Motherhood, mozzarella and the search for satisfaction
BY JULIA WAYNE
PHOTO BY LARA FERRONI
Bridget’s cheeses are magical. It’s not just their infinite variety. Or their flavors, or mouthfeel, or textures. It’s all of those things, but mostly, it’s Bridget. You can love her cheeses without knowing her, but the more you know about her, the better they taste.
Although Bridget never makes excuses or apologizes for her life, she has had her fair share of hardship. A repeated breast cancer survivor, Bridget is also the mother of an autistic, agoraphobic son named Joey, with obsessive compulsive disorder. When he was a child, she was told he would never walk, speak, write, or function even close to normally. With great love and determination to make Joey’s life the best it could be, she took him to specialists and psychiatrists throughout his childhood. Now, Joey is a straight-A student at Ballard High School and is currently writing a screenplay about baseball. It was through one of his doctors that Bridget discovered her passion and talent for cheesemaking.
“His psychiatrist said to me, about seven years ago, ‘look, you need to get a hobby you can do at home, or you’re going to kill your kid. You’re gonna go crazy.’ So, I took up cheesemaking,” Bridget says. Years before, when she was living in a small town, one of her patients (Bridget is a nurse by trade) taught her how to make cheese.
“Living in a small town that didn’t have much money, everybody did something cool at home—raised sheep or cows, made cheese. So, I asked a patient of mine to teach me how to make mozzarella and she did. It’s supposed to be the hardest cheese to make, but it came out perfectly the first time. I’ve messed up a lot of batches since then.”
Bridget continued to experiment with cheesemaking sporadically throughout Joey’s early childhood but it wasn’t until she was advised to do something at home with him that she really began to research cheeses and learn more about the process. She attended several cheesemaking workshops and made mostly fresh cheeses for about five years.
Ready for a new challenge, Bridget started dabbling next in more complex cheesemaking processes, beginning with a feta that she aged in the back of her fridge, and then moving on to burrata. In 2004, she began experimenting more with aged cheeses after an engineer friend refurbished a pair of refrigerators into a make-shift cave, with controls to maintain a constant temperature and humidity level.
“I made a lot of crappy cheese before I found the right combination for what I wanted,” Bridget says of her early days making blue cheese. Too often, she says, blue cheeses have so much mold that there isn’t any actual cheese left in the cheese. So, through internet research and pen pal relationships with fellow home-cheesemakers in Ireland and France (“Who?” I ask, “It’s a secret,” she says), she experimented with various cultures, molds, and rennet, finally finding the combination she uses today in her Stasera facciamo l’amore (Italian for “tonight, we make love”). Made with a kosher vegetarian rennet from Ireland, Italian cultures, French mold, local milk, this Gorgonzola-style favorite took four countries and many years of experimenting to become the delicious, complex cheese it is. Bridget loves giving samples of it to people who say they don’t like blue cheeses, because it almost always changes their minds.
Why vegetarian rennet for her Gorgonzola? Although she has nothing against using animal-derived rennet in her cheese, and does for other varieties, one of her dearest friends is a vegetarian and she wanted to make sure he could enjoy her cheese, too. Unlike microbial and genetically-engineered rennet which can give cheese a bitter taste (especially in aged cheeses), the vegetable rennet used does not take away from the richness of the flavors.
Although Bridget loves making blue cheese and mozzarella, she rarely makes straight-up cheddar. “Beecher’s makes great cheddar and it tastes fantastic on sandwiches. If I make nachos, I’ll use Tillamook. It’s good cheese. I’ve made more English coastal-style cheddars, but I don’t really have the desire to make it, because there’s already good cheddar out there.”
The instant gratification she gets from making fresh cheeses—ricotta, paneer, crème fraiche, mozzarella—has kept her from focusing too much on aged cheeses. Her favorite cheese is, in fact, plain cow’s milk mozzarella. Luckily, it’s Joey’s favorite, too. Until she started making this for him from organic milk (from cows raised with love by a friend in Chehalis), she thought he was lactose intolerant. She realized that it was probably the chemicals in commercial milk making him sick, not the milk itself. Now, her official cheese taster joyfully leads the quality control efforts for each batch of cheese. “If it’s not right,” Bridget says, “Joey will tell me.” (Perhaps a future screenplay of his will do for cheese what Sideways did for Pinot noir.)
Occasionally, she makes a fantastically complex Pecorino which ages in the “cave” from the full moon immediately after it is produced until the first full moon 18 months later. Bridget’s inspiration for following the moon cycles comes from a great respect for their consistency and presence as something heavenly and larger than humans. By using the moon calendar as a guide, Bridget’s aged cheeses are allowed to change with each stage of the moon. Although Pecorinos are typically brined solely with a salt solution during the aging process, Bridget washes hers in a hearty red wine during its last lunar month in the cave. The wine seeps into the spaces between the cheese and its wax rind, and enhances the flavors of the both the lactic acid and salt crystals.
The bath of wine is just one example of the extra care that is Bridget’s signature. Bridget recognizes that cheese is alive, so when she makes burrata (which has a short lifespan), she attaches a flower to the cheese to signify its freshness—when the flower dies, the cheese dies too.
When Bridget was deciding on a name for her cheese company, she thought about what was attractive to her about cheese. To her, everything about it is sexy. In particular, she loves the passion it inspires—the hold that her cheese has over certain people. These, she says, are the people that she keeps in bondage. Thus, “Le Fromage Bondage.”
Committed to making the best cheeses she can from all over the world, Bridget’s favorite cheese to make is something most people have never heard of: an Iraqi cheese called geimer, made from the milk of water buffalos.
“One of the guys I work with is from Iraq and I asked him if he’d ever heard of geimer. He stared at me like I was crazy and said that it was the last thing he ate before he and his family left the country. When I made it and brought him some, he cried. He thought he’d never taste it again. That, for me, is why I make cheese. That moment when someone tastes what I’ve made and it takes them back to another place, time, reality.”
Meanwhile, in this reality, cheesemaking has become much more than a hobby for Bridget and Joey. It has become a central part of their lives. Something they can do together and do for other people. Something magical.
Bridget can be contacted via email at
fr************@*ol.com