Authenticity, Artisanship, and Cheese: Gringa Dairy in London

Ruoxi Yu `15 on her summer working at Britain’s only Mexican cheese producer

This post originally appeared on the YSFP’s Tumblr on November 5, 2015.

There are no corn tortillas in Tesco. In fact, there aren’t even any in Aldi or Morrisons or most name-brand grocery stores in London. On one of my first trips to the grocery store, I searched the bread/starch/all-things-flour aisles for corn tortillas and, despite finding wheat-flour ones (and an entire section dedicated to crumpets). No luck. I walked home with the kind of disappointment you might expect from a Texan who pretty much doesn’t even eat tacos without the corn tortilla requirement.

Gringa Dairy is incredibly festive in decor and atmosphere. It’s located under an archway where overground trains pass overhead, and rumbles throughout the day.

Given this encounter, I often found it strange that I had dedicated my summer to learning how to make Mexican cheese in London. As a Yale Sustainable Food Program Global Food Fellow during the summer of 2015, I interned with Gringa Dairy, a Mexican dairy in London. It’s owned and operated by Kristen Schnepp, a native Californian who ditched her corporate job and started producing cheese in April 2013.

I chanced upon Gringa Dairy by way of The Pig Idea, a campaign to encourage the use of food waste towards pig feed. The dairy supports The Pig Idea by donating its excess whey from cheese production. I found myself immediately captivated by the dairy’s mission, their business model and their commitment to sustainability as an emerging artisan business in London. I was surprised, above all, to have found a small cheesemaker in London that focused not on making English cheeses, but rather three distinct Mexican ones: queso fresco, queso Oaxaca and queso Chihuahua. In a community where Mexicans and the accompanying cuisine were relatively uncommon, how has an artisan Mexican cheese company flourished?

The Cheese Shop at Caseus Fromagerie Bistro easily includes over fifty types of artisan cheeses, from local Connecticut cheeses to the classic Parmigiano Reggiano from Italy.

Having interned at Caseus Fromagerie Bistro the previous semester in New Haven, I had a preliminary sense of what it’s like to run a cheese shop. Every Wednesday morning, a magical delivery would arrive at Caseus, bringing in boxes of cheese of all different sizes and weights and smells. I often wondered, opening a fresh wheel of Taleggio (or to name an English cheese, Lincolnshire Poacher), what it would have been like to make the cheese. How does the cup of milk I put into my cereal turn into this delicious morsel of cheese on my plate? What goes into a wheel of cheese, small or big? How do the techniques of cheesemaking embody themselves in the maker? What are the affective processes at play, and how do they translate into “the artisan,” both as a maker and a descriptor of the product?

From the moment I began the internship at Grinda Dairy, I knew that I had found the right place to answer these questions. The company is small but growing — I was almost always able to get my hands straight into the curd. I went home with smell of milky whey at the end of each day. Because the dairy focuses on fresh cheeses, the milk collected in the morning turns into the desired product by the end of the day. Below, I document a typical day in the dairy, from start to finish.

Commonworks Farm cows.

5:10 a.m.

On Tuesdays, Gringa Dairy is second in line to pick up milk from Commonworks, an organic farm with a herd of about 250 cows located just southeast of London in Sevenoaks, Kent. Because Gringa Dairy specializes in fresh Mexican cheeses they must pick up milk the morning of every production day. By the end of the day, this milk will become queso.

Commonworks Farm, which provides the milk for Gringa Dairy.

Jeremy, who I accompanied to the farm, is one of the Gringa Dairy’s two full-time cheesemakers. The other is the owner, Kristen, an energetic, red-headed woman with smiling eyes and a loud laugh.

“Kristen initially picked this farm because they were the only ones she liked willing to sell her milk,” Jeremy explained. It’s an eighty-minute round-trip commute four mornings per week. “It’s difficult,” he continued, “trying to find a farm in line with our business ethics and standards of cleanliness when we are located in London.”

6:09 a.m.

Jeremy adds bacterial starters to the large IBC (intermediate bulk container) tank in the back of the van. He had set up the milk delivery pump about ten minutes earlier, and now the level of milk was rising in the container in fifteen-liter intervals, signaled by clicks.

I take a glance through the yard to see a row of cows being milked, then herded out to be replaced by another ten cows. The role of bacterial starters nowadays is to allow proper development of certain bacteria that give a cheese it’s particular flavor. Most of this bacteria should already be present in the raw milk, direct from the cow. However, most milk is now too clean, so commercial starters are now required.

The downside is that these standardized, commercial starters can end up standardizing tastes, even for artisanal cheeses. Out of the three urban artisan cheesemakers I visited in London (there are only four), however, each company used starters. You can read more about starters here.

Today’s queso Oaxaca, a pasta filata style raw milk cheese, uses two bacterial starters. The first is added at the farm, and second is added later, back at Gringa Dairy. The most famous cheese made in the pasta filata style is mozarella. Queso Oaxaca is similar in that it is stretched after a wash in hot water. But unlike mozzarella, queso Oaxaca is shaped into ropes and then wrapped into balls.

