(upbeat funky music) - What I love about cheese is it is a living, breathing thing in itself.

- [Dave] It's amazing what one basic ingredient, milk, some cultures, what you can create is hundreds of cheeses that are completely different.

- It's got a little bit of everything in there.

When you take a bite, it just knocks your socks right off.

- Cheese is very much a product of the people by the people for the people.

I can't believe I just said that, but, like, cheese, I can't stress this enough.

Cheese is not fancy.

Cheese is special, but it is not fancy.

(upbeat music) - She loves kisses.

Do you love kisses?

(Alyssa clicking) Kisses?

(Alyssa chuckles) - [Narrator] Almost every fridge in America has a block of cheese in it, be it cheddar or Pepper Jack or something a little more unique like blue cheese or queso fresco, and Oregon fridges are no different except our cheese comes from right down the road.

- Any good cheese out there is out there because somebody has the passion and the tenacity to make it happen.

People often ask me what my favorite cheese is and it's kind of like asking a parent which child they would save from a fire, - [Narrator] And as a cheesemonger, Chelsea Lowrie sees that passion every day, working directly with cheese-makers all over the Pacific Northwest.

- This is a bit of an underdog from Rogue Creamery.

So Rogue Creamery is, of course, famous for their classic blue, their Oregon blue, and then, of course, their big, big award winner, Rogue River Blue.

- [Narrator] In southern Oregon, Rogue Creamery is putting a Pacific Northwest spin on a classic European cheese.

- There's something special going on with blue cheese.

Blue cheese has an intensity of flavor that you can't really get out of any other style.

In the early 1900s through the depression years, dairy was integral to this valley's success.

In 1933, a creamery cooperative was formed to create a resource where farmers could bring their milk to create a value-added product called the Rogue River Valley Creamery Cooperative in 1933, and that was when the Rogue Creamery facility was built.

- [Narrator] In 2014, Rogue Creamery purchased their own dairy farm to make sure they had the best milk available.

- If we could control the source of milk from the start, we could control the quality of our cheese.

- [Narrator] Happy cows make happy milk.

For Rogue, that means the cows choose when they get milked.

- Yeah, we have Jenna.

We have Lady Gaga.

I've been here for so long that this herd has become my herd and I treat them like every single one of them is my own.

Every day, I am here for eight-plus hours a day just to make sure that every single one of our cows is happy, healthy, and producing the best milk that they can.

- [Narrator] No one knows exactly how humans first discovered how to make cheese, but all cheese starts with the same basic ingredients.

- [Michael] Cheese-making starts with filling the vat.

You add cultures, which are bacteria and other microorganisms from previous successful cheese makes.

You put those in the milk.

What those are doing are creating acid and diversifying your flavor.

You're building firmness and texture.

- [Narrator] The bacteria go to work, eating sugar or lactose in the milk, and this affects the acidity and flavor of the cheese.

They then add a coagulant called renin, which makes the proteins and fats stick together.

(exciting music) - They weave a little net around all the water and all the fat and then you can cut that.

- [Narrator] Cheese-makers then cut the curd into different sizes to change the amount of moisture in the final cheese.

The curd is cut large or small and then stirred and cooked to release even more moisture, separating the curds from that liquid whey.

It's all about concentrating flavor and developing texture.

- And there you have your cheese.

You can take it any direction you like.

You can end up a million different places, even with just standard cow's milk with standard components in it.

You can make cheddar.

You can make blue cheese out of that.

You can make Jack cheese.

It all depends on how you manipulate your moisture content and your acidity and the forms you put it into and how you treat it afterwards.

- [Narrator] For aged cheeses like cheddar and blue, this first step in the process is the quickest, just a few hours from milk to formed cheese, but what sets these cheeses apart is the fourth essential ingredient, time.

As cheese ages, cultures keep developing flavor.

The cheese dries, concentrating that flavor further, but flavor isn't the only thing that grows.

Blue cheese is all about mold.

- So blue cheese is created by adding a culture to the milk as the curds begin to form.

As the wheels of cheese age, the veins of blue begin to develop.

So we need to perforate each wheel to allow oxygen to get into the interior of the wheel to allow that veining to develop.

