Conestoga College program aims to create new cheese culture in Ontario

Author Clifton Fadiman said, "cheese is milk's leap toward immortality."

The dairy product, along with baking, is one of humankind's greatest culinary achievements. What was once merely an ancient way of preserving milk is now both a delicious food source and an art.

With the cheese industry hungry for more cheese-makers, last year Conestoga College's School of Hospitality and Culinary Arts (HCA) in Waterloo began offering a one-year cheese-making program.

"There's a shortage of professional cheese-makers. Most of the current cheese-makers are European-trained and are at the point of retiring," HCA chair Keith Mueller said. "The Ontario Dairy Council identified that as an issue and asked the colleges to put in proposals, which we did."

Conestoga submitted a proposal in conjunction with Collège La Cité in Ottawa, which will teach the program in French.

The year-long course — which is open to the public and includes part-time enrolment — graduated eight students in its first year. Those students are now working in the industry. 

It's a fully hands-on course. Professional cheese-makers are the instructors, including Ruth Klahsen who operates well-known Monforte Dairy in Stratford.

Rather than the machinery of massive industrial cheese production, the Conestoga cheese-making course is designed to give students the hands-on feel of the process which is a series of steps that is essentially curdling milk and removing most of its fluid with the help of heat and rennet and cultures.

However, that seeming simplicity is deceptive, according to Mueller: there are many variables cheese-makers, especially small-batch artisanal cheese-makers, have to learn about and deal with.

"With large-scale industrial cheese production, ingredients are added to the milk to make the cheese the same each time. Whereas with artisanal cheese-making, such as what we are doing at the college, the milk is going to be different from one month to the next depending on what the cows are eating, whether that's fresh grass, or whether they over-wintered on silage, and what the weather and humidity is like."

"It's what makes European cheeses so unique," he says.

Time, patience and attention

The Conestoga students make tomme (a French cheese), cheddar, brie, a blue cheese, gouda and cheese curds as part of the curriculum. Also demonstrated are the processes for making emmental, halloumi, mutchli (a Swiss-German semi-hard cheese), cream cheese and paneer, a fresh cheese which originated on the Indian sub-continent.

Cheeses made by students go home with them for further aging and consumption; those made by instructors are used in-house in the college's kitchens.

Mueller anticipates that more cheeses will be added to the repertoire as the program grows.

The intensive process requires time, patience and attention to proper temperatures while the milk is heated, stirred and rennet added to separate it. In cheese-making, the heating temperature is critical and the addition of acid and salt prevents the growth of bad microbes.

The whey is drained from the curds, which are pressed in a variety of shaped molds to "knit together," wrapped, often rind-washed and then left to finish and age in a temperature- and humidity-controlled chamber.

Cheese production is reduction: like maple syrup (with 40 litres of boiled sap resulting in one litre of maple syrup), it requires 10 litres of whole milk to make one kilogram of a hard cheese. And only at the very end of the process — when you crack open your tomme or emmental — will you know if you've been successful.

Future growth

In the quickly evolving food cultures of Waterloo region, the Conestoga program — unique in Canada, according to Mueller — adds the prospect of continued growth and entrepreneurship in the hospitality industry and is about creating Ontario and Canadian cheeses against vast cheese competition from around the world.

"The plan is to eventually create a centre for excellence in cheese-making and to expand to butter, yogurt, ice cream and processed cheese products," he says. "This may well develop into a research centre for cheese and ultimately a cheese-makers' guild."