just heading down to his cheese cellar to wash the rinds of the Soft Wheels and turn the others. As he sat on a large blue picnic cooler and methodically washed the rinds with a salt brine solution, we talked about how he got into making cheese and what's it's like raising goats and making cheese in Vermont.
A former cheese buyer for Formaggio Kitchen in the Boston area, Michael said that since he was young he had wanted to start a farm even though there was no history of farming in his family. As a young adult he worked as a pruner at an orchard, oddly enough, on Sauvie Island in Oregon, and had also done harvesting on a vegetable farm. Those experiences and his own inclinations convinced him he wanted to raise animals, so he went to work for Ann and Bob Works at Peaked Mountain Farm in Townshend, Vermont, where he learned to make cheese.
As for the dual duty of having animals and making cheese, something many cheesemakers avoid by buying their milk from area farmers, Michaels says, "The only way I'm going to know if I've got the milk quality that I want is to have my own animals." He does supplement his herd's milk with milk from a neighboring farmer, but knows how the farmer treats his animals and what he feeds them.
We spent the majority of our week in Burlington, the biggest city in Vermont with a population of 40,000, a lovely place on the banks of Lake Champlain in the upper northwestern third of the state at the foot of the Green Mountains. It's a university town, home of the fighting Catamounts (defined by Merriam Webster as "any of various wild cats"), which accounts for the young folk wandering the balmy summer streets around midnight.
One of the hot spots downtown is American Flatbread, just off City Hall Park. Basically a pizza parlor and pub, they're dedicated to local, natural ingredients for the flatbread pizzas they make in the wood-fired oven that sits front and center in the dining room. Comparable to our temples of woodfire like Ken's or Nostrana, with Vermont microbrews featured prominently on the beverage menu, this is a place I could get comfortable going to.
A favorite place and one I always return to when we visit the rels is the Bennington Potters store, featuring made-in-Vermont hand-thrown stoneware pottery. Besides having a great sale and seconds section, this store is chock full of gift items and knick-knacks alongside their traditional splatterware and newer organics collection. It's got the feel of an upscale country store and I just can't resist stopping in and picking up a new piece of pottery whenever we go east.
Like here, farmers markets are a big thing in Vermont with markets happening all over the city several days a week. The difference seems to be that they're not the foodie extravaganzas you find at certain markets here, but more the old-fashioned community market experience, with farmers selling fresh produce, craftspeople selling their wares with a few food vendors sprinkled into the mix. The thing I was surprised at was the variety of produce they had for such a northern climate, with peppers, fennel, beets, corn and fabulous greens.
And no tour of Burlington proper would be complete without mentioning their Waterfront Park, a gorgeous stretch of prime real estate downtown along Lake Champlain that was claimed for the people of Burlington and features a 900-foot boardwalk with a portion of the 7.5 mile bike path running through it. There's a marina with access to ferries that take passengers across the lake, the ECHO Lake Aquarium and Science Center and a multitude of festivals going on all summer.
Then there's the beer. Vermont is all aboard the microbrew bus and it has left the terminal at full throttle. Nearly every pub and restaurant features at least one brew on tap, and several are now bottling. From Long Trail and Magic Hat in Burlington to Otter Creek in Middlebury and The Alchemist in Waterbury (photo, left), this place is literally hopping. We sampled several, and while their IPAs don't quite grab your tonsils the way ours do, they've got some mighty fine brews happening there. They've even got a tour map of the state's breweries for visitors at the Vermont Brewers Association website for those who want to focus their vacation on liquid pursuits.
It had been way too long since we'd been to see Dave's mother and sister in Vermont, so we decided head up to New England this summer for a little quality time with the fam. And since Culinate.com had asked me to do an article on artisan cheese for their fall issue, I made some appointments with a few artisan cheesemakers to see what they were up to.
According to Jeffrey Roberts, whose Atlas of American Artisan Cheese was just published and lists 34 producers in Vermont alone, "great cheese starts from complex, vital relationships among land, climate and animals." And perhaps no one in Vermont exemplifies that better than Peter Dixon of Dairy Foods Consulting, the go-to guy in the country if you want to start making artisan cheese. Like a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, he's spreading the gospel of artisan cheese across the country and working with new and established cheesemakers to start up their businesses or expand their existing product lines.
He's worked with four cheesemakers in Oregon alone, and is currently consulting with owner Angela Miller of Consider Bardwell Farm in West Pawlet, VT, on their cow and goat's milk cheeses (photo, upper left; notice the date on the house: 1819!). The day we talked he was cutting curds and making wheels of their Manchester cheese (photo, upper right). He says, "This is a wonderful kind of business to have. It's easy on the land because you're grazing and the animals are eating forage. You can get by with less grain because when you make cheese you don't need to have the cows or goats produce as much milk as when you're selling your milk. And the value of the milk is high because you're making it into cheese. It lends itself to going back to the old-fashioned way of dairy farming."
He also notes that the proliferation of farmers markets has "developed enough that people can jump into this type of business and become successful. Just look at Jasper Hill. Three years ago there was no Jasper Hill. Now there's 70,000 pounds more cheese mostly in the northeastern seaboard market. There have been ten new ones starting up to contribute another 100,000 to 200,000 pounds. Some kind of market is gobbling up all this production." And to that we can only add, "Bring it on!"
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