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 A Visit With... July/August 2005 By Marian H. Mundy Marian H. Mundy interviews Eran Wojswol, cheesemaker and owner of Valley Shepherd Creamery in Long Valley — the only sheep dairy farm in New Jersey. Here is a sample from that interview:
Would you explain what goes on here and how it all came to be? About 10 years ago we began making cheeses at Farmersville Cheeses in Tewksbury. Three years ago we bought this 120-acre farm and called it Valley Shepherd Creamery. We built everything, even the pastures, from scratch. Attached to the cheese factory there’s a ewe barn for the ewes and their lambs, plus a birthing barn or “lamb greenhouse,” a shelter barn where the animals come in at night, a composting center where we make fertilizing compost to sell, and a house for our farmhands. We have a petting pasture with alpacas, miniature horses, goats and sheep. We also built a new cheese cave with seven aging rooms, blasted it right out of the mountain 20 feet down. What is that strange metal contraption that takes up the whole room next to the ewe barn? That’s the first rotating sheep-milking parlor in the United States. The ewes walk up onto the circular platform, which holds 36 at a time. Workers in the center hook them to the machine. The ewes can snack on feed as they go around. It’s amazingly fast. It can milk 300 ewes in about an hour. The milk then goes into the cheesemaking room next door. At the main entrance is our shop where we do tastings, sell our cheeses and all sorts of sheep-related items, including handcrafted pottery and blankets made from our own wool. We have tours for different age groups, from kindergarten to seniors, where we explain the cheesemaking process starting with sunlight on blades of grass. Part of the tour is a wagon ride up the hill to the new cave. We also give cheesemaking classes. Students come back for their cheese wheel after it ages. What kinds of cheeses are you making this year? I’m doing Fresco, a fresh, white semi-hard cheese, and our signature cheese, Oldwick Shepherd, a semi-hard cheese like a buttery Manchego, with a natural rind. We’re also making a small, soft, round cheese rather like a Camembert called Shepherd Cushion. Plus several cow’s milk cheeses with milk from a neighbor’s farm: A soft, fluffy cream cheese plus a mold-ripened, Gouda-like cheese called Califon Cow, and Shepherd’s Logue (pronounced log) a loaf-shaped table cheese rolled in herbs and aged. This year we’re starting a sheep milk blue, and I may make a smoked cheese. I love to experiment. I make a surprise cheese every weekend. We also make Ewegurt, a creamy, European-style yoghurt. Read the entire interview in the new July/August issue of New Jersey Countryside, available now at bookstores, newsstands or by calling (866) 888-8174, or try our free issue offer.
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