Meet Allison Lakin: A Maine Cheesemaker Truly Steeped in Culture
Allison Lakin photo cred Lakin’s Gorges Cheese
Allison Lakin has a rich background, steeped in culture. She was an anthropology major at Cornell University, studied Japanese and Swahili, and worked in a series of maritime museums. Always fascinated with foodways, she learned to cook salmon on cedar stakes when she worked at Tillicum Village on an island in Puget Sound with Native people and researched food preservation for Polynesian voyages for a museum in Oahu. She is now a cheesemaker at her own company, Lakin’s Gorges Cheese in Mid-Coast Maine, where she produces prize-winning cheeses.
Why did you transition from anthropologist to cheesemaker?
Allison Lakin (AK): I feel like I was destined to be a cheesemaker. I was working at a non-profit, educational farm in Upstate New York, designing adult education programs and marketing and selling the cheese made on the farm. I started hanging out in the cheese room, learning how the cheese was made. It seemed amazing, but I realized that the cheesemaker didn’t really care about the aging side. He would just make the cheese and leave it. So there was all this cheese rotting in the aging room, and they were making no money on their cheese sales because affinage had not captured his imagination.
So I took over the cheese-making and went to the University of Wisconsin for their two-week, intensive cheesemakers course. I did have a science background, but I knew zero about cheese, except “Yum!” Then I had workshops from the “cheese gods,” Peter Dixon and Kathy Biss.
Opus 42 and Morgan cheeses in the aging caves photo credit Lakin’s Gorges Cheese
How do you structure your time?
AK: When I started Lakin’s Gorges Cheese in 2011, I structured it so that I could do it all myself. I was buying my milk and not doing any farmers markets. That’s why I have so many restaurants as customers. Then I met my husband, who was a farmer. He said, “Marry me, and I’ll give you cows.” I said fine, but you need to take care of the farming side because I already have a full-time job as a cheesemaker. But once I had cows of my own, I wanted to be spending time with them. By the end of the year, all the milk will come from our own cows, so I guess I’ll be milking them. I also raise pigs and ducks and now make other ingredients in our cheese boxes. Usually, I make 10,000 pounds of cheese a year (not in 2020 though).
Tell us about the cheese you make with seaweed
AK: I was trying to decide on a new cheese that was of the farm, with a taste of place. Here in Mid Coast Maine, our farm goes down to the Medomak River, which has the most prolific clam bed cove and a lot of seaweeds. I started researching seaweed and cheese I thought I might use the seaweed to replace the salt for dry salting. I contacted Maine Coast Sea Vegetables and explained to them what I wanted to do. They sent me a variety of seaweeds to try. I spent 6 months doing research and development and actually discovered that my idea didn’t work. I wasn’t achieving the right level of salt on the exterior of the cheese. So I thought, all right, then let’s put the seaweed in the cheese and I spent a long time trying to figure out how to do that, making small batches of cheese. But I didn’t like any of them. Then I went to a party and someone was serving Morbier and I’m like oh, duh! put it in the middle.
Of all the seaweeds, the one I really liked the taste and look of was the bladderwrack. I love to say that name, but I realized you can’t put that on a label. People don’t want to eat something called bladderwrack. But another seaweed, rockweed, is not dissimilar to bladderwrack--they basically look the same, so unless you really know your seaweeds, people just refer to all those seaweeds with bladders as ”rockweed.” So, I called the cheese Rockweed, even though seaweed purists might have a problem with that.
Rockweed cheese photo credit Lakin’s Gorges Cheese
How have you promoted Rockweek?
AK: As a small business owner and cheesemaker, I realized that the economic impact of entering competitions is not geared in a favorable way for a small producer. For example, if you enter a competition, they’ll want a whole 6-pound wheel of cheese. But I might make only 10 of them. So, I had stopped entering cheese competitions because it was costing too much. But when Rockweed came out, I was like, you know what, I think this is a special cheese. I entered it in The Big E, [the largest agricultural event on the eastern seaboard, which includes all 6 New England states]. It has a substantial cheese competition, and it took second place. And then Yankee Magazine, which always names “The 10 Best Foods of New England” in their annual Holiday issues, decided that Rockweed was one of the those. Fortunately, I knew that was coming so I made a whole bunch extra. One of the very few times when I have had national publicity that has translated into sales.
Cheese Box for Two To-Go photo credit Lakin’s Gorges Cheese
Tell us about your cheese boxes
AK: Last year, we were trying to figure out how to re-brand ourselves. I started making what I call a Cheeseboard for Two. So first, we were buying crackers, but my husband used to own a bakery and was known for his crackers. He said, “do you want to see what making crackers is like?” And I said, I’ll try to squeeze it in. He also had a recipe for this savory red onion jam, so we started making that too. And we also make charcuterie here too and we don’t want to stop doing that. And actually, we are now planning to plant onions and grow and pickle our own cornichons too.
How has the pandemic affected your cheese business?
AK: I was preparing to double my production in 2020, but as it turned out it was reduced by 75%. My normal market is 85% wholesale, mostly directly to restaurants. I make a high-quality product with high-quality ingredients. The problem with being a micro-cheesemaker is that my price point is not great and makes my cheese a harder sell. That’s why it works well for restaurants. They want quality and have wiggle room on price.
Part of the effect of the pandemic was that I had a lot of unsold cheese. So I started making ravioli and lasagna and these have taken off as their own entity. So in addition to being the cheesemaker and doing affinage, I also have to squeeze in the time to make pasta, because I don’t want to lose that market.
We’re still hanging on by our fingernails here. March 17, 2020 was the day I lost all my business, like everyone else. That same day I sat down and said, I know I am not alone in this so what can I do to help all of us? I started a shared Google document where farmers could put down where they were, what they had, and how people could buy directly from them. That got picked by the University of Maine Cooperative Extension who now manages it. It grew into a great website with an interactive Google map and has been modeled in 11 other communities and Ireland. By the middle of the summer, it had been viewed more than a million times.