Bayley Hazen Blue Cheese from Jasper Hill

What’s the shelf life on cheese?

• Hard, aged cheeses stay good for a long time. Many days for sure. Sometimes weeks. Bigger hunks of cheese last longer. If it looks and smelled as expected, it’s likely still great.

• What if it’s got a little mold on it? A little mold is no problem. It’s a good sign, it means the cheese is alive. Scrape it off with a knife. But if there’s a lot of mold and it’s turning dark and funky it’s time to say goodbye.

• Soft cheeses and cheese spreads (like pimento and liptauer) are best eaten within a week or two of receiving them.

How do we ship artisan cheese year-round across the country?

In warmer months (early April to mid September), we ship cheese with two business day service plus warm weather care. We employ an ice pack and insulation defensive strategy to protect against warm delivery trucks and warm warehouses and ensure your shipment arrives in great shape.

The rest of the year (late September to the end of March), the shipping method will either be flat rate service (1-4 business days) for our durable hard, aged cheeses or two business day service for our more perishable soft cheeses and cheese spreads.

Hard cheeses have been carefully selected to withstand a longer transit time. Don’t worry if it arrives a bit warm or a bit cold – cheese is durable.

How should the cheese be stored once it arrives?

• Store cheese in the fridge, ideally in the spot closest to 50 degrees. That will likely be the door of your refrigerator or in a drawer where the temperature is consistent but not too cold.

• We wrap hand-cut wedges of cheese in a cheese bag before shipment, and you can continue to keep the cheese in that cheese bag. The next best option would be parchment or wax paper.

• After you open the cheese for a nibble, any remainders can be put back into the bag and closed with a simple roll or fold. 

• Do not freeze your cheese! Cheese is a living thing. Freezing will stop the natural processes that keep cheese so tasty. 

How should the cheese be served?

Regardless of the kind of cheese, it’s best to take it out of the fridge about 20 to 30 minutes before serving it. Cheese tastes better at room temperature. It makes a world of difference: the aromas expand, becoming more complex; more of the fat spreads on your tongue, which makes the flavor more intense. When cheese is warm you’ll eat less of it and enjoy it more.

Tucked deep into the green, rolling hills of Vermont’s northeast corner is America’s most groundbreaking cheesemaker—literally. Fifteen years ago, the team at Jasper Hill Farm spent 10 weeks blasting into a hillside to build cheese aging cellars.

Today some of the best cheeses made in America—including Bayley Hazen—spend months maturing in those cellars.

Jasper Hill Farm was started to put Vermont cheese on the map.

Before brothers Andy and Mateo Kehler broke ground on their cellars, they were dairy farmers and cheesemakers. They started Jasper Hill Farm in 2003 with a herd of 15 Ayrshire cows. From the beginning, though, their goal wasn’t just to make a few locally-sold cheeses. They wanted to revitalize the Vermont dairy industry and put Vermont cheese on the national—and international—map. Today the farm has grown to include a herd of about 45 cows that spend their lives out on pasture as the seasons allow. Right next to the barn is the creamery, where every day they churn out a few cheeses using the milk of their own herd. And about a two-minute walk down a dirt lane, you find the cellars.

The cellars set Jasper Hill apart from other cheesemakers in the US.

The cellars at Jasper Hill are a set of seven underground vaults filled with wooden shelves holding thousands of wheels of cheese. The cellars are unique for a couple reasons. First, they’re great for cheese. Being underground, the cellars naturally maintain consistently cool, humid conditions across the year, no matter what the weather is like outside. Those cool, humid spaces allow cheese to mature slowly and develop huge, complex flavors. It’s a system that’s not uncommon in Europe—notably at places like Fort St. Antoine in eastern France where our Comté matures. In America specialized underground cheese caves are pretty rare. Jasper Hill’s cellars even go a step further than Fort St. Antoine. At the fort, there’s only one cheese and the conditions in the entire space are roughly the same. At the Jasper Hill cellars, each of the seven vaults is calibrated slightly differently. Having slightly different conditions allows for maturing more different cheeses—at any given time, there are roughly a dozen or so different cheeses in the Jasper Hill cellars. The differing conditions allow the cellarmasters to rotate the cheeses from one vault to another as they age so that they’re always in the ideal environment.

The second, and even more remarkable, thing about the cellars is that Andy and Mateo don’t just age their own cheeses there. They also partner with local cheesemakers to mature their cheeses, too. In many cases, Jasper Hill then helps to market and sell those cheeses across the country. In a world that’s so torn these days by competition, the collaboration and community fostered at the Jasper Hill cellars is refreshing.

