FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
1
What ingredients are in cheese?
Cheese has four basic ingredients: milk, cultures, coagulant, and salt. Thousands of different cheeses come from these four ingredients. The milk can be raw or pasteurized, and produced by cows, goats, water buffalo, or - in our case - sheep. Like the bacteria lactobacilli used to make sourdough bread, cultures are carefully selected bacteria used in cheesemaking. Typically, the milk is ripened with cultures before a coagulant is added. The coagulant transforms the proteins in liquid milk into a solid called curd. In traditional cheesemaking, the coagulant used is an enzyme extracted from the stomach of a calf, kid, or lamb on a milk diet. The salt in cheese adds flavor, acts as a preservative, and influences cheese texture and cooking properties. Traditionally, salt is added to cheese during the aging process (maturation).
2
why make cheese from sheep’s milk?
Sheep’s milk contains almost twice as much butterfat as cow’s and goat’s milk and far more protein. The richness of sheep’s milk gives it a delicious flavor and texture, and makes it excellent for cheesemaking. Also, sheep’s milk is naturally homogenized, so it is easier to digest than other milk. Sheep’s milk is unique in that it can be frozen without altering its taste, texture, or its physical or chemical composition.
3
is imported sheep’s milk cheese really the best?
Almost all (99%) of the sheep’s milk cheese sold in the U.S. is imported from foreign countries. In fact, the U.S. is the world’s largest importer of sheep’s milk cheese. The world’s largest producers of sheep’s milk cheese are Greece, China, Italy, Spain, Syria, France, Turkey, Romania, Iran and Portugal. The world’s largest exporters of sheep’s milk cheese are Italy, France, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, and Romania.
What does that mean for U.S. consumers? It means that 99% of the sheep’s milk cheese you can buy was made in a foreign country … under foreign food safety and animal welfare laws. Most foreign sheep’s milk cheese producers get their milk from hundreds of small farms. Some foreign cheeses are hauled to a commercial affinage for maturation. After maturation, the cheese is loaded on a truck or train and hauled to a major shipping port, where it sits in a warehouse until it is loaded onto a cargo ship. Then the cheese spends two or three weeks in a shipping container crossing the ocean. When the cargo ship docks at a U.S. port, the cheese is unloaded and hauled to a distributor’s warehouse - where it sits until the distributor loads it on a truck and delivers it to your store. Cheese made in foreign countries and sold under U.S. labels also makes this journey to market. By the time it gets to your shop’s cheese coffin, imported sheep’s milk cheese has passed through a lot of hands. Let’s just say, imported sheep’s milk cheese gets around.
4
Why is so little sheep’s milk cheese made in the united states?
Although Americans buy 73 million pounds of sheep’s milk cheese a year, almost all of it is imported from foreign countries. So why is only 1% of sheep’s milk cheese produced here? For one thing, the sheep’s milk cheese industry is centuries old in Europe and the Middle East. When those countries began to export their sheep’s milk cheese, exports became a key market. To protect their exported sheep’s milk cheese from competition, foreign countries sought market protection. They got international designations that prohibit the production of many sheep’s milk cheeses in the U.S. They also got international designations that prohibit our use of common cheese names. For example, even if a U.S. sheep’s milk cheese is virtually identical to Parmigiana-Reggiano, the U.S. producer can’t call his cheese Parmigiana-Reggiano. The same goes for U.S. produced sheep’s milk cheeses that are identical to Feta, Roquefort, Ossau-Iraty, Brebirousse d’Argental, P’tit Basque, Abbaye de Belloc, Basco-béarnaise, Idiazabal, Manchego, and Pecorino. Some of the international designations held by foreign countries are Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), Traditional Specialties Guaranteed (TSG), Appellation d'origine Contrôlée (AOC/France), Denominazione di Origine Controllata (DOC/Italy), Denominação de Origem Controlada (DOC/Portugal), Denumire de Origine Controlată (DOC/Romania), and Denominación de Origen (DO/Spain).
This foreign market protection scheme significantly increased the amount of sheep’s milk cheese imported to the U.S. - effectively blocking development of the industry here. Also, American producers don’t receive the direct and indirect government subsidies received by foreign cheese producers, which further dampens U.S. competition. As a result, there was no incentive for Americans to try sheep dairying. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that the first sheep dairies started here. Dairy sheep from foreign countries were generally unavailable, so it has taken decades to improve U.S. sheep for milk production. By 2010, there were only 80 sheep dairies in the U.S. Because it is so costly to construct, license, and operate a creamery in this country, most sheep dairies sell their milk to third party creameries. The costs of compliance with USDA and FDA regulations, the cost of labor, and the lack of government subsidies make it difficult for U.S. cheesemakers to compete with the price of imported sheep’s milk cheese.
5
WHY HARLAN RIDGE?
The one thing you can be sure of in sheep dairying is that the ewes must be milked twice a day for over 200 days. That means every single ewe must come to the parlor twice every
single day for over 200 consecutive days. There are no vacation, sick leave, or I-don’t-feel-like-it days. The same goes for cheesemaking. Cheese must be made day in and day out –
sometimes twice a day. Each cheesemake takes about 10 hours – only 20% of which is active cheesemaking. The rest is sanitizing, setting up, cleaning up, washing, and sanitizing. And
the cheeses in the affinage must tended every day, 365 days a year.
Knowing we would be spending all day, every day in the parlor and creamery, we designed the buildings to offer expansive views of Harlan Ridge – the rugged, tree covered mountain that overlooks the Powder River. Harlan Ridge flanks the river for miles through our family ranch and is a nearly impassable barrier between the ranch headquarters and the high plateau
beyond. In 2008, the United States permanently named Harlan Ridge in recognition of James and Joanne Harlan’s service to the community and state.
Home to deer, elk, mountain lions, bobcats, fox, coyotes, eagles, hawks, and turkeys, Harlan Ridge is the wild west. And it is an integral part of our daily lives. We start and end each day with it. Milking sheep and making cheese, we watch clouds chase across the sky above it, thunder boomers come crashing over the rim, shadows slip over its face, and the seasons play with its colors. Never changing, yet ever-changing. Harlan Ridge is woven into the fabric of our lives and lifts our spirits as we work. How could we name our flagship cheese anything else?