- [Narrator] The cultures are so important that sometimes they're kept a secret.

- So this part of the Rogue Creamery history is shrouded in a bit of mystery, and it all started after World War II when the company's founder, Tom Vela, decided to travel to Roquefort, France.

He thought that he could make a superior blue cheese that the US market had not seen before.

We don't know exactly how Tom Vela came back from Roquefort with the secrets of blue cheese making, but it happened and he came back with the cultures.

Of course, after inoculating the new facility here, the cultures began to evolve, and now our cultures are completely unique to our own facility and region.

This is a living culture.

What we have today is completely unique to our own recipe.

- I think it's arguable that Rogue might be the American creamery that really brought American blue cheeses to the world stage, especially winning best cheese in the world in 2019.

Not best American cheese.

Not best blue cheese.

They won best cheese in the world in 2019.

Europe was furious, and it just kind of, they helped change the narrative.

- It was a very proud moment for all of us, and then I found out it was my cheese, cheese that I made personally, and that was even better.

It was a very fulfilling feeling.

You know, what we're doing here matters.

- So, a tendency in fine foods, cheese is no exception, is that we hold Europe in high esteem, but not all foods begin and end with Europe.

One of the curious things about all styles of American cheeses is that they're often relegated just to the ingredients drawer.

We don't think of Jack as being necessarily worthy of a cheeseboard for whatever reason, or Oaxaca as worthy of a cheeseboard for any reason, and Don Froylan is playing a big part in making sure that that's changing.

(gentle string music) - Still, to this day, watching my husband's hands in the curds, it just, like, gives me chills, and I can see, you know, the passion that he still has of being a cheese-maker and caring about the tradition and the quality, 'cause this is food that people are going to eat, you know, and feed their families.

I feel so lucky to be a part of it, you know?

- This is from Don Froylan.

These guys are putting artisan Hispanic cheese on the map and I'm very grateful to them for that.

- [Francisco] Yeah, you can see the process where it started in one big ball, and then he starts stretching it, and they keep walking back and forth to get the right size of string that we want, and by walking back and forth, we get more strings in the curd.

It'll be really stretchy, really stringy, and that's what we're looking for in the Oaxaca cheese - [Lisa] Stretching is so important to get that correct texture and the stringiness that you can't get with machinery.

- [Narrator] Francisco and Lisa Ochoa have owned Don Froylan since 2009 with the goal of bringing more artisanal Mexican-style cheeses to the US, but the business goes back even further to Francisco's father, Froylan Ochoa.

(Francisco speaking in Spanish) (Francisco continues speaking in Spanish) (lively music) - [Narrator] Part of having the business is education, showing people the process for making Mexican cheeses.

- Keeping the tradition of culture of Mexican cheese-making made the way it's supposed to be made is something the world should see.

We are a Mexican American family ourself.

You know, we have Mexican American children.

You know, people come in with their families and kids and say, like, "Look, they're making string cheese."

And for them to see that we're winning huge awards from the American Cheese Society competitions, the best string cheese is Mexican string cheese, made right here in Salem, Oregon.

It's super exciting to, like, have that melding of the two worlds.

- This is from Tillamook Creamery.

Tillamook is one of the oldest creameries in Oregon.

They produce more cheese in Oregon than anyone else, and last time I looked, by volume, by actual poundage, they create more cheese in the United States than any other single creamery.

(lively folk music) - You can make cheddar cheese anywhere in the world, but you cannot make Tillamook cheddar cheese anywhere else in the world.

It is a very wet region that creates beautiful lush grass that creates beautiful milk that, in turn, creates award-winning cheddars.

- [Narrator] In 2024, one of Tillamook's cheeses was named the best cheddar in the world.

The company's history stretches all the way back to the late 1800s.

The Tillamook region, with its abundant natural resources, was home to the Tillamook people, whose descendants are now part of the many tribes that make up the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians.

Early settlers also recognize the land for its abundance, and specifically its potential for dairy farming, but it was far away from other white settlements.

- In 1854, the Tillamook settlers created the Morning Star, and that was to help us transport our dairy products from Tillamook over to the Portland area so that they could sell their dairy products, specifically cheese and butter.

