Featured in the Culture Blog
Peter and Barney check the progress on the bloomy rind cheeses
Making Artisan Cheese in China
Peter H. Dixon | March 10, 2022
In November of 2008 I was making cheese at Consider Bardwell Farm, doing some consulting and offering workshops for cheesemakers, when I got a message from Barney Smith, the creamery manager at Ambrosia Foods in Shanghai. It seemed the owner of the company wanted to add cheese to their product line, and Barney thought I was the man for the job. At first, I didn’t believe it. I hadn’t heard much about cheesemaking in China and knew next to nothing about the Chinese dairy industry. Was there even a market for western-style cheeses in China?
There was, and Myra Chan was serious about having this Vermont cheesemaker train her Shanghai staff. During our conversations I learned that Myra had planned to be a doctor, but while waiting for a spot in an American medical school, she took a job at an import-export company in Shanghai. Her talent for logistics and sales led her to start her own company importing European gourmet foods and beverages for the western hotels and cruise ship lines. Dairy products were in demand, as Shanghai—a city of 22 million people—had four million westerners in residence. At the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Chef Christian Rassinoux bought a lot of European cheeses from Myra, and he saw an opportunity if high quality dairy products could be made locally. This was all the encouragement Myra needed, and she hired Barney, a New Zealander working in Frontera’s Shanghai office, to design, outfit, and manage her creamery.
With milk sourced from dairy farms within a 30-minute drive from the creamery, they’d begun producing sour cream and yogurt that year, but Chef Christian wanted cheese and his list was long: mozzarella, pizza mozzarella, provolone, asiago, gouda, havarti, baby swiss, fromage blanc, and of course, French-style bloomy and washed rind cheeses.