Bayley Hazen was one of the first cheeses made at Jasper Hill.

It’s a raw milk blue cheese with a natural rind. Bayley Hazen is made daily with unpasteurized milk from the Jasper Hill cows. From the milking parlor, the milk travels just a few hundred yards to get to the cheesemaking room. Jasper Hill might have the prettiest cheesemaking room I’ve ever visited. While the inside is all white and stainless steel much like most cheesemakers, the room is awash in natural light that pours in through a half dozen or so huge picture windows that look out over unbelievably picturesque grassy, sloping fields that give way to mountains on the horizon.

The baby wheels of Bayley Hazen spend two days at the creamery before they’re carted down the lane to the cellars. When the wheels are five days old, they’re pierced to help with mold development. The piercing doesn’t inject the cheese with mold. The Penicillium Roqueforti cultures are added to the milk while the cheese is being made. Piercing the wheels with long needles allows oxygen to get inside, which helps the mold spores develop into the blue-green veins that lace across the interior of the cheese. The wheels then age for about three months under the careful attention of the cellar masters who flip the wheels, pat them down, and move them from one vault to another to ensure they mature evenly.

Bayley Hazen is the most approachable blue cheese I know.

It has sweet, well-rounded flavors without the bitterness and pungency that some people find off-putting in blue cheese. The texture is rich, buttery, chocolatey. It’s a great choice on a burger or in a salad, either crumbled on top or whipped into a blue cheese dressing.

First things first: it’s not a cave.

Cheesemongers universally refer to their cheese storage rooms as caves but these rooms have about as much in common with a cave as astroturf has in common with the field of dreams. Cheese caves are commercial coolers. Usually walk-ins, which is industry speak for a refrigerator big enough for a full-sized door.

Our cave is ten feet wide, twenty feet long, about the size of a short container truck. It is stark white and sits right in the middle of our warehouse, across the pick line from the bread bagging tent. Between the two they mark the two poles of our operations. Bread and cheese. Both made by hand. Cut by hand. Wrapped by hand. Traditional, practically ancient foods.

We work mostly in whole wheels of cheese.

That’s the way the cheesemakers make them and that’s the way we buy them. We haul them into the cheese cave and cut them open by hand. Sometimes with a big knife. Sometimes with a cheese wire: a thick steel cable with handles that the cheesemonger uses to glide through cheese like butter.

And sometimes you’ve got to tackle Parmigiano Reggiano. Those 80 pound wheels have a hide as tough as a stegosaurus. They need to be coaxed open with a set of wedge shaped knifes that become part of every cheesemonger’s rite of passage. A freshly cracked wheel’s aroma is beguiling. Every one who splits one stops for a moment, puts their face up to the cut surface, and inhales. Fresh shards of parmesan always flake off too – cheesemonger’s treat.

Once a wheel is open we cut pieces of cheese and hand wrap them in waxed cheese bags.

If we cut a piece that weighs exactly the right size on the scale we ring the bell – perfect cut! We send the just-cut cheese out to be packed in boxes, then wait for the container to empty and return to let us know we need to cut a few more. We do this all day long for the 50+ cheeses we carry. On our busiest day in December we’ll do it thousands of times.

That means your cheese is essentially cut to order.

It spends a few hours at most from when it’s cut to when it’s packed to ship. It sounds simple – and it is. But it’s also rare. Most companies that ship cheese these days don’t cut cheese to order. They ship cheese that has been cut long ago – weeks, even months – and sealed in cry-o-vac. It’s not terrible, but remember that once a cheese gets cut it never gets better. It fades. Cry-o-vac slows the fading, but if it spends a long time cut in a wrapper its flavor will become a shadow of itself.

Freshness matters, even when you’re talking about aged cheese.

The primary culprit for flavor loss is air. Air surrounded the wheel of the cheese, of course, but it didn’t penetrate the paste inside thanks to the rind. Now the cheese, with its insides showing, is under siege by air. Air swoops in to dry out the cheese, carrying the environment’s off-aromas and unwanted bacteria along the way.

To protect the cheese’s cut face from air’s ravages we wrap each cheese in a waxed cheese bag. This bag lets the cheese breathe yet keeps it from drying out. The wax lining keeps them in perfect shape. It lasts, too – reuse it for other cheese, it’ll keep almost any hard cheese in great condition.