- And what started as a way for small farmers to pool resources has grown into Oregon's most recognizable cheese brand.

(upbeat country music) - [Jill] Tillamook's been making cheddar cheese for 116 years, so we, in theory, have been using that same recipe.

We've had a few modernizations along the way.

As you've seen, our Cheddar Master.

- [Narrator] Cheddar cheese is named for the English village of Cheddar, where the process of cheddaring was first invented.

It's a method that involves packing curds together into big blocks and then flipping them by hand, but at the scale that Tillamook makes cheese, that looks a little different.

- We bring in 1.8 million pounds of milk into this facility every single day.

So the curds and whey will be gently pumped over to our Cheddar Master, and that's where it's taking up the manual piece of flipping the cheddar mats and draining the whey from the curds.

- [Narrator] Whether you're the largest cheese producer in the state or the smallest, good cheese comes from good milk, which comes from good land and a lot of help from these ladies.

(cow moos) (upbeat music) - So this is from Helvetia.

They are a teeny tiny creamery.

Even I as a retailer have a really hard time getting my hands on this, and they make traditional alpine-style cheeses, and it's one that most even Oregonians haven't had.

I mean, what makes any cheese unique is not necessarily the place or even the cheese-maker.

It's just grit.

So, for instance, Tillamook might be the largest creamery in Oregon, but Helvetia is living history.

- Normally, I would start at like 4:30, try to be done there at seven, and, obviously, this small of a cheese operation is not my sole income.

I have a day job.

This is 1940s milking technology here.

Modern dairy has a pipeline that just pumps it directly over there.

In this case, I am in the pipeline.

(cow moos) So we're making our Bergkase.

That's our flagship cheese.

That's what my great-granddad originally made here on the farm.

He immigrated from Switzerland in the late 1880s with two brothers.

They landed in Kansas, kind of along the Oregon Trail.

My great-granddad and his wife and his newborn son, they made their way out here to Helvetia.

- [Narrator] At the turn of the century, many Swiss immigrants came via the Oregon Trail and settled in Helvetia.

It was remote, but they found the mild climate was perfect for grazing cattle.

To survive, they stuck to what they knew, dairy farming.

- This is one of those things that's also a little bit of a Swiss tradition, is making sausage, secret spices, and year-old Bergkase.

- [Narrator] And the flow of European-descended settlers working the fields, forests, mines, and waterways provided a hungry market for a burgeoning industry.

(lively music) - So if we really think about it, cheese, as much as we like to tout it up as this, like, fancy artisanal product, like it's special, but it's not fancy.

As much as we want any food to kind of be a luxury, that seems to be an interesting human trait is try to find something special and then kind of keep it for ourselves or try to keep it from other people.

As a cheesemonger, I really want to break us out of that.

Like, classism has no place in cheese.

So what makes Oregon cheese unique?

I'm not really sure, but I am very proud of every single Oregon cheese-maker for basically making sacrifices to make sure that we can get really delicious artisan cheese.

- [Narrator] So what is it about Oregon's cheese culture that makes it special?

Is it the history?

- I think we all have a collective responsibility to make sure that a lot of these pieces of living history, a lot of these connections to our neighbors and our land and our heritage, or even just the region that we have adopted that is Oregon, to kind of help keep that history alive.

- [Narrator] The traditions?

- I have a lot of respect for my dad.

I'm really honored to introduce him to everybody.

He showed me how to make cheese.

- [Narrator] New generations?

- Everyone that I tell when I first meet them, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I'm a dairy farmer."

They're like, "What?

Those are still around?"

I'm like, "Yeah."

It's very shocking to people that, for one, I'm a girl, and two, I'm a farmer.

- [Narrator] Or mixing cultures and striving for perfection?

- It's part of the the challenge, the addiction to making cheese.

It's never quite just perfect, but you're always aspiring.

Yeah, a little more tweaking here, I'll have it.

- [Narrator] Cheese helped build the Oregon we know today, and it will mold what it will look like in the future.

(lively music) (lively music continues) - Also, don't be afraid to use your cheesemongers.

Like, it's our job to know about cheese.

Put us to work.

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