At Gringa Dairy, Jeremy lays out the stretched queso Oaxaca to ready them for salting before wrapping up into balls.

8:01 a.m.

The 300 liters of milk we collected from Commonworks is now in the large, metallic vat in the Make Room, a bright white and sterile space where all of the cheese is produced. Now and then, the building, which is located in a railway arch under the London Overground, rumbles under the weight of the passing morning commuters.

Before adding in the second starter, Jeremy tests the pH, TA (total acidity) and temperature of the milk in the vat. The pH and TA test acidity, which can affect the structure of the stretch, the melt of the cheese in the future, and its taste. The values have to be within a certain range at each step of the production process to ensure quality and safety.

“We choose 300 liters because it’s the most we can do of the Oaxaca in a day,” Jeremy explained. “We have to stretch it by hand, all while the pH of the curd is falling. There’s only so much we can stretch before the pH gets too low.”

9:27 a.m.

By now, the milk has been heated to and kept at roughly 34°C (~93°F). Jeremy has been drifting in and out of the Make Room, testing the pH and keeping an eye on the temperature. At last, the pH reaches 6.3 and Jeremy adds the rennet, a brown-colored enzyme after diluting it in water. To get a sense of how little is used, for every 100 liters of milk, there is roughly fourteen milliliter of rennet.

10:12 a.m.

Jeremy is holding one of two large, metallic cutters that will cut the curd, which has formed in the vat as the milk coagulated. There is a horizontal and vertical cutter, identical if not for the perpendicular directions of their wires. Jeremy uses what looks like a large butter spreader to test whether the curd can split cleanly into two — it has the texture of soft tofu. He gives me a thumbs up, and lifts the horizontal cutter first.

The movement consumes his entire body, as his elbows bend into the vat and he drags the cutter in one fluid motion across. He repeats this until the curds are cut into tiny pieces, sinking into the watery whey. Jeremy lets the curds “heal” for about ten minutes before taking what looks like a giant, baby blue paddle to stir the curds, thus expelling excess whey. He talks about these curds like they have some kind of intuition.

“If there is individual expression in cheesemaking,” Jeremy continues as he moves the paddle in a large figure-eight through the curds. “I think it is in the stirring of the curds. You can give people the same instructions, for the same cheese, with the same milk and everything, but what will change is they way the stir — and that will change the cheese.”

Kristen readies the curd in the vat for transfer to the table, where they will be made into one of Gringa Dairy’s fresh cheeses.

12:04 p.m.

The curds have now made their way onto the large, metallic table in the center of the Make Room. This step can only occur after careful balancing of the curds’ temperature and the dropping pH. Because queso Oaxaca needs to be stretched, the temperature and pH both play an important role that this is possible later on in the process.

“Sometimes I get it wrong,” Jeremy tells me. Certain days, the curd easier to stretch or harder to stretch. “But, I am always within the margins of art.”

1:16 p.m.

We have spent the last hour stretching blocks of curd into long ropes, which now rest on the top of the Make Room table. I had a bit of difficulty handling the warm curd in my hands and pulling it without causing piling. Piling is when sandy bumps of curd, like caught fibers, mark the otherwise smooth surface of the long string. I learned to exercise extreme care in stretching with gentle pulls, but not squeezing.

Kristen and Kiko, one of Gringa Dairy’s part-time cheesemakers, have joined us in this time-consuming process. “It’s like doing weights,” Kristen says. “You use your body resistance rather than force.”

“Do you know the noodle-makers in China?” Kiko asks, adding another analogy. “It’s like how they stretch the noodles. Use the momentum.”

2:48 p.m.

I watch with awe as Kiko takes one of the 250g-Oaxaca-ropes that Kristen has measured out and cut, and shapes it into a florette, like a small flower she’s holding in her hands. I look down at the misshapen ball in my hand, which looks more like a messy ball of yarn.

“Don’t worry about it!” Kristen exclaims as she notices my face looking ever more apologetic. She assures me it takes practice and, plus, Kiko does it the best. What Kristen worries about, instead, is the piling on some of the ropes of Oaxaca, which ruin the look of the surface texture. “It’s looking a little more artisan than we like.”

During the last steps of queso Oaxaca production at Gringa Dairy, Kiko wraps up the ropes of Oaxaca into beautiful balls, shaping them like flowers at times.

4:07 p.m.

All of Gringa Dairy’s cheeses are fresh cheeses — at the beginning of the day we start with milk and at the end of the day the product is pretty much ready to eat. The last step of each production day is to pack all of the cheese away for storage in one of Kristen’s three large refrigerators. She doesn’t yet have a walk-in fridge, but she and Jeremy have been considering it as her business has grown.

Kristen started Gringa Dairy after leaving a fairly impressive job in financial consulting. “Back when I used to work in finance,” she told me, “I knew what my hours were. I had a schedule. Don’t get me wrong, I worked really hard and had long days, but I always knew when it would be over.”

“When I started making cheese,” she continued, “I realized that was no longer the case — I can’t tell how the acidity of the curds will develop, or anticipate that texture of a certain make will different than usual. I know I’m the boss of this business, but sometimes, I think it’s really the cheese.”

For Gringa Dairy’s queso fresco, a mountain of curd is milled and crushed by hand in individual cylindrical containers. This manual process gives the variation in curd size that give the cheese it’s unique texture and shape.

Often times during production (or “the make”, as Kristen and Jeremy colloquially refer to the process), Kristen would jokingly attribute small inconsistencies in texture or visual appearance of the cheeses to their artisan identity. Over the course of my time with Gringa Dairy, I began to mentally collect when Kristen would use the word “artisan.

When the queso fresco, which was individually hand-milled and packed into cylindrical molds, ended up being of different heights, it was deemed “artisan.” It was “artisan” when the queso Oaxaca, in the stretching process, ended up torn or uneven. When the queso Chihuahua, which was grinded with a meat grinder for an even consistency, ended up being of different heights: “artisan.” Sometimes, Kristen would even say an oversalting would be “a little too artisan” for her taste.

What is “artisan?” I still can’t be certain, but I am better at recognizing what it is not: mechanization and standardization. Given the regulations of governing organizations such as British Health and Safety, or the US Food and Drug Administration, I have no doubt that some level of mechanization and standardization is required (and this doesn’t just begin at the cheesemakers, but at the dairy farmers themselves). Still, the commitment to being “artisan” manifests in the decision to forego, perhaps, an automatic mill and use one’s hands instead; to lay aside an industrial strainer and use a translocated, remote process that requires greater physical effort. The terroir is in the process.

Gringa Dairy is the only producer of queso fresco in London, and perhaps of Mexican cheese in England. Queso fresco is the first cheese that Kristen, the owner of Gringa Dairy, made.

And how has Mexican cheese found its niche and following here in London, of all places? As my summer came to a close, I found the answer to be surprisingly obvious: this lack of Mexican cuisine actually created a market for authenticity from Mexican expatriates and other enthusiasts of the cuisine (like me).

Kristen confirmed this assumption. When I asked Kristen why she started her business, she told me that partly, it was because there were no producers of Mexican cheeses like queso fresco or queso Oaxaca in the UK. When the early Mexican restaurants of London were serving tacos, they used similar cheddars but nothing close to the traditional ingredients of Mexico.

My own investigations proved this point: after I gifted a ball of queso Oaxaca to a friend who had then given it to his Mexican expatriate boss, the friend had reported to me his boss’s surprise to even find cheese like that in London.

In many ways, Gringa Dairy came to be through Kristen’s foresight of a growing popularity for Mexican food in London in the past four years and a lack of producers who made authentic ingredients for Mexican food. This is why she has come to focus more on wholesale and supplying restaurants with ingredients rather than retail.

Being the first in a category also posed unique challenges to Gringa Dairy. It had had to not only be authentic, but also communicate what “authentic” meant for this type of food. Working closely with restaurants brought Gringa Dairy one degree closer to the customer, in the sense that Kristen could receive immediate feedback from cooks who would taste and use the cheeses she made for their dishes. Gringa Dairy has grown quite a bit in its first two years, as more and more Mexican restaurants pop up in the area and use her cheeses.

After a day of queso-Oaxaca-making, Jeremy (left) and Kristen (right) take a well-deserved break on their “urban beach” outside the dairy. I’m in between the two!

The questions surrounding a booming Mexican cheese producer in London are at least three-fold. On a business level, how can growth of queso production be sustainably maintained while remaining authentic? On a culinary level, what has the growing popularity of Mexican cuisine meant for restaurants? On a community level, has this popularity reflected itself in increasing accessibility for individual consumers who seek these ingredients?

While the answers to these questions go beyond the scope of my eight-week internship with Gringa Dairy, I have kept my eye open for bits of insight. Many food trucks and small start-up businesses that make tacos have started within the past two years or so. Many of these have a commitment to authentic ingredients, although the suppliers are still few and far in between. On one of my last days at the Dairy, a woman came to the door asking if she could buy some of our Queso Oaxaca. She was Mexican and had seen Gringa Dairy’s stall at a recent food festival in London. She was planning to make quesadillas that evening. Although this occasion marked the first of its kind for Kristen — who told me that no one had showed up unscheduled to buy cheese from them before — this instance certainly solidified for me that Gringa Dairy was, indeed, having an impact on the community.

Still, as the popularity of Mexican cuisine continues to grow around the world, Gringa Dairy serves as but one case study of the discovery, development and expansion of consumption needs in an ever-diversifying world. The rest will have to be followed similarly in time at the intersection of cultural and culinary arts.

Ruoxi Yu BK ’15 is an Anthropology major.