Korean-American artisan's enthusiasm for gourmet cheese never wears thin

Korean-American cheesemaker Soyoung Scanlan. Korea Times file.

By Kang Aa-young

Korean-American cheesemaker Soyoung Scanlan, better known in Korea by her maiden name Kim So-young, is one of the top-notch cheese artisans in the United States.

Produced fresh at her Andante Dairy in Petaluma, California, her organic hand-made cheeses go directly to America's top restaurants and high-end retailers who are seeking to meet sophisticated consumers' delicate taste buds.

The San Francisco-based local newspaper SF Gate named Scanlan's Figaro as one of the top 10 cheeses for 2008.

Her dairy business took off after celebrity chef Thomas Keller publicly endorsed her hand-made cheese as one of the best in a TV interview.

Unlike farmstead cheeses, Scanlan's hand-made cheeses have their own flavor and taste.

Her cheese is named after musical terms, such as Adagio, Rondo and Nocturne.

“Making music and making cheese (or anything good) are very similar,” Scanlan said during a recent Korea Times interview in Seoul. “They require a lot of practice, and even small mistakes can screw things up and negatively affect their overall quality.”

For this reason, music is an integral part of her life.

“Pursuing harmony and beauty of music and cheesemaking give me enough joy to forget about the painstaking process of making cheese,” she added.

Scanlan is one of the few artisans who only uses her hands all during the process.

Her dairy does not have a pump, which means it follows a very traditional method with intense labor.

She often delivers her finished products to customers, who understand her dedication to cheese. Her cheeses are mostly used for a cheese plate at the end of a meal. It goes through “minimum modification” and is served with some other ingredients, which she said is similar to that of “fish for sushi making.”

Scanlan's meteoric rise as a gourmet cheese artisan came as a surprise to Koreans familiar with her academic background.

She was once a promising biochemist who graduated from an elite program in engineering. She initially went to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree after earning a master's degree from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

In Korea, Scanlan said she was a city girl born and raised by a professor father and a homemaker mother and a typical science major who was eager to know more about nature and how life mechanisms work.

While taking doctoral courses in the United States, she felt bored of studying. “My skepticism grew as time went by. The more I studied engineering the more I found myself moving far away from the purpose of my study. Then I heard my inner voice that I wanted to do hands-on work”

Before leaving Seoul, Scanlan said she herself had no idea her journey to the United States would end up being a cheesemaker.

The turning point of her dramatic career transition came in 1993 when she and her American husband traveled to France.

Scanlan said her encounter with French cheese was like “love at first sight.”

She was fascinated with the dairy product that is made with simple ingredients, including milk, rennet, salt and fermentation-related microorganisms and transforms various cuisines with rich flavors, textures and tastes.

There, she realized cheesemaking is her destiny, and determined to make cheese her profession.

After returning to the United States, she started from scratch.

Her beginning was rough. Back in the 1990s, she said dairy farmers in California were “very conservative.” She was a newcomer from South Korea, a country few of them knew of.

“You cannot imagine what it was like,” she said. “Putting myself out there as an aspiring cheesemaker in the United States into Korean context is like an expat who is trying to find a job in the fishing industry on the small southern island of Geoje in South Korea.”

Scanlan described her first visit to a dairy farm in California: “When I visited there to purchase some milk, the dairy owner asked me bluntly if I could lift the huge amount of milk,” she said to indicate the heavy labor that is required in the dairy business. ”He was worried that I might spill the milk, because then he would be the one who had to clean up the mess.”

She said she was a stranger in the U.S. dairy industry because previously there were no Asian cheesemakers.

“I am probably still the only Asian cheesemaker in the United States,” she said.

At that time, European-style homemade cheese was rare in the United States as many American dairy farmers produced cheddar or pizza cheese in big facilities.

In the American dairy industry, she was a stranger in every sense.

She chose to learn cheesemaking as a trainee at a dairy farm. In addition to learning cheese, she had to take care of chores, including cleaning her workplace. She was eager to learn.

After a years-long of stint in dairy farms, in 1999 Scanlan established her own dairy business, Andante Dairy in Petaluma, Sonoma County, 60 kilometers north of San Francisco.

She is the founder and the only employee of her business, and this kept her busy.

She has worked seven days a week without days off. Despite the restless life, she said she is not tired at all because she still has passion for quality gourmet cheese.

Her professionalism has paid off.

Word of mouth of “Soyoung cheese” spread fast after her products debuted at a nearby grocery store. Her dairy business took off after the celebrity chef Thomas Keller, who runs the San Francisco-based high-end restaurant French Laundry which was awarded three Michelin stars 12 years in a row, praised her cheese in public.

“I couldn't believe the cheese is from U.S., made from Korean cheesemaker,” Keller said in a TV interview. Keller is the only American-born chef having two three-starred Michelin restaurants.

The celebrity chef helped bring her work to wider attention when he featured her cheeses at French Laundry.

“He treated me with all respect,” she said, adding the respect came from understanding her masterpiece.

She said without moments like this, she couldn't have made it.

Keller's endorsement took Scanlan's dairy business to the next level. She earned fame and became a rising artisan cheesemaker.

Some local based business owners commented it's an “honor,” for them to have her in the U.S.

Although she is called a cheese artisan, there is no formal certification for “artisan” in the U.S. cheese industry.

Reputation is all that matters for cheesemakers to survive.

“Though you have a good technique, the finished product is all that people care about,” Scanlan said.

Consistency and credibility are two of the core factors that have made her a reputable cheese artisan.

Over the past two decades since she founded her diary business, the process of making cheese has not changed much. She sticks strictly to basics when making cheese.

All cheese starts from milk. She collects milk at the dairy farms and transfers it to the cheese dairy. Her cheese dairy is located at a goat milk farm, so the distance from the animals to the cheesemaking facility is “about 20 meters.”

The milk is pasteurized, and the cheesemaking starts.

She adds starter culture (lactic acid and flavor producing bacteria and fungus), rennet (an enzyme to induce coagulation), and the milk becomes acidic and coagulates.

From here, a continuous process to concentrate milk solid components (mostly proteins and fat) starts: Milk coagulation, draining the curds, processing the curds, salting, drying and ripening. Depending on the cheese, the whole process takes two days (for fresh cheese) to two years (some aged cheeses).

Korea's cheese market is growing faster at a rapid pace, with its consumption on the rise here over the last five years.

Despite its newfound popularity, however, critics say the market is still at an “early stage” in terms of product variety and consumption patterns.

Especially, it is rather very “limited” to certain types, what's called “processed cheese.”

Scanlan said cheese culture in Korea is in its “infancy” and she warns them to see the reality before starting out.

“There isn't a job market for the craft, when they go back home,” she said.

After she got public recognition, she visits Korea to teach classes for the small-scale cheesemakers who own dairy farms and try to make cheese to increase the value of the milk.

She found out knowledge on cheesemaking is at a “very primitive level” and also randomly modified by some teachers.

“It's important to offer accurate information,” she said.

Nowadays, she's importing cheese made from her friend to Korea. She said she aims to give opportunities to people to know about the variety of cheeses.

“It's important to know the variety then find their favorite, regardless of where it came from,” she said.