Our next Maine cheese maker was Spring Day Creamery, operated by Sarah Spring (who owns a Springer Spaniel – there seems to be a theme here!). Sarah makes her cheese in a 40-gallon vat. She doesn’t have her own animals, and buys her cow milk from either Pineland Farms or another local wholesaler. Like us, she started small, in 5-gallon batches. She built just enough of a building to get legal, then expanded the next year. Now she has a much larger dedicated cheese “plant” attached to the house, and the very tiny old “plant” is about to become her aging cave.
We got to taste Sarah’s award-winning blue cheese, and she shared tips on how to overcome the challenges of blues. (Hopefully we will now be able to produce a nice blue more consistently!) We discussed bloomy-rind cheeses (Brie, etc.) at great length, compared notes, and traded tips. She told us about the workshops she has attended, many of them put on by the Maine Cheese Guild, which strongly supports its members.
Sarah focuses on soft cheeses that don’t require pressing and are ready for market fairly quickly. And they are delicious! Her Candide is a Brie dusted with cracked pepper, and her Evangeline is a cow milk version of the classic Pyramide goat cheese. We tried both, and loved them.
