How the Sisters of Our Lady of Angels Are Making Monastic Cheese
Monastery Country Cheese photo credit Serat Petras Photography
“We knew nothing about making cheese, absolutely nothing,” chuckles Sr Barbara of Our Lady of Angels Monastery, (OLA) reflecting on the order’s decision to produce the two-pound, red wax-covered wheels of Gouda cheese it has been hand-crafting since 1990. “We were a little naive, we thought we just get some milk, you follow the recipe, and make some cheese. But there's a long learning curve.”
The Sisters’ efforts have proved successful. Their pale yellow, semi-firm Gouda is sweet, mild, and creamy, has great mouthfeel, and frequently sells out, particularly at Christmas time. The proceeds enable OLA to pay its living expenses and give alms.
Monastic Cheese
Their decision to make cheese is in keeping with a long history and storied tradition of monastic agriculture. Hundreds of years ago, many abbeys made wine, beer, mead, and cheese to support themselves. Monks played an important role in the development of a wide range of cheeses because they were educated and thus knowledgeable to experiment with different techniques. Seminal cheeses such as nutty Parmesan Reggiano and stinky Epoisses, for example, have monastic roots. Mild-tasting Munster cheese got its name from the Latin word monasterium, or monastery.
True monastic cheeses are a rarity today as a decline in the number of monks has led to dramatically decreased production. The United States’ oldest monastery, Trappist Monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky, founded in 1848, stopped making cheese in 2015 after more than sixty years of production, Our Lady of the Rock in Washington State’s San Juan Islands closed its dairy last summer, but the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut, featured in Michael Pollan’s book “Cooked,” continues to make cheese.
Though there are abbeys in Canada, Belgium, France, Spain, Bosnia, and India crafting cheese, it is nearly impossible to ascertain how many there are in total (believe me, we tried), perhaps in the dozens. Sr Barbara guesses six or seven of their Trappist Cistercian order are engaged in cheesemaking. Most monastic cheese today is factory-produced and is said to have less taste.
Our Lady of the Angels Monastery photo credit Sera Petras Photography
Our Lady of Angels
In 1987, OLA’s motherhouse, Mount Saint Mary’s Abbey in Wrentham, Massachusetts, was looking to set roots down in rural Virginia and wanted to purchase a property that would enable the Sisters to be self-supporting, a tenet of their rule along with prayer, contemplation, and manual labor. (The Sisters grow their vegetables and care for the buildings and grounds, including culling trees with the help of a local company.)
A 500-acre property tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains in Crozet, Virginia, just outside of Charlottesville, that just so happened to contain a dairy seemed ideal. Intrigued and pleased by the opportunity to continue the industry, the community felt it could overcome their lack of cheesemaking experience. “When there's a will, there's a way,” Sr Barbara recounts their thinking. “It just it all came together. It was God's providence, we're sure it helped us, helped so many people be cooperative and get us started.”
Monastery cheesemaking photo credit Sera Petras Photography
Traditional Monastic Cheese
According to “The Oxford Companion To Cheese,” washed-rind cheeses, particularly round semi-firm ones called Trappistes of which Port Salut is the most well-known, are the cheeses most closely associated with monasteries. Legend also has it that a monk who was cleaning a wall with an alcohol-based substance noticed mold growing on cheese rounds aging nearby and washed them to get rid of the mold. When the mold returned, he did so again. Eventually, monks tasted the cheese and found it creamy and delicious. Cheese became an important source of income for the monasteries.
Another notable factor in the development of monastic cheese was the wealthy monasteries’ access to large herds. This enabled them to make cheese right after milking and develop a classic style, as opposed to the peasants, whose cheeses’ taste and texture was affected by their need to combine milkings to ensure a large enough quantity of milk to produce cheese.
Stirring the curds photo credit Sera Petras Photography
The Sisters Learn to Make Cheese
To learn how to make cheese, Sr Barbara and the other nuns read widely, attended a cheese-making class at the University of Wisconsin, visited the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani to observe its cheesemaking process, and consulted local cheesemakers who generously shared their experience and expertise.
They received crucial help from fellow Gouda makers Jim and Margaret Morse, who coincidentally lived nearby. “We would not be where we are today,” says Sr Barbara, who credits them with helping scale up production. The farm’s previous owner had also made Gouda, so with the equipment in place, the decision to produce it was simple. Thirty-plus years ago, points out Sr Barbara, Gouda production in the US was a “bit of a rarity,” so the opportunity to fill a niche was also appealing.
Team at the factory photo credit Sera Petras Photography
Gouda Production at OLA
The Sisters make Gouda 30 times a year. It takes 12 hours to produce, during which the milk is pasteurized, curds are formed, cut, put in forms called hoops, soaked in brine, and dried. Then each wheel is painted with a coat of liquid food grade polymer so the wax will adhere, is waxed, and then turned about once every two weeks during two months of aging. 400 wheels are crafted each time using approximately 7000 gallons of milk sourced from the Dairy Farmers of America cooperative for a total of approximately 20,000 pounds of cheese each year. Eight of the 11 sisters at the monastery produce the cheese, along with a few local volunteers.
Over the years, the Sisters have invested in different equipment and tinkered with the amounts of culture used; they’ve now settled on a formula. As with any seasonal product, says Sr Barbara, the taste of the cheese may change slightly as the milk changes.
Sr Barbara prefers her Gouda when it is young and mellow, but says it ages well, gaining more flavor and not sharpness as it gets older. “We have folks who buy from us and put it in their fridge for five years because they like it stronger,” she says.
The recipe is in the common domain, but it’s how and what you do with it, says Sr Barbara, that sets their cheese apart. “Our lives are built around love and prayer, love of God and one another, and prayer for ourselves into the world,” she says. “That's the ambient we live in. I think it does something to our cheese making. We put a lot of love and prayer into our cheese. I think you can taste it. It’s part of our life of prayer, something we do as a community.
Sr Barbara acknowledges that creating cheese from milk is a transformative process that can have religious connotations. “You’re dealing with something on the order of nature, and you're adding a human craftsmanship, which does transform it into something else,” she says. It’s very satisfying “to produce something good and wholesome from the fruits of god's creation as it were,” she says, “to turn it into something else that will then nourish the life of people. I'm glad it is cheese and not candy. There's something more natural.”
Gouda aging on racks photo credit @eatwithhannah
Cheese-making ends in October; the rest of the year is spent filling holiday orders, which account for seventy percent of their sales. Orders are accepted by mail or pick up only. People frequently send holiday lists to ship to along with many requests for prayers.
The Sisters take those requests very seriously and always respond, offering support and sympathy. Though in very sad human situations, nothing humanly speaking can be done, says Sr Barbara, “prayer can do something. The cheese supports us,” Sr Barbara says, but it does so much more than that.”