This week we are pleased to feature Hartwell Cheese from Ploughgate Creamery of Albany, Vermont. All this week, Chef Casey Graham will use Ploughgate Creamery products in main dishes, appetizers, soups, and salads. Be sure to ask your server about tonight’s Farm to Table Special!
The Farm
Ploughgate Creamery is an award-winning artisan cheese creamery in Albany, Vermont. Ploughgate collaborates with the Cellars at Jasper Hill, a cheese again cave in Greensboro for affinage, or cheese aging expertise, as well as for distribution. Artisan cheeses from Ploughgate Creamery can be found at farmers' markets in Montpelier and Stowe as well as at restaurants and stores throughout Vermont and in select locations in Boston and New York.
Ploughgate CreameryIn Vermont, we believe that the principles of Freedom and Unity are not mutually exclusive. Individualism benefits the community, and vice versa. It’s kind of like in the song: “I get by with a little help from my friends.” Marisa Mauro owns and operates Ploughgate Creamery, an artisan cheese making business in Albany, Vermont. When she was getting started three years ago, she borrowed equipment, solicited advice from colleagues and neighbors, and got free assistance from the Small Business Association of Vermont to develop a business plan and take out a loan. Help was donated enthusiastically and generously. “I had to cook ten different people pies because no one would take money!” she says. Today, Marisa makes award-winning artisan cheeses whose production supports local people and enhances the local landscape. It is a shared accomplishment that she and the community can be proud of. Marisa hosted a pig roast this summer to thank everyone who supported Ploughgate Creamery along the way, and the field next to her house could barely contain all of the cars that showed up.
Marisa grew up in southwestern Vermont. Her career as a cheese maker began at age fifteen when she went to work at Woodcock Farm, a sheep dairy in Weston. It was apparent that this was the life for her, and she spent the next several years traveling and working on dairy farms in northern California and southern Vermont before moving to the Northeast Kingdom to study farming for a year at Sterling College in Craftsbury. She ended up getting more of an education working for Neil Urie at Bonneview Farm in Craftsbury, where she spent two years making sheep cheese and becoming involved in the Northeast Kingdom's local foods community.
It wasn’t long before Marisa and Princess Maclean, a friend at Bonneview who cofounded Ploughgate and later left the business, decided that they wanted to start their own cheese operation, but they lacked the start-up capital necessary to buy a farm and animals. Neil encouraged them to purchase an abandoned creamery in Albany instead. It was already equipped with washable walls, drains, draining racks and a walk-in cooler. He would lend them stainless steel tables, cheese moulds, and various other equipment. A small cheese vat, more moulds, and cooling coils came from Mateo and Andy Kehler of Jasper Hill Farm, old family friends of Marisa’s. Cabot Creamery even lent the odd piece of equipment from their warehouse. With a little help from their friends and a loan guaranteed by the Small Business Association of Vermont, Ploughgate Creamery was born.
The new business plan included purchasing milk from a local farmer, which eliminated the cost and labor of running a farm and allowed Ploughgate to give back to the community that had given them so much. Marisa buys her milk from the Hancock Family Farm in Coventry, which milks Ayshire cows and has been owned and operated by the same family for one hundred years. Ayshire milk is prized by artisan cheese makers, and the Hancocks raise their cows naturally on feed produced on the farm. Marisa pays $20 per hundredweight for their milk, compared to the current national average price of $16. Studies have shown that conventional farmers need to makie $18 per hundredweight to survive. Marisa is happy to pay more to support a local farm that raises their animals responsibly and to do her part to keep the Northeast Kingdom’s farmland open and working. “I believe in good farming practices and in keeping things local,” she says.
Ploughgate’s cheeses are aged and distributed by the Cellars at Jasper Hill, a system of cheese aging caves in Greensboro, Vermont. The Cellars is an invaluable resource for Marisa as a small cheese producer. “The aging process is its own art,” she says. “Having Jasper Hill there allows me to just focus on making quality cheese.” The Cellars also provides opportunities for Marisa to perfect her craft. Once a year she works with a man she calls “the cheese ninja,” a consultant from France who is hired by the Cellars to teach classes to local cheese makers. Even with the support of the Cellars, developing her cheese recipe has not been easy. Plenty of batches have ended up feeding her pigs. “So many times, my boyfriend would be looking for me, and he’d be like, oh, she’s crying again at the pigpen!” she says. But her hard work is paying off. At the American Cheese Society awards in Seattle this year, Ploughgate’s Hartwell Cheese won a blue ribbon in the cow milk camembert category. Ploughgate Creamery will produce and sell around 13,000 pounds of cheese this year locally at the Montpelier and Stowe Farmers Markets, as well as to restaurants and stores throughout Vermont and in select locations in Boston and New York.
Marisa currently makes three kinds of cow milk cheeses, all named after local bodies of water. Hartwell is the award-winner, a mild, slightly grassy brie with a velvety texture and a good shelf life. Willoughby is a pungent soft cheese with a washed rind, made with local artisan mead and occasionally washed with Eden Ice Cider. Elmore is a delicious fresh cream cheese available in local markets in plain, sundried-tomato garlic, and chive. Marisa recommends making a baked brie out of the Hartwell, with a Vermont twist. She bakes the brie and tops it with local maple butter, chopped nuts and homemade jam, using fresh Elmore Mountain bread for dipping